The Siege of Derry

1689 — For 105 days the walled city held out against a Jacobite army — 'No Surrender' — in one of the defining episodes of the Williamite war.

When the Catholic King James II was deposed in England in favour of the Protestant William of Orange, the war between them was fought out in Ireland. In 1689 the walled city of Derry, held by supporters of William, shut its gates against James's advancing army — famously when thirteen apprentice boys seized the keys.

The siege that followed lasted 105 days. Inside the walls, the townspeople endured starvation and disease, their defiance summed up in the cry "No Surrender." The blockade was finally broken when a relief ship, the Mountjoy, smashed through a boom across the River Foyle and brought food to the starving city. Derry's resistance became a founding legend of Ulster Protestant identity, commemorated every year to this day.