LEADING DATES.

Con O’Neill accepts Earldom and Patent of Tyrone1st October, 1542.
Title of King of Ireland conferred on Henry VIII.23rd January, 1543.
Shane O’Neill slain by the MacDonaldsJune, 1567.
Act of Elizabeth confiscating Tyrone1569.
Patent to Claneboy O’Neills13th March, 1587.
Revolt of Hugh O’Neill1594.
Sir Con O’Neill, of Claneboy, adheres to Elizabeth1600.
O’Cahan, MacDonnell, and O’Byrne join Elizabeth1602.
Submission of Hugh O’Neill24th March, 1603.
Accession of James I.24th March, 1603.
Mountjoy (Earl of Devonshire) sails with O’Neill and O’Donnell for England26th May, 1603.
Patent to MacDonnell includes fourth of tidal Bann28th May, 1603.
King’s Letter appoints Chichester Governor Carrickfergus, with Belfast estate8th August, 1603.
King’s Letters regrant Tyrone to O’Neill23rd August, and 1st September, 1603.
Patents to Chichester under King’s Letter of 8th August10th September, and 5th November, 1603.
King’s Letter grants John Wakeman (Devonshire’s nominee) £100 a year8th November, 1603.
John Davies arrives as Solicitor-General20th November, 1603.
King’s Letter to Chichester, amending Letter of 8th August, 160329th December, 1603.
Wakeman’s Patent of St. Mary’s Abbey28th February, 1604.
Wakeman’s Patent of Meath, Westmeath, and Kilkenny lands5th March, 1604.
Chichester’s Patents, under amended Letter, take Lough Neagh and the Bann for life9th May, 1604.
Chichester appointed Lord Deputy15th October, 1604.
King’s Letter grants Thomas Irelande £100 a year6th December, 1604.
Partition of Claneboy with James Hamilton and Hugh MontgomeryJanuary, 1605.
Chichester sworn in as Deputy3rd (? 24th) February, 1605.
Thomas Irelande assigns £100 a year to Hamilton26th February, 1605.
King’s Letter to Hamilton for Claneboy, &c.16th April, 1605.
Chichester’s protest to Cecil against Hamilton’s grants19th June, 1605.
Chichester’s Commission for Inquisition into Hamilton’s grants26th June, 1605.
Inquisition at Antrim as to Hamilton’s grants12th July, 1605.
Chichester agrees to share spoil with HamiltonJuly, 1605.
Hamilton granted Coleraine Priory and Bann tithe fishing (under Thomas Irelande’s Letter)20th July, 1605.
Hamilton assigns Coleraine Priory and Bann tithe fishing to Captain Thomas Phillips23rd September, 1605.
Thomas Jones, Archbishop of Dublin and Lord Chancellor14th October, 1605.
Wakeman’s power-of-attorney to Auditor Ware21st October, 1605.
Hamilton’s Patent for Claneboy (King’s Letter, 16th April)5th November, 1605.
Gunpowder Plot affects Anglo-Irish policy5th November, 1605.
Hamilton’s Patent for Lough Neagh and Bann, &c., under Thomas Irelande’s Letter14th February, 1606.
Auditor Ware (Wakeman’s assignee) granted tidal Bann2nd March, 1606.
Auditor Ware assigns tidal Bann to Hamilton3rd March, 1606.
Hamilton’s Patent of Trim, &c., under Thomas Irelande’s Letter13th March, 1606.
Hamilton’s Patent of Westmeath lands under Thomas Irelande’s Letter17th March, 1606.
Earl of Devonshire’s will2nd April, 1606.
Earl of Devonshire’s death3rd April, 1606.
Hamilton assigns Lough Neagh and non-tidal Bann, &c., to Chichester10th April, 1606.
Hamilton’s Patent of Antrim and Down customs under Wakeman’s Letter11th April, 1606.
Hamilton assigns fourth of tidal Bann to Chichester14th May, 1606.
Hamilton’s Patent, Westmeath and Longford lands under Wakeman’s Letter18th May, 1606.
John Davies promoted Attorney-General29th May, 1606.
O’Cahan v. O’Neill tried by ChichesterMay and June, 1607.
Flight of the Earls (O’Neill and O’Donnell, &c.)14th September, 1607.
O’Cahan’s imprisonmentFebruary, 1608.
Hamilton’s Patent of Wexford lands under Thomas Irelande’s Letter13th May, 1608.
Sir Cahir O’Doherty’s rebellionMay-July, 1608.
Niall Garve O’Donnell’s imprisonment1608.
Patent to Bassett of all Hamilton conveyed to Chichester, with MacDonnell’s fourth of the tidal Bann1st July, 1608.
Bassett re-assigns contents of Patent to Chichester23rd January, 1609.
King’s Letter to Chichester for Sir Cahir O’Doherty’s estate30th July, 1609.
Inquisition at Limavady declares Bann Chichester’s30th August, 1609.
James I. grants Bann, Lough Foyle, and Derry to City of London28th January, 1610.
Hamilton’s additional Patent, St. Mary’s Abbey23rd February, 1610.
Hamilton receives £4,500 compensation for Bann and Lough FoyleJune, 1610.
Chichester annuls grant to MacDonnell of “fourth” of BannNovember, 1610.
Chichester’s surrender, via Archbishop Jones, of Bann and Lough Foyle3rd April, 1611.
Sham Corporations created to pack Parliament1612-1613.
Londoners’ Ulster Charter sealed29th March, 1613.
Planters’ Parliament meets18th May, 1613.
Recusants’ protest against packing ParliamentJuly, 1613.
Chichester created a peer25th February, 1614.
Planters’ Parliament escheats Ulster estates1615.
Planters’ Parliament dissolved24th October, 1615.
Sir John Davies’ legal reports published1615.
Chichester dismissed from Deputyship29th November, 1615.
Chichester appointed Lord High Treasurer2nd July, 1616.
Hugh O’Neill dies in Rome20th July, 1616.
Crown Rental describes Bann as Chichester’s1618-1619.
Deputy St. John investigates Wakeman-Irelande PatentsOctober, 1618.
Archbishop Jones, Lord Chancellor, dies10th April, 1619.
Davies resigns Attorney-Generalship30th October, 1619.
King’s Letter for re-grant to Chichester8th August, 1620.
Inquisition at Derry finds Bann for Londoners26th March, 1621.
Inquisition at Carrickfergus finds Bann and Lough Neagh for Chichester6th April, 1621.
Patent to Chichester includes Lough Neagh and the Bann20th November, 1621.
Chichester made Ambassador to PalatinateJanuary, 1622.
Chichester leases Lough Neagh to Londoners1622.
Wakeman Patents condemned by Exchequer Barons1623.
Chichester dies in London19th February, 1625.
James I. dies27th March, 1625.
Chichester’s embezzlements exposed1625-1626.
Sir John Davies diesDecember, 1626.
Sir A. Forbes’ fishery “discovery”21st October, 1628.
Opinion of ex-Baron Oglethorpe condemns Wakeman Patents26th April, 1630.
Strafford, Lord Lieutenant3rd July, 1633.
Londoners’ Irish estate seized by Charles I.1635.
Inquisition at Wicklow annuls Wakeman Patents21st April, 1636.
King’s Letter requiring surrender of Lough Neagh from Edward Chichester24th September, 1638.
Edward Chichester surrenders Lough Neagh and the Bann1st July, 1640.
Patent to Edward Chichester for estate (less fisheries)22nd September, 1640.
Commonwealth ordinance restores Londoners’ estate4th September, 1655.
Cromwell leases Lough Neagh to Clotworthy13th May, 1656.
Henry Cromwell inserts Bann in Clotworthy’s lease14th August, 1656.
Cromwell’s Charter restores Londoners’ estate24th March, 1657.
Oliver Cromwell dies1658.
Charles II. confirms lease to Clotworthy15th November, 1660.
Charles II. grants reversion of Clotworthy’s lease to Lord Donegall28th February, 1661.
Patent to Lord Donegall of reversion of Bann and Lough Neagh3rd July, 1661.
Charter of Charles II. restores estate to Londoners10th April, 1662.
Chichester Patent of 1640 “enrolled”1665.
Clotworthy’s lease expires14th August, 1755.
Lord Donegall’s litigation with Londoners1781-1801.
Londoners’ ejectment claims Bann from Lord Donegall1868.
Londoners accept lease of Bann under Lord Donegall1872.
Public right in Lough Neagh challenged1873-1878.
Public right in Lough Neagh annulled1908-1910.

THE GREAT FRAUD OF ULSTER

CHAPTER I.
THE MEN OF DEVON.

