King James II. returned to Dublin. The town held out a hundred and five days, in spite of the cruelties of the Count de Rosen, who had roused the indignation of James himself, when, on the 30th of July, upon receipt of a formal order from London, Colonel Kirke, lately dispatched from England to the aid of Londonderry, made a last effort to force the barricade constructed by the enemy across the river. "If we don't deliver the brave citizens of Londonderry, the whole world will rise against us," cried Birch, in the House of Commons. "A barricade! well, let it be forced! Shall we let our brothers perish almost before our eyes?" The barricade was forced, and the population of Derry, decimated, dying, but still indomitable, at last saw the vessels, which brought the aid so long expected, advance majestically by the narrow channel which alone the drought had left navigable. Thanksgivings and cries of joy were still echoing in the town, when a line of flames already indicated the retreat of the Jacobite army. The siege of Londonderry was raised.
The same day the inhabitants of Enniskillen, who had spiritedly held their town in face of the enemy's troops, pursued the Irish in retreat to the village of Newtown Butler. There, at the foot of a hill, in front of a bog, the battle took place. "Advance or retreat?" their leader Wolseley, detailed by Kirke, had asked his improvised soldiers. "Advance! advance!" shouted the Protestants. The rout of King James's partisans was complete, and the massacre frightful. Nothing could check the violence of religious and political hatreds among a half civilized population. "The dragoons, who had fled in the morning, retreated with the rest of the cavalry without firing a pistol," wrote the Count d'Avaux, "and they all ran away in such a panic that they threw away muskets, pistols, and sabres, and most of them having run their horses to death, took off their clothes, to go quicker on foot."
While the arms of King James met with these severe checks in Ireland, he received news from England which for a moment disquieted his counsellors; but soon reanimated, by the very imminence of the danger, the natural courage of the Irish race. The illustrious Marshal Schomberg, who was driven by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes from the adopted country he had gloriously served, the lieutenant of William III. when he first set foot in England, had just embarked for Ireland at the head of a numerous body of troops. Other alarming intelligence was added to this: the last efforts of the Scotch insurrection had miscarried; and all hope of a Jacobite restoration was dying out in the hereditary kingdom of the Stuarts.