An address from Parliament praying the sovereign to declare war against a foreign state is far from a common incident in our history; and even in this instance the initiative then taken by the Commons was one of form rather than of fact. The descent of James upon Ireland, under the convoy of a French fleet of fifteen sail of the line, and accompanied by a force of 2500 French soldiers, amounted to an act of war on the part of France, if ever such an act was committed by one nation upon another; and it was not till more than a month after the perpetration of this outrage that the address referred to in the last chapter was presented to the King. James landed at Kinsale on the 12th of March; the address to the King is dated, as has been said, on the 19th of April. England, moreover, was not the first of the coalition of Powers which the patient diplomacy of William had formed against Louis to take action against the common enemy. The declaration of the German Diet had appeared in February, and that of the States-General in March. On the 24th of March James entered Dublin, which, in common with all the other cities of the three southern provinces of Ireland, had declared for his cause; but after only three weeks' stay in the capital it was decided, against the advice of his chief French counsellor, d'Avaux, who with the Lord Deputy Tyrconnel, and the Irish Catholic party in general, were for keeping him among the Celtic population of the island, that he should go northward and take command of the royal army in Ulster. He accordingly set out on the 14th of April, and after some further hesitations caused by conflicting reports as to the results of a skirmish between the Protestants and a body of his own men at Strabane, arrived a few days later among his troops, who were quartered a few miles south of Londonderry, a city which, with Inniskillen, had formed the rallying point for the Protestant minority when the outbreak of the Revolution, awakening the hopes of the Catholic population, appeared to threaten the "English garrison" with a repetition of the horrors of 1641. Here it had been fully expected by James's more sanguine counsellors that he would be, if not loyally, at any rate submissively received. The appearance of their lawful sovereign before their walls would at any rate, it was thought, confirm the wavering allegiance of the military under the command of the Governor, Colonel Lundy. As a matter of fact, it only served to arouse a spirit of determined resistance in the townsmen, to unite the soldiery in the same cause, and to precipitate the flight of the Jacobite governor. James and his retinue, on approaching the gate, were fired on from the nearest bastion; a subsequent demand for surrender was contemptuously rejected, and after a few days' delay before the town its rejected sovereign set off in chagrin and disappointment to return to Dublin, leaving Londonderry to prepare for that heroic defence of three months against