When Elizabethan England blazed with glory, martial and poetic, when the booty of the Spaniard enriched her adventurers, and the genius of her minstrels charmed every heart, the hills and valleys of the “sister island” echoed with horror, and her pleasant places were filled with the groans of wounded men. A group of Devon captains waged there a fearful war, led by the Queen’s Deputy, Lord Mountjoy. Reckless of their own lives, their deeds of valour scarcely noted by their countrymen, they ended their stubborn task, after a nine years’ death-grapple, by the levelling of every hostile stronghold and the reduction of the clansmen and their shielings into “carcases and ashes.”

At the moment when the victors expected to reap their reward and take possession of the domains of their enemies the course of history was changed by the death of Queen Elizabeth. As her successor the Privy Council selected the King of Scots, who had at times been the secret ally of the Irish chieftains. This choice baulked many a warrior’s hope of prey. James I. forgave O’Neill and O’Donnell (who, indeed, had never offended him), summoned them to London to receive pardon, and restored them to their honours and estates. They had rebelled, as he knew, to save their possessions from covetous officials who, by inventing charges of treason against them, deceived Elizabeth in order to make confiscation a virtue in her eyes.

In her reign the settled plan of the Executive was: to affect to further the interests of the Crown by promoting forfeitures, and then to divert them to the benefit of officials. The disgrace was a legacy bequeathed to her Majesty, her heirs and successors; the booty they kept for themselves. To-day the Crown lands of Ireland, despite three general confiscations, yield only £19,000 a year. In England, where, since the Wars of the Roses, there have been no wholesale spoliations, the Crown estates enrich the Exchequer by £488,000 a year. The cost of prostrating the Irish was borne by the British taxpayer. The profit from it went into private pockets.

James I. tried to reward the conquerors without beggaring the conquered. Lord Mountjoy, who, on the 6th June, 1603, led O’Neill and O’Donnell through London, was given grants of lands and Custom duties in England and was made Earl of Devonshire. His main assistants in the rebellion were two other Devon men—Sir George Carew, who commanded in Munster, and Sir Arthur Chichester, who ravaged Ulster. Between Mountjoy and Carew a close friendship existed. Mountjoy’s letters in the “Pacata Hibernia” manifest the warmth of their relations. Carew was equally confidential with his comrade-in-arms. His cipher of 1602 apprises Mountjoy of the dispatch of a poisoner to follow Red Hugh O’Donnell into Spain, after the defeat at Kinsale. Another tells of the murderer’s success, as O’Donnell was about to secure fresh aids from the Spanish King. Such secrets are entrusted only to bosom friends.

Sir Arthur Chichester was also the intimate of Mountjoy. He had, as a short-cut to end the rebellion, tried to compass the assassination of Hugh O’Neill; and, when this failed, he atoned for his ill-success by devices equally ruthless. The Deputy supported them in everything; and, when the Scotch succession came about, he wished that James I. should repay them royally. Cecil, the most influential Minister of the King, was the friend of all three; and he found it natural that, when James took back to favour Irish noblemen lately in arms, the recompense of those who had reduced them to submission should not be stinted. Chichester came to London from Ireland to push his claims and, accordingly, on the 8th August, 1603, he received in fee the Castle of Belfast, with lands adjoining of undefined extent, and was appointed Life Governor of Carrickfergus at 13s. 4d. a day.

Carew’s worth was recognised in what seemed a less grateful fashion, for on the 28th September, 1603, he was allowed an estate of the value only of £100 a year. This looked an unworthy return; but it represents in present money £1,000 a year. Neither Chichester nor Carew was content with his requital, for each believed that, if the reconciliation between James and the Northern chiefs had not taken place, their swords would have reaped a richer harvest. With this feeling Mountjoy (now Earl of Devonshire) sympathised. So it came to pass that a system was established by which the royal demesne was stripped, for their benefit, and his own. There was at least plenty of monastery plunder to be divided.

The looseness of the times, the feeling aroused among angry captains at the favour shown to surrendered rebels, the grasping example of the Scotch adventurers who swarmed over the Border after King James, the readiness of his consort to lend herself to their petitions—all tended to excite men in power in an unsettled land to batten on the public treasure. The Earl of Devonshire knew that it was illegal for him, as Deputy, or for his officials, to take or possess estate without royal licence. Still the chances offering were too alluring to be thrown away. Yielding to temptation, he abused his trust and soiled his hands.

The plan on which he and his friends worked bore the semblance of legality. A “King’s Letter” was employed to mask every fraud. Such a Letter was a warrant obtained by a petitioner for royal favour. It was usually submitted in draft by the applicant to his Majesty engrossed on parchment. Sometimes two or three skins were sewn together, making it of great size. Its terms, if approved, defined the royal bounty or prescribed the royal will. It was sent to the Signet Office in London when perfected, and was there copied into the Signet Book. Then it was dispatched to Dublin, where a fiant (or order) of the Law Officers to make it “patent” was issued. The Patent was supposed to put the Letter into legal form, but, by official connivance, it often included grants that had never been authorised. When sealed under the Great Seal of Ireland by the Lord Chancellor, a copy was generally “enrolled” in Chancery. This merely meant that its words were inscribed in the vellum rolls kept by the Court officials.

In Stuart days no system of comparing or checking the King’s Letters with the Patents existed, unless the Crown lawyers chose to direct that precaution. If they were corrupt, the Crown was robbed. In that era, official corruption was almost universal. No register of Patents was kept, and grantees constantly strove to extend the limits of their Letters, so as to secure more than the King intended. With influential backing, any fraud was possible. If the grantee did not enrol his grant the Crown was left without even a copy, and could not always tell which of its possessions had been given away. Looseness was fostered by lack of system as well as by lack of honesty.

The Attorney-General and Solicitor-General were supposed to oversee the Patents. They were often needy adventurers, imported from some London Inn of Court on the nomination of accomplices in the Executive. The Lord Lieutenant was their master, and they did not pretend to independence, but obeyed their superiors without question. Honesty injured their prospects, and they seldom affected to practise that unusual virtue. It was a time when much ecclesiastical property was forfeit, especially in Ulster, where the downfall of the Gael enabled the Statutes of Henry VIII. against the monasteries to be at last enforced. St. Mary’s Abbey, Dublin, at its dissolution by Henry VIII. reputed to be the richest in Ireland, held valuable possessions in every province, and several fraudulent Patents made raids on them. Many of these were given over to the Lord Lieutenant and his confederates on flimsy pretences. Public advantage from the confiscations was nil.

The King’s entourage was not fettered by vows of poverty. Courtiers who boasted no virtue themselves did not look for shining examples from Irish officials. They knew these men had left England for their advancement, to make what they could out of a conquered country. The Castle in Dublin was a coarse replica of the Court in London. The spendthrift habits of James I. bred extravagance in his underlings. To deceive that slobbering pedant seemed a small demerit to the Anglo-Irish harpies who regulated their profligacy by London standards.

The clearing-house of corruption in the metropolis for the sale of offices and favours was kept by Michael Hicks of Ruckholt, son of a Cheapside shopkeeper, who had been Burleigh’s secretary in Elizabeth’s reign. Hicks was Cecil’s playfellow in youth; and at his mart much was to be learnt of the schemes and foibles of great men.

After Devonshire’s arrival in England in June, 1603, he was held in thrall by a love affair with the wife of Lord Rich, and never returned to Ireland. He was made Lord Lieutenant by James I., and was able at Court to lend countenance to the malpractices of his friends. To hide his own share in them he worked behind nominees, the principal being henchmen named John Wakeman and John King. The latter he sent over from England to a post in Dublin. Devonshire’s participation in the loot began on the 8th November, 1603. He then secured a King’s Letter for a grant of lands to the value of £100 a year in favour of John Wakeman, on the plea that it represented the Royal gratitude for “services done unto Us and to be done and also in regard to a valuable consideration in money paid and to be paid by our order to an ancient and well-deserving servant of ours in Scotland” by Wakeman. The “old servant” was a myth. So was the money payment by Wakeman to him. So was the £100 a year limit of recompense. From November, 1603, till the Earl’s death in April, 1606, a stream of grants, nominally to John Wakeman, but really for the Lord Lieutenant, flowed from this source. In yearly value they amounted to several thousands of pounds.

Wakeman was a servant of the Levant Company who in 1603 had returned from trading with the Emperor of Morocco. That he had made any payment among the Moors to “well-deserving” Scotchmen in Elizabeth’s reign was unlikely, yet over a dozen Patents of enormous value were passed in his name, on pretence of rewarding him to the extent of £100 a year. Devonshire’s second go-between, John King, was made Clerk of the Crown in Dublin on the 12th July, 1603, and received much property on pretexts equally flimsy.

In order that these practices might be safely carried out, the Lord Lieutenant arranged with Cecil to dispatch to Ireland, as soon as John King was appointed, a law officer on whom they could rely. This was John Davies, a hungry lawyer from the Middle Temple, who afterwards was knighted for his part in fleecing Hugh O’Neill. Davies was nominated in September, 1603, and was sworn-in in Dublin during November, 1603. His unscrupulousness and cunning were beyond the common even of those spacious days. To him must be ascribed the feats of conveyancing, the multiplication of Patents, the shady trusteeships, the magnification of grants, and the plunder of the Gaelic gentry, which defile the reign of James I. His arrival worked an immediate improvement in the fortunes of Chichester and Carew.

On the strength of a warrant for £100 a year, Carew received three Patents. Each included lands far exceeding that sum in annual value. Like John King and John Wakeman, Sir George served as agent for others in the obtainment of grants. In one case, on receiving a King’s Letter in his own favour, he two days later assigned all rights under it to Richard Boyle, the notorious Earl of Cork. This helped Boyle to enlarge the huge estate in Munster which he had snatched from Sir Walter Raleigh—who had himself seized it from the Earl of Desmond. Other officials who dredged in the same muddy tide were Hibbots, Chancellor of the Exchequer; Cooke, Secretary of State; St. John, afterwards Deputy; and the law officers, Davies and Jacob, with many besides.

Before any Patent could legally be made out, the law required conditions to be fulfilled which these worthies entirely disregarded. Notice should first be given to the public, and an inquiry held into the nature of the grant, and the power of the King to make it. So strict was Statute on this point that Patents issued in default of prior inquiry were declared to be “void and holden for none.” This did not trouble Davies or his confederates, who set aside legal safeguards as lightly as moral principles. King James knew naught of their devastations, and it would have touched him nearly to hear the fate of St. Mary’s Abbey—which his predecessors were firm in retaining. Neither Henry VIII. nor Elizabeth would permit its possessions to be recklessly squandered.

Founded by a Gaelic Prince, its revenues were increased after the Conquest by successive Norman Kings. The Abbey gave hospitality to strangers who came overseas, and was frequently used as a lodging by the Viceroys. Deputy Leonard Gray strove to save it from confiscation, but he was recalled by Henry VIII., who suspected him, and had him beheaded. Henry ordered the Dublin portion of the Abbey to be reserved for the Royal ordnance; and Elizabeth, although she gave a site to Trinity College out of its possessions, rejected in 1567 the prayer of the Mayor and Burgesses of Dublin that some portion should be let to them “in consideration of their loyal and dutiful services.” The Queen requited their loyalty by a grant of other lands; but her hold on St. Mary’s Abbey she would not lightly relax.

This made the trick played on King James the more scurvy. Mere monastery pickings, however, were trifles compared with the other colossal thefts carried out under the new regime. At no period before or since was there anything to equal them in hardihood. The operations of Chichester were more extensive and ingenious than those of his co-mates, and entailed larger historic consequences.

CHAPTER II.
THE RAPE OF THE LOUGH.

The ingenuity of Davies helped to distend beyond all honest limits the grants allotted to Chichester, who coveted properties too unique and vast to be openly proposed for his reward. Sir Arthur’s Castle at Carrickfergus lay neighbourly to Lough Neagh, and on this great prize, with its outlet, the fishful Bann, he had set his heart. To crave such guerdon for his services would have been in vain. It was not the King’s to bestow, and never had been seized or claimed by the Crown. With official connivance he might lay hands on it, but his power in the State was limited. James I. had chosen him with Sir Henry Docwra and Sir William Godolphin as a partaker in the Government during Devonshire’s absence; but he shared a divided authority, and had to beware of jealousy or exposure.

Lough Neagh lay outside the territory of every native chieftain, while the Bann belonged to notables whose rights could not lightly be trespassed on. In 1542 the Lough was fixed as the Eastern boundary of Tyrone in the Patent of Henry VIII. to Con O’Neill after Con’s acceptance, at Greenwich, of English allegiance. When that Patent was renewed by James I. to Hugh O’Neill in 1603, the same landmarks were maintained. On the opposite side dwelt the Claneboy O’Neills; but, beyond their shore-fishings and those of the monks, they laid no claim to it. Their Patent of 30th March, 1587, is confined to County Down, and makes no mention of Lough Neagh. Queen Elizabeth gave Sir Thomas Smith a Charter to conquer East Ulster in 1571, but the Lough was not included in his grant.

The limits of tribal ownership were at all times acutely studied; and to interfere with them without provocation or legal excuse, once peace was established, would arouse angry protests and appeals to the Throne. It was plain, moreover, that, whether English Law or Brehon Law prevailed, there was no one against whom a forfeiture could be enforced for Lough Neagh as a whole.

Inconvenient as this was for the official despoiler, with his nice sense of quiddities, Sir Arthur saw its usefulness from another point of view, since no great owner would suffer if a confiscation were carried out. On this basis he laid his plans. Queen Elizabeth, during her nine years’ struggle for supremacy, had established war-boats on Lough Neagh, from which O’Neill’s territory was raided. The crews hindered the natives from fishing when their kine and corn were destroyed; and, after famine had enforced peace, the galleys were ordered to be kept serviceable. Hugh Clotworthy, one of Chichester’s warriors, remained in charge of them, and received from Sir Arthur the lands of Massereene, near the shore, out of his own grant, at a cheap rate. He calculated that, with proper backing, Lough Neagh might be put under his “command” as Governor of Carrickfergus, and that on this foundation a beginning might be made from which ownership could be built up. The Lord Lieutenant was not privy to this purpose; and had never conceived such an annexation, even for his own benefit. He would have been staggered by its audacity in a subordinate, but he unwittingly helped to bring about what Chichester sought.

It has been told that on his visit to Court with the subjugated Earls, Devonshire secured Sir Arthur’s life appointment as Governor of Carrickfergus, with a gift of the property lying between the Castles of Carrickfergus and Belfast. This served as a basis from which Chichester operated. Most of these lands had been awarded to Sir Ralph Lane, Muster-Master-General to Queen Elizabeth, under a “custodium” (or lease) of 1598. They included Belfast Castle, with its adjacent fishery of the Lagan, and other valuable perquisites. Large areas comprised in the grant had, in Lane’s day, to be won from the natives; and in 1603 the rightful owner, Sir Con O’Neill, was held prisoner in Carrickfergus Castle by Chichester on a charge of treason invented with a view to stealing what remained of his property.

Before Sir Con could be brought to trial he escaped to Scotland; and, Lane being displaced, everything in the “custodium” was given to Chichester. The King’s Letter of the 8th August, 1603, ordered his grant to be made rent free in perpetuity. Thus the soil on which the City of Belfast now stands, under the name of “the Fall, Mylone, and the Tuogh called the Sinament,” fell to a penniless freebooter with scantier ritual than would to-day mark the transfer of an acre from an African savage.

This recognition of Sir Arthur’s merits, though princely, left him ungrateful. On the 23rd August, 1603, he wrote Cecil pretending that the King’s Letter had been “by the learned counsel found defective,” and praying that “some other to better purpose may be signed by his Majesty.” He did not disclose what was amiss with the Letter, or that its only “defect” was that it did not authorise what he coveted. The help of the vulnerable Viceroy was also enlisted, but to him the plea put forward was that the Letter “was not so ample as his Majesty intended.” Without awaiting Cecil’s reply Chichester stretched the Letter by taking out two Patents, in each of which he inserted grants greater than his Majesty had sanctioned.

In the first Patent, dealing with Belfast, issued on the 10th September, 1603, he included the entire of the river Lagan, although the fishing at the Castle alone was given him. The second, relating to the Carrickfergus Governorship, he enlarged by a still more daring addition. The original of either Patent is no longer available, as they were first concealed, and then cancelled; but from those substituted for them the conclusion is irresistible that they swept the “command” of Lough Neagh into his hands. So glaring were their excesses that Sir Arthur shrank from enrolling them lest a comparison between their text and the King’s Letter, on which they purported to be based, should shock inquiring minds. The King’s Letter then (as now) lay in the custody of the Master of the Rolls.

Davies’ arrival in Dublin in November, 1603, proved a godsend to all jobbers. The new Solicitor-General brought the latest London gossip of the extravagant largesse of the Scotch King and Queen, and of the Lord Lieutenant’s careless amours. This intelligence and his lawcraft lent aid to Sir Arthur’s purposes and shaped his methods. The system under which swollen grants were called into being for the profit of needy favourites had already been set in full swing; and Davies knew that the absentee Viceroy was not squeamish about the scope of the Patents taken out by his brothers-in-arms. The Solicitor-General framed himself to that situation. The entanglement with Lady Rich made the Lord Lieutenant reluctant to return to Ireland, and the delicacy of his position was becoming notorious. Davies saw its weakness, and discerned in Chichester a kindred spirit and a rising power.

Before long their interchanges resulted in a dashing expedient. Underlying the application for the new Letter lurked the design to make it cover a Patent bulking the “command” at Carrickfergus with a right over Lough Neagh. If the scheme prospered, the concealed Patents could afterwards be destroyed; and, as they were not enrolled, legal proof of malpractice in framing them would also disappear. This plan bore upon its face the stamp of Davies’ mint.

Cecil was favourable to Sir Arthur, and the Lord Lieutenant doubtless reflected that to extend his “command” to embrace Lough Neagh would only increase his responsibility without enriching his estate or enlarging his pay. They, therefore, furthered Chichester’s petition without troubling as to the purpose to which an “amended” King’s Letter might be turned. In the first profuse year of the Stuart regime, small scrutiny was spent by James I. on requests of this kind. Once Devonshire and Cecil backed up a suppliant’s prayer, no difficulty was made in yielding it. His Majesty accordingly, on the 29th December, 1603, consented to sign a second Letter; and thereby became anew the victim of servitors who prostituted regal forms to corrupt ends.

The difference between the first and second King’s Letter related chiefly to the “command” of Lough Neagh; but that difference enabled the craftsmen to effect a far-reaching extension of the Patent it authorised. The “amended” Letter was drawn to invest Chichester with “the government of Carrickfergus and of all other forts, places, and commands, with the Lough Neagh and the commodities thereof mentioned in our Letters Patent formerly granted unto him, together with the fee of 13s. 4d. by the day, for the term of his natural life.” This phraseology shows that although Lough Neagh had never been mentioned in the first King’s Letter, a patent was founded on it which illegally dealt with the Lough.

On the strength of the new Letter, the rogues minted a fresh Patent on the 9th May, 1604. This revealed the original design and reeked with every kind of illegality. Having declared Chichester “Colonel and Governor of our forces at Carrickfergus,” with the fee of 13s. 4d. a day for life, it created him “Admiral and Commander-in-Chief of Lough Neagh for the disposal of all shipping and boats thereon.” There was daring in that, but a greater marvel followed, for the Patent thievishly went on to confer on him “the fishing of the said Lough as far as the Salmon Leap in the River of the Bann.” In other words, it annexed to the command at Carrickfergus a life estate in the fishery of Lough Neagh and the Bann. This was a stupendous encroachment on the nature and limits of the grant sanctioned by the King. To transform a military “command” into the gift of a huge fishery, and adjoin thereto the rank of “Admiral,” was a masterpiece of perversion. The English Crown had never laid claim to the waters so purloined. James I. did not mean to give them away; and had neither power nor right to do so. The feigned dignity of “Admiral and Commander-in-Chief of Lough Neagh” was usurped to mask a material advantage, and its author vainly tried afterwards to confirm his shaky title by dubbing the lake “Lough Chichester.” The mock baptism was as scornfully rejected by the natives as his piratical claim of ownership.

No inquisition had been held (as the law required) to establish the right to make the Patent. Nor did any official notification of it apprise the Crown or the public of what had been done. A spell of black magic transmuted a military appointment into a life estate in the richest fishery in Ulster, and attached thereto a bogus “Admiralty.”

Uglier even than the uncanny graft on the “command” at Carrickfergus was Sir Arthur’s crookedness as to the Bann. The river was nowhere mentioned in either King’s Letter from first to last; yet the new Patent captured it for Chichester. Ecclesiastics as well as laymen owned the stream on either bank. It belonged to Hugh O’Neill in part, to Sir Randal McDonnell in part, to the Bishop of Derry, to the Bishop of Down and Connor, and other magnates. They never learnt till too late that, by imposing the Great Seal on skins of vellum, Sir Arthur had stolen their property. The fresh-water “Admiral” kept his scrivenery secret until its victims were powerless and his sway assured. His day was coming; and the spirit in which he trampled down public and private ownership proves that the embittered captains of Elizabeth never intended to respect the treaties of peace which heralded the dawn of the Stuart reign. Chichester had as little compunction in thwarting the policy of James I. as in stripping chiefs and clansmen of their acres.

To baffle research as to his misdeeds, he inserted a proviso in the Patents of 1604 declaring that those of 1603 should be annulled before their substitutes were sealed. He had cunningly left them unenrolled, lest their contents should rise up in judgment against him, and thus they were for ever withheld from scrutiny and subtracted from the archives of the State. Knowledge of them is derived only from the King’s Letter and recitals in the Patents of 1604. The germ of the stranger’s claim to Lough Neagh and the Bann, thus clandestinely called into being, animates the unnatural pedigree of the Chichester title. In no essay of his descendants to trace it back through the centuries to some legitimate source, nor in their lawsuits to maintain a hold on what he filched, are the Patents of 1603-4 ever mentioned. In no legal proceedings concerning the Bann or Lough Neagh (and they were frequent) was the pretenced life-estate ever relied on or referred to. A modern affidavit, which boasts a complete and accurate enumeration of the grants, piously avers that the first was issued in 1606, and suppresses those of 1603-4. The guilt-dyed originals were left buried out of sight, as if no tell-tale ghosts haunted the Record Office. Yet they represented the fairest flower of the handicraft which typified the majesty of the law in Ireland when the Brehon Code was overthrown.

They were fabricated on the eve of Chichester’s promotion from Carrickfergus to Dublin Castle, for his elevation to the Deputyship was at hand; and on the threshold of his greatness this brace of parchments exhibits him reeking in the mire of duplicity and ingratitude. He requited James I. for the gift of a lordly recompense by manifold falsehoods and fabrications. The whole River Lagan was snatched instead of a mere fishing-reach at Belfast Castle. The “command” of Lough Neagh was assumed without sanction under an unenrolled Patent. The misrepresentation that his grants “were not so ample as his Majesty intended” begot a fresh King’s Letter to furbish title to that coveted command. By warping the Royal Warrant he endowed himself with the honour of “Admiral and Commander-in-Chief” in his watery jurisdiction, plus a life-estate in the fisheries of a great inland sea. Unsated by this immensity, he absorbed long leagues of the River Bann, the property of high-placed chieftains and unoffending prelates, in defiance of treaty and law. To crown all, an intrigue to gain the Deputyship was entered upon, to complete the work so masterfully begun.

The development of his “life-estate” into the full-blown perfection of the Fee Simple took years to accomplish and much ministering sleight-of-hand. In the process legal conjuring and covin more astounding than that which ushered in its illegitimate birth briskly unfold themselves. Toadies of Chichester depict him as a Christian of deep religious fervour. A hypocrite by habit, a churl by nature, and a thief by instinct he took care that his deceptions should not be easily unravelled. The consequences of the “amended” Letter, which the ’prentice Monarch of the United Kingdom was befooled into signing, reach down into a far futurity.

CHAPTER III.
CHICHESTER, DEPUTY.

At the outset of the Earl of Devonshire’s wooings, his Deputy in Dublin was one Cary, Treasurer at War. Cary, in comparison with his confederates, was a mere pedlar in villainy. As Treasurer at War he drew forged Bills of Exchange and passed off false moneys dexterously enough; but as Deputy he showed himself unskilled in the mystery of annexing broad acres by sealed sheepskins. Cary was ill-regarded by Chichester, who from his eyrie in Carrickfergus sped into England sly narratives of his misdeeds. Filled with remorse for his colleague’s sins, Sir Arthur humbly insinuated his own merits. Devonshire and Cecil were on the side of the cunning penman, and submitted his reports to the King. An inquiry into his charges was held, and although Cary’s audited accounts were found in order he was recalled. Then Chichester with great show of reluctance allowed himself to be installed in the vacant place.

On being invested with the “Sword of State” he displayed a rapacity in keeping with his increased power, but the more he robbed the Crown the more redolent of loyalty and piety grew his dispatches. He had written of Cary words which quickly waxed applicable to himself:—“The Deputy made such a hand of enriching himself in this land, as the like was never done by any other that supplied the place.” He marked down the pardoned Ulster Chieftains as his especial prey. Upon their possessions he had long cast envious eyes, and with cold watchfulness he set himself to weave a web around them.

Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, after three months at Court, had, on the 11th September, 1603, secured from James I. an order for the “restoration in blood” by Act of Parliament of himself and his brothers, and the re-grant of their lands by Patent. The King wished a Parliament to be summoned so that the Irish Princes and people should universally enjoy (for the first time) the protection of English Law. Two documents published in the year of his accession attest in this particular the statesmanship of the Stuart. Yet no Parliament was called, nor did any Patent issue in favour of the Chiefs from the Dublin fount of grants whose parchments alone a crafty Executive treated as binding. In the words of a Spanish Don, O’Neill and his comrades were “a very simple sort of men.” They had Latin pat, but little skill in lawcraft. Their warlike prowess won European renown, but they were easily outmatched in legal tourney. Despite Royal pardon, Royal parchments, and Royal promises, the Earls O’Neill and O’Donnell and their titles were blotted out within less than five years of the Treaty of Peace by the relentless Devonian.

Shortly after Chichester became Deputy (February, 1605) there appeared before him a Scottish suitor bearing “King’s Letters” entitling him to unexpected bounties. Their magnitude astonished the “Admiral of Lough Neagh.” At first he gibed at the stranger and thwarted his projects. Then he trounced him in letters of alarm to Cecil. The nature of the replies he received, however, was not encouraging. For Sir Arthur had to do with a Royal favourite—James Hamilton—reputed to be a mighty hunter of holes in other men’s grants. The son of a clergyman at Ayr, Hamilton during Elizabeth’s reign, served the Scottish Crown as a spy both in Ireland and England. His career is a romance of the Fee-Simple, and he ended his days as a Peer of the Realm, owning, as Lord Claneboy, an estate in Ulster and elsewhere as extensive as the greediest of the freebooters. In his youth Hamilton was a Scholar of Dublin University, which was then newly founded by Queen Elizabeth on lands seized from St. Mary’s Abbey. Afterwards he kept a Latin School near Dublin Castle with James Fullerton, and the pair acted as intelligencers for the Scottish Crown.

When the Tudor Dynasty was drawing to an end he hired himself to quest for the King of Scots on perilous errands to and fro between the Three Kingdoms. Finally he took pay from both Crowns, and after Elizabeth’s death the favour of James was his rich endowment. A subtle devisor of pretexts to bring about a lapse in the Patents of others, he often succeeded in persuading the King that the forfeits should fall to “discoverers” like himself. Such rewards cost his Majesty little, and the Ayrshireman’s influence and wealth grew apace.

Upon the Stuart Accession, Hamilton was entrusted with the task of pleading at Court the claim of the heirs of Sir Thomas Smith (Elizabeth’s Latin Secretary) to the lands of Claneboy. The Queen’s Charter of 1571 offered a large slice of East Ulster to Smith and his bastard son to encourage a warlike expedition against the eastern branch of the O’Neills. In pushing the raid, Smith’s son was killed, and this brought the adventure and the Charter to an end. When Ireland was subdued in 1603 the Smith family petitioned (in view of their sacrifices thirty years earlier) that the lapsed Charter should be revived in their favour, and Hamilton was hired to press their suit on the King. His retainer proved unprosperous: the Smiths got nothing, but their advocate managed to acquire the bulk of the property for himself. At this result cries of “treachery” arose from the disappointed Smiths, yet no one wasted a thought on the fate of the real owners, the O’Neills of Claneboy.

From Tudor times this branch of the O’Neills had been loyal to the Crown, but were afterwards found to be rather in the way. Holding choice spots of strength, they saw their possessions raided by those whom they had served. After James I. came to the throne, Chichester seized whatever part of their lands he chose to think fell within Sir Ralph Lane’s “custodium.” He had, as already mentioned, imprisoned Sir Con O’Neill; and the rage he felt when that chief escaped from his clutches was intensified on Hamilton’s arrival with the news of his pardon and King’s Letters for a Patent of his property. The O’Neills had dwelt a thousand years in Claneboy; but the Deputy was indignant that a rival should forestall him in spoliation, and avail of his own procedure to work it out.

Sir Con’s downfall came about because, being minded to import wine into the harbour at Carrickfergus, the garrison there looted it on the way to his cellars, and his servant killed one of the soldiers in a hasty affray in 1602. The chief and his retainers had been in the pay and service of Queen Elizabeth since 1600, yet this scuffle Chichester dubbed “treason.” Instead of punishing the thieves he attacked the owner of the wine, and Sir Con’s life and lands were put in jeopardy. He was arrested, thrust into a cell in Carrickfergus Castle, and tried as a rebel by “office of inquest” before the Provost-Marshal. There had been no Provost-Marshal at Carrickfergus in Elizabeth’s reign; and, in order to do service on Sir Con, Chichester got leave, on the 30th August, 1603, to appoint one. He and the Ulster Earls were then in London, and before Con could be executed he escaped from the Castle. A Scotch laird, Sir Hugh Montgomery, helped him to fly, and had him ferried across the narrow strait between Carrickfergus and Scotland. The Laird was brother to the new Court Chaplain under James I., the Rev. George Montgomery. To London he took Sir Con to see the reverend favourite and secure a Stuart pardon. O’Neill promised him a large fee, no less than half his estate, as the price of “forgiveness.”

When they arrived at Court the suppliants encountered the ex-spy, Sir James Fullerton, brimful of craft and watchful of chances. He was the old comrade of Hamilton, and contrived a turn for him out of Sir Con’s distress. His influence was such that the King only granted the “pardon” on condition that the chief’s bargain with Montgomery should be recast and a third of his estate given to Hamilton. O’Neill was kept dangling about the Court for over a year before this composition was arrived at. Thus the chief was shorn of two-thirds of his lands instead of half, as the price of “mercy.” To temper the loss to Montgomery the King promised to throw in as many abbeys and monasteries as would make it good, but Sir Con had to submit to the condition that the new Patent should be made out in Hamilton’s name and accept his promise to assign a third to himself and Montgomery. Such was Fullerton’s fealty to his brother-spy. At his death Fullerton was honoured with a grave in Westminster Abbey.

By such help James Hamilton won a lodgment in Ulster. He at once hastened to Dublin, and presented two King’s Letters to the Deputy. One of them, dated the 16th April, 1605, entitled him to the entire of Sir Con’s property, while another of the 6th December, 1604, gave him land (unspecified) to the value of £100 a year. These warrants startled Chichester, who had expected to make his own of the whole of O’Neill’s possessions. In his eyes they revealed a woeful situation, for they conferred on an outsider “of his Majesty’s gift the countries and territories of Upper Clandeboye and the Great Ardes.” This manner of looting O’Neill fell out with his plans—a stranger had struck sickle in the corn he had sown.

Hamilton’s second grant of £100 a year was framed on the elastic “Wakeman” model, and surpassed it in the romance of its origin. In his impoverished Elizabethan days the spy used when he came to London put up at the “Half-Moon” Tavern in Bow Lane. It was a house of call for Scotchmen; and the landlord, Thomas Irelande, hailed from “the North Countrie.” At that date the Scotch were by Statute the “ancient enemies” of the English; but Hamilton, while acting as a scout for the Scots, was also in the pay of England. When James I. reached the throne he cannot have suspected this, and his Letter of the 6th December, 1604, with other gifts, attests his gratitude.

Suitors for King’s Letters who wished to baffle inquiry or avert jealousy often put forward some “John Doe” or “Richard Roe” as a feigned beneficiary (as the Earl of Devonshire did) to mask grants intended for themselves. Hamilton preferred that the name of his innkeeper should appear in the royal Letter instead of his own. He had, on the 6th November, 1603, and 18th May, 1604, been given a valuable monopoly for the export of linen yarn from Ireland, and may have thought it would be easier or more speedy to obtain further grants if he remained in disguise rather than appear as the original beneficiary. Whatever his motive, he showed himself as skilful as higher personages in employing the machinery for juggling with Patents. The name of the Innkeeper, Thomas Irelande, chosen for insertion as the nominal Patentee, corresponded with that of another “Thomas Ireland,” an escheator of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, who might be looked on as the grantee by those who did not burrow too deeply below the surface.

Figments were recited about Thomas Irelande in the King’s Letter which rival those palmed off on James I. by the Lord Lieutenant in the case of John Wakeman. Its text made his Majesty certify that the tapster of the “Half-Moon” had paid into the Exchequer £1,678 6s. 8d., but whether before or after he came to the throne of England was not stated; and that, as a recompense, Thomas Irelande was to receive an estate worth £100 a year “out of such castles, manors, etc., as came to the Crown by forfeiture, attainder, etc.” The Privy Council had just ordered the Irish Executive not to part with any such “castles.”

In the year 1604 the sum of £1,678 6s. 8d. would represent nearly £20,000 in to-day’s values. This a humble innkeeper is supposed to have presented to the Exchequer without security or interest—an unexplained and un-Scottish caprice. To have had such command of money, Thomas Irelande must have amassed a fortune out of the tavern “where Scotsmen lie”; although in Elizabeth’s reign no large muster of Scots from whom it could derive custom repaired to London. A Census of Foreigners in 1567 shows that there were only 40 resident Scotchmen in the metropolis, as compared with 472 Frenchmen and 2,030 Dutch. So the Bow Lane philanthropist must have been as lucky under the Tudors as he was lavish under the Stuarts.

His Majesty was in the habit of borrowing money wherever he could lay hands on it. He took loans from Hugh O’Neill and never repaid them. He also laid himself under obligation to wealthy London citizens; but these were personal debts; and the landlord of the “Half-Moon” is not alleged to have made the King a private loan, but to have lodged cash in the public Exchequer. His place of abode is not mentioned in the King’s Letter, where his innkeepership is disguised by misdescribing him as a “merchant.”

The oddest part of the transaction has now to be recorded. Having poured his largesse into the royal coffers, the tapster’s openhandedness sought a fresh outlet. With boundless disregard for bawbees, Thomas Irelande made over to Hamilton the grant of £100 a year which had cost him £1,678 6s. 8d. This was expressed to be done “for divers good considerations”—that being the common form for a voluntary conveyance. In other words, he gave a valuable property away for nothing. Few London hotel-keepers now endow their guests in that way. These goodly giants of the prime are alas extinct.

Hamilton, armed with his landlord’s conveyance and the grant of Sir Con O’Neill’s estate (in trust as to two-thirds), pressed the Deputy for Patents to validate them. Legally his demand was irresistible; but Chichester’s righthand men, led by Sir William Parsons (the Surveyor-General), shared his reluctance to “passing” a grant so extensive. They, like their master, felt wounded that an intruder should try to carry off booty larger than any seized by the Lord Lieutenant or the other Elizabethan warriors.

What was to be done? A blank refusal to honour the King’s warrant was impossible, so they temporised and parleyed with Hamilton. Meanwhile, the Deputy, smarting at the loss of the hoped-for escheat from Sir Con (whom he would gladly have hanged), poured out his soul in protest to Cecil. He wrote on the 19th June, 1605:—

“The King’s grants daily increase. There is come hither one Mr. James Hamilton with two Letters from the King: one containing a gift of £100 land in fee-farm, in the name of Thomas Irelande; the other for passing to him the Great Ardes or Upper Claneboy—by virtue of which words, if he have his desires, he will have more lands than the greatest lords in this kingdom, and all is given in free and common soccage, whereby his Majesty’s tenures are lost and everywhere abridged. If copies of these letters be called for the grants will be found to be extraordinary.

“When I was in England, it pleased the King, by your means, to bestow on me the Castle of Belfast and other lands adjoining. I have passed it twice, and as yet I understand by this gentleman—who, it seems, has sought all the records—there are some questions may be made thereon, by reason of some grants made long since to Sir Thomas Smith. For albeit that deed be of no force, yet, not being so found void in the ‘office,’ as the records of those deeds were not in this Kingdom, I am subject to some danger. I pray, therefore, that one Letter more may be granted to me for re-passing the same.” While awaiting Cecil’s reply, Chichester, on the 26th June, 1605, appointed a Commission of his most trusted officials and cronies to hold Inquisitions preliminary to any grant being made, so that by a rigid enforcement of the Patent laws (hitherto ignored), Hamilton should not get a rood of land or a rill of water to which he was not strictly entitled. The scope of the Commission was severely limited to the text of the King’s Letters which Hamilton presented, and the persons appointed to execute it were:—

Nicholas Kerdiff, Serjeant-at-Law,
Sir Charles Calthrop, Attorney-General,
William Parsons, Surveyor-General,
Nicholas Kenney, Escheator-General.
John Dallway of Carrickfergus,
Robert Barnwall,
and
Laurence Masterson.

Of these, the three last, with Parsons, alone acted, and they sat to hold Inquisitions at Ardwhin, Co. Down (recte Ardquin), on the 5th July, 1605, and in the town of Antrim on the 12th July, 1605. They were commissioned to ascertain what lands Sir Con O’Neill and his father, Brian Fertagh, were possessed of in Upper Claneboy and the Great Ardes, with the rents and “cuttings” to which they were subject. Their other duty was to discover what property in the Counties of Antrim and Down should have come to the Crown by attainder or forfeiture, so that the £100 a year granted to Thomas Irelande might be provided thereout. The verdict then found took shape in a return, which was put to such an illegitimate use that it was not enrolled for 79 years, lest its terms should leak out.

For by the time the Commissioners had completed their labours and returned to Dublin, Cecil silenced the murmurings of the Deputy, and counselled him to come to an understanding with Hamilton. The “one Letter more” never was signed, for the policy recommended from London made it unnecessary. Cecil having, in 1599, promoted Chichester to the Irish command, acted as his protector ever after. He used lovingly dub him “poor Arthur,” but “poor Arthur’s” appeal against Hamilton made too large a draft on his power. Instead of procuring a fresh King’s Letter he evidently warned him to make terms with the royal favourite, for within a month the Deputy treated “the Scot” as a bosom friend. The Antrim Inquisition was then availed of, with the aid of the ductile Parsons, as the groundwork of an enormous grant to Hamilton, who arranged to hand over a large slice of the plunder to the Deputy. This dispensed Cecil from having to beseech James I. for another “Letter” for Chichester, and from that forth a working partnership was established between the Deputy and Hamilton. This alliance in ill-doing linked them for life. Backed by Davies, and with the help of the Lord Chancellor (Jones, Archbishop of Dublin—called that “rascal Jones” by Dean Swift), they organised a conspiracy to cheat the State unmatched in Anglo-Irish annals.

CHAPTER IV.
AN EVIL PARTNERSHIP.

The system applied by Chichester to hoodwink the Crown and defraud the subject went undetected for years. It consisted in availing of spent King’s Letters, and issuing Patents upon them afresh—in many cases to an extent enormously beyond the powers originally contemplated. In this way the Ulster fisheries were annexed; and equally lawless appropriations were made in nearly every county. Where fishings were concerned, the Deputy’s maw was insatiable. Until the Stuart era, Hugh O’Neill and Sir Randal MacDonnell largely controlled the Bann; O’Donnell and O’Doherty Lough Foyle; and Maguire Lough Erne. The Lagan had been included by Sir Arthur in his Patents of 1603-4; when his scriveners conferred on him a life-estate in Lough Neagh and the Bann, with the title of Admiral. Upon taking Hamilton into partnership he treated his own Patents for both the Lagan and Lough Neagh as worthless, and prepared fresh dispositions.

His old comrade, Captain Thomas Phillips, was commander of the fort at Toome (where the Bann issues from Lough Neagh), and had been allowed to become tenant of the fishery at Coleraine belonging to Sir Randal MacDonnell (afterwards Earl of Antrim). Sir Randal was brother-in-law of Hugh O’Neill, and had supported him in the war against Elizabeth. Chichester nourished an implacable hatred of MacDonnell and his clan, because in 1597 they defeated his brother, Sir John Chichester, and beheaded him. During O’Neill’s revolt he tried to get Sir James MacDonnell, Randal’s brother, poisoned; and used to write of Randal to Cecil as “MacSorley,” in order to recall the feud of his father, Sorley Bwee, with the Queen. The MacDonnells, as Lords of the Isles, were Scottish as well as Irish chieftains, and of old blood. King James was hardly six weeks on the united Thrones when he confirmed Sir Randal’s estate of 333,000 acres in County Antrim. This area MacDonnell occupied by ancient conquest; but the legal recognition of his ownership was hateful to Chichester, who planned to make the rival Scottish favourite the instrument of his revenge.

Hamilton, being a stranger, needed a backer in the North, and one having local knowledge. For this service Captain Phillips was well fitted, and his price had to be paid. At the outset the Deputy provided for it by stripping the Crown of stray escheats from the monks. Then, on the 20th July, 1605, he issued to Hamilton, under the Thomas Irelande Letter, a Patent for the Abbey of Coleraine, with the monastery fishing in the Bann. Along with this went much other spoil, lay and ecclesiastical, such as the Manor of Moygare, in Meath, with several rectories, tithes and manors in Kildare, Queen’s County, Down, and Antrim. The rent reserved to the Crown for this was only £54 1s. 1d., and Cecil was advised that Hamilton, on the 23rd September, 1605, had transferred to Captain Phillips the Abbey of Coleraine with the fishery. So splendid a gift was no small handsel from one who was himself entitled to receive only “the value of £100 a year.” It was intended as a “retainer” to Phillips to blood him for an intended attack on Sir Randal.

Though the tap of the “Half-Moon” had poured much wealth into Hamilton’s maw it left his thirst unslaked, and the exhausted warrant to John Wakeman, which had lain fallow for over a year, was next prepared for action. To employ it, the co-operation of Sir Richard Cooke, the Secretary of State, was needed, as, by a “power of attorney” from Wakeman in 1604, Cooke was entrusted to “sue out” grants under it on Devonshire’s behalf. Chichester feared to make use of Cooke. He wished for a more pliable nominee, who would consent to deceive the Lord Lieutenant as well as the King. Whether Wakeman agreed to this, or whether his name was abused, is uncertain; but an altered “power of attorney,” dated the 21st October, 1605, was put forth, purporting to have been executed by Wakeman, in which Mr. James Ware, Auditor for “martial causes,” figures instead of Cooke. No honest reason for such a change (inside a year) can be imagined; and by this means the Auditor, whose office was intended to check corruption, was enlisted for the corrupt obtainment of grants. Before availing of Ware’s help, the Deputy issued to Hamilton, on the 5th November, 1605, a Patent for Sir Con O’Neill’s estate—two thirds of which was afterwards reconveyed to Montgomery and its true owner. In this (as part of the process of mystification) was included a grant of “the whole fishing of the River Lagan,” which Chichester had snatched for himself in his Patents of 1603-4. He gave it to Hamilton only by way of conferring valid title to it on a stranger, intending subsequently to secure a transfer to himself. Thus one branch of the 1603-4 illegality was vested with seemly raiment.

At this time the Gunpowder Plot shook England, and emboldened in guile the officials entrusted with the administration of Ireland. Trumpeting a tale of Popish treason, the action of Guy Fawkes and his gang deafened the ears of the King to the complaints of Irish Catholics. Whatever lingering tenderness James might have retained for them the Plot whiffed away. The severe measures which it excused gave Chichester a larger command of power; and he used it to advance his grasping policy. Having the Auditor-General in his pocket, he soon prepared a dazzling stroke. The self-styled “Admiral,” who purported to have received in 1604 a life-estate in the fisheries of Lough Neagh and the Bann, gave them to Hamilton by Patent in derogation of his own rights, on the 14th February, 1606. Using the Thomas Irelande Letter as his authority, he presented “the Scot” with these coveted waters in fee simple, and included in the grant gigantic stretches of territory in Antrim, Down, Carlow, and Roscommon, as well as a couple of abbeys and the advowsons of half-a-dozen rectories. All was done in alleged compliance with a warrant entitling its possessor to £100 a year. A haul so comprehensive seldom weighted a single Patent. To-day it would be worth a million of money. No Inquisition warranted this, and there was nothing to show that the property belonged to the Crown, but by Parsons’ dexterity the Inquisition at Antrim of the 12th July, 1605, was made to serve as a shaky foundation for what was done, although the Commission authorising the inquiry confined it to the estate of Con O’Neill and to “concealed” lands to provide for Thomas Irelande’s £100. The Inquisition was then carefully tucked away, and lay in concealment nearly eighty years, while the Commission is defaced in a style unusual amongst the records of the period.

The inclusion in Hamilton’s Patent of Lough Neagh and the Bann exposes the hollowness of their pretenced donation for the Deputy’s life in 1604. Had Chichester’s Patent been a reality, why should he abandon them to Hamilton two years later without even paying the existence of his life-estate the compliment of a “recital” in the Inquisition over which his creature Parsons presided? It was the counterpart of his device as to the River Lagan which he at the same time made over to Hamilton with a like understanding as to its being reconveyed to himself with, as he hoped, a less infirm title.

The mystery of this multiplied munificence is soon told, for Chichester forthwith took a conveyance of the entire property from Hamilton without a blush. The assignment to him was not enrolled or published, and was kept a close secret. The system of privily transferring property had not yet been made illegal in Ireland, although in England, by the Statute of Uses, Henry VIII. forbade “covinous” or furtive parchments. Not until Strafford’s Viceroyalty, when Chichester’s malpractices stood partly revealed, was the wholesome English law applied to Ireland in 1634.

Having swallowed Lough Neagh and the Bann, with other huge expanses, the Deputy showed that he and his confederate were not men to make two bites of a cherry. The tidal fishing of the Bann remained ungrabbed; and to capture it the Auditor-General proved invaluable. This reach of the river stood “in charge” as Crown property in the books of the Exchequer; and was leased to Sir William Godolphin at £10 a year. As Wakeman’s attorney Ware immediately “sued out” a grant of the tidal fishery. The transfer was graciously sanctioned by the Deputy; and next day Ware made it over to Hamilton (3rd March, 1606).

The tidal Bann was officially described by Sir John Davies as Crown estate, and especially valuable. Yet the Auditor-General treated it as a trifle which an exhausted King’s Letter might smuggle to a stranger, with himself as conduit-pipe. By these expedients, Lough Neagh and the Bann (tidal and non-tidal) were made away with—so far as parchment and sealing-wax could do it. Ware was rewarded for his accommodating ways by sundry emoluments and perquisites, and was also graced with a knighthood.

His “power of attorney” was next availed of to generate a fresh litter of Patents as monstrous as those previously begotten on the spent Letter to Thomas Irelande. Ware knew, when Wakeman’s warrant was abused for the third time, that its efficacy was dead. He had been Auditor-General since the 6th September, 1603, and was empowered when appointed “to search the records in the Auditor’s office”; so he cannot have been ignorant of the bloated grants passed under it in 1604. He must also have felt, when Sir Richard Cooke was set aside within a year and himself substituted as a recipient, that the change portended a baleful purpose.

CHAPTER V.
A VICEROY’S LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT.

If any interest in Wakeman’s Letter lingered, grants under it would belong, not to Hamilton or Chichester, but to the Lord Lieutenant. That lovesick absentee was now on his honeymoon in England. He had of late mysteriously begun to fail in health; so his underlings thought some additional risk might be taken. That Wakeman was privy to cheating his master is hard to believe. Ware certainly was; and it is more than probable that the power of attorney, which purported to substitute him for Sir Richard Cooke, was a counterfeit. True, it was enrolled, but enrolments during the Stuart epoch, when forgery was a fine art, are not trustworthy. They can no more be accepted without corroboration as proof of the existence of genuine deeds than those of the Puritans. It is significant, too, that Cooke afterwards became one of the Deputy’s severest critics.

Vast as were the annexations so effected, the artificers remained unglutted. On the 13th March, 1606, they again plied the Thomas Irelande Letter, and a Patent was issued under it to Hamilton of lands in six counties—Meath, Queen’s, Wexford, Mayo, Galway, and Dublin. Four days later (17th March, 1606) by a fifth Patent, a few Westmeath castles were thrown in. On the 11th April, 1606, they shifted back to the Wakeman Letter; and by its potency Hamilton received a Patent of the Customs of Down and Antrim.

None of the Patents contains any recital showing how the property so granted was supposed to have come to the Crown. No right existed to confiscate lands without attainder (save those of the monasteries, which vested in the King by Statute). No great Ulster proprietor had then been attainted. To overleap this obstacle, the Deputy’s plan was first to declare the estates to be Hamilton’s by Patent, next to obtain an assignment to himself, and lastly to discover a pretext for hunting the native owners out of the country or out of the world.

On the 3rd April, 1606, a tragic event thrilled England and smote Ireland. It came as a portent athwart a troubled sky to both conquerors and conquered. On that day the Earl of Devonshire died; and his unlooked-for taking-off changed the course of history. The influence of the victor of Kinsale over a prostrate country was not without benignity. He restrained mere vengefulness after O’Neill’s surrender in 1603, and bent towardly on the defeated nobles. The new Court in London he despised, and, doubtless, ranked his long-descended antagonists in Ulster high above the rabble who infested Whitehall or “Tibbald’s” to importune scullions for writs to plunder.

Between 1603 and 1606 the absentee Lord Lieutenant advised the Privy Council on Irish affairs; and, by correspondence with his subordinates, loosely governed Ireland. He befriended Hugh O’Neill, and his death left the Earl without a protector at Court, where Chichester sought to instil poison against the Ulster lords, in order to forfeit their territories for his own benefit. Devonshire had, a few months before his death, gone through a form of marriage with Lady Rich, greatly to the King’s displeasure. The ceremony was performed by his chaplain, Laud—who afterwards perished on the scaffold under Charles I. as Archbishop. Devonshire’s will (signed the day before he died) shows plainly that he was party to the unmiraculous multiplication of loaves and fishes by the Patent-mongers.

The frame of the will (a long Latin document) makes it evident that he was ignorant of the giving of the power-of-attorney by Wakeman to Auditor Ware to enable Hamilton to annex the tidal Bann. One of the executors, Sir William Godolphin, was the lessee of that fishery from the Crown under a demise made during the rebellion in 1600; and he would hardly have kept silent had he learnt of the making of a grant which might affect his lease. The will appointed John Wakeman and John King “trustees” to enable Lady Rich to receive “the residue” of grants to which they were entitled under the King’s Letter, though that was already long exhausted. This was an ugly disclosure to appear in the hurried will of a dying Statesman, for it made plain that the intent of the King’s Letter to recoup “money paid to an ancient and well-deserving servant in Scotland” was a mere device to benefit the Lord Lieutenant. The appointment of Cecil as one of the executors revealed the fact that the Secretary of State was also in the secret.

Other Court nobles, including Lord Southampton, the patron of Shakespeare, were named executors, and were thus saddled with notice that the Royal revenues had been made away with, and were to be further embezzled for a misliked woman. Yet they made no protest and asked no questions. This put them all in Chichester’s power, and emboldened him in depredation. On the 25th April, 1606, he wrote to Cecil praying that his letters to the late Lord Lieutenant should not be allowed to fall into the hands of any other member of the Privy Council; and that “all my papers” in the dead man’s drawers should be taken up by Cecil. This was treating the Secretary of State on the footing of an accomplice, and Devonshire as a fellow-culprit.

Even the Earl’s widow became the victim of Chichester’s rapine. Bequeathed everything springing from the Royal Letters to John Wakeman and John King, she received nothing after her husband’s death. Being out of favour at Court because of her divorce and re-marriage, Lady Rich was further prejudiced by the fact that Devonshire’s estate-broking had been furtive and illicit. The Deputy availed of this to divert the profits from her into his own pocket. Every official knew that the King’s Letters mentioned in the will were over-spent, but Devonshire fondly supposed he could rely on them to create grants for her benefit. Chichester tricked the widow, as he had tricked the husband; and kept everything for himself. He even used the death of his patron to saddle him with abuses committed in his own interest.

In Chichester’s earlier dispatches after Devonshire’s death no coarse suggestion of confiscation directed against the estates of the Ulster lords appears. Ostensibly his sole concern was lest the chiefs (who, as O’Neill complained, could not quaff a cup of wine without chronicles of carouse being sent up by spies to Dublin Castle) should suddenly amass force to overwhelm the might of England. His dispatches are worded to suggest that he could hardly sleep o’ nights in his alarmed loyalty for the safety of the kingdom. Diurnally by post he trembled lest scathe should befall the interests of the princely Scotchman whom he loved. He reported everyone who had anything to lose by treason, as hourly engaged in plotting against a benign Sovereign—with a view to pocketing the escheats.

CHAPTER VI.
THE ULSTER LORDS.

Hugh O’Neill owned in fee the counties now styled Derry and Tyrone, with parts of Armagh and Monaghan. In Elizabeth’s reign he tried, after defeating her troops, to bring in King James as Monarch of Ireland; but, when the Scottish ruler came to lawful sway over the Three Kingdoms, the Earl was discerned by Chichester to be an ingrate traitor. O’Neill had just got back his lands by Royal orders after much travail, and had received proof of the clemency of the new King. He was over sixty years of age, and war-worn after a nine years’ campaign. Many of his own clan hated him. Yet he was supposed to harbour fierce designs of “rising out” against the son of Mary Stuart, who had re-invested him in his earldom and estate, and to whom he lent money freely. A sheriff’s report on his position tells of his weakness, and was thought so important that Sir George Carew made a copy with his own hand:—

“There are certain kindred or septs of the Neales in divers parts of Tyrone, which ever did, and still do, as much as in them lieth, oppose both against Tyrone and all those of his proper sept and party: namely, in the Barony of Strabane, Tirlogh Oge O’Neale, son to Sir Arthur, and all his followers and dependents, as well of the Neales as of the Quins, and likewise of divers other septs on the side of Sluagh Shees. Also in the Barony of Omagh, all that sept of the Neales called the Sluagh Arts do deadly hate Tyrone’s sept. And likewise in the Barony of Clogher are two other distinct septs of the Neales, who hate Tyrone and his sept—one of which septs are the sons of Shane O’Neale and their followers.”

How, then, could the weary and beaten head of a sundered clan be engaged in compassing rebellion against a kingly benefactor? The Deputy, to make his insinuations more plausible, called in aid religious prejudices. In an owner so extensive as the Chieftain of Tyrone, Popish superstition must needs lie at the root of Celtic malice, and Chichester wrought much on that string. O’Neill, however, had married a Protestant and accepted the blessing of Bishop Jones, the new-fangled prelate of Meath, when he wedded the sister of the English Marshal Bagenal. He had been brought up at Elizabeth’s Court, and was once taunted by the Earl of Essex that “he cared no more for religion than his horse.” He attended the Deputy at a Protestant service, when Catholic Palesmen would go no further than the door. He supplied beeves for the royal garrisons in Ulster; readily came up to Councils in Dublin Castle when summoned, accepted the King’s Sheriffs, and comported himself submissively as a country gentleman. Chichester even certified that he hanged an unruly nephew who broke the peace in Tyrone; but this was invented merely to show what an unnatural person he was. True or false, the story did not support the suspicion of disloyalty. O’Neill’s enormous estate alone gave ground for ranking him with traitors.

Adjoining Tyrone lay the territories of O’Donnell, Earl of Tirconnell, who had been O’Neill’s ally in the wars. The fisheries of Lough Foyle were almost as valuable as those of the Bann; and naturally O’Donnell also fell under the Deputy’s displeasure. Another ex-rebel, Lord Maguire, owned Fermanagh and swept Lough Erne. There were sub-chiefs besides, equally obnoxious by reason of their possessions. That such owners, who, despite their fluent Latin and Shakesperian English, used the Irish tongue and practised Popery, should be allowed to breathe in their own land was an evident danger to the State. Wherefore Chichester poured into the King’s ear, via Cecil, the leprous distilment of his greed. No overt act could be suggested against the Ulster lords. Their circumspection, after being pardoned and reinstated, was proportioned to their knowledge of the Deputy’s unscrupulousness. Chichester boasted that a dog could not bark in the North without his hearing of it, and this was not mere brag. Sheriffs, under-sheriffs, escheators, inquisitors, surveyors, mapsmen, tax-collectors, and tithe-collectors infested the Province. Kinsmen of the beaten chiefs who, in the hope of sharing their estates, had taken the English side, were watchful correspondents of Dublin Castle. When James succeeded Elizabeth, her officers in local forts supplied the necessary rumours of warlike preparations or Spanish descents for London consumption to further the plans of the landsharks.

Once Chichester was firm in the saddle he resolved, a month after Hamilton conveyed to him the fisheries and territories under the Patent of the 14th February, 1606, to take over also from him one-fourth of the tidal Bann. This he did by assignment of the 14th March, 1606. The “fourth” belonged to Sir Randal MacDonnell, under a Patent of 1603; and the Deputy spent himself in expedients to secure a colour of title for it. He kept the transfer secret until he could invent a device for “legally” relieving MacDonnell of his rights and set on Hamilton, with the help of Captain Phillips, to assail Sir Randal’s Patent by a suit in the “Castle Chamber” before himself. All this was done within three years of the grants to O’Neill and MacDonnell, when they must have been fresh in the mind of every official.

The Bann Patents to “the Scot” (under way to Chichester) wronged one or more of at least four persons. On the Antrim side the river belonged partly to Sir Randal MacDonnell and partly to the Bishop of Down and Connor; on the Derry side to the Bishop of Derry and Hugh O’Neill. The fishing rights of the Bishops were so well-established that when the Reverend George Montgomery received the See of Derry later on, his share in the Bann was admitted by the Deputy, in spite of the adverse Patents he had sanctioned. These grants, therefore, transferred the property of two Bishops and two chieftains to a Scotch interloper on a spent warrant by a secret process. To prevent the facts being unravelled, they were complicated by a tangle of technicality.

Throughout the first half of Sir Arthur’s sway, Cecil was Secretary of State. While he lived the Deputy’s position was unshakable. Chichester called him his “saint,” and reverently worshipped at his shrine. Still, even the hunchback saint’s protection could not wholly screen him from danger. He knew that the underground Patents were mere parchment so long as the true owners were left in possession of their domains. To assert them publicly, when no legal forfeiture or escheat had taken place, would give rise to scandal. An appeal to the King must ensue, and the exposure might end in disaster. He, therefore, resolved to fasten the brand of “traitor” on those whose title he had sapped by subterranean conveyances.

An ecclesiastical accomplice was convenient for this work, in view of the “flagrant zeal” for Protestantism affected by James I. Hamilton had helped to get promotion for the Reverend George Montgomery—with whose brother he had partitioned Sir Con O’Neill’s estate. That divine was advanced from a Court chaplaincy to the See of Derry, but was loath to risk himself in a troubled diocese. For this he was chidden by Attorney-General Davies, who wished him to come over and preach the Gospel to the clans and chiefs in course of despoilment, so that their distresses might be cheered by the consolations of the new evangel. Three years flew by before the prelate could be persuaded to venture into Erin. When he came he began his mission by a severe survey of the temporalities of the diocese. The richest part of it, the City of Derry, was a gift from the O’Dohertys to Queen Elizabeth, but it also included large areas within O’Neill’s jurisdiction. The devoted Bishop was, therefore, set on to dispute with the Earl the nature and extent of the Church lands in his See. These having heretofore been dedicated to Catholic uses, it is possible that O’Neill was not speedy enough in handing them over to help the spread of Lutheranism.

Nor was the business free from local complications. Before County Derry was shired, it formed part of Tyrone, but lay under the chiefry of the O’Cahans. That sept paid tribute to the O’Neills; and Bishop Montgomery soon learnt of Sir Donal O’Cahan’s desire to be freed from contribution to the Earl of Tyrone. O’Cahan was married to O’Neill’s sister, and had joined him in the wars; but Chichester and Docwra, to end the struggle, tempted him to take the Queen’s side by a promise to relieve him from tribute to O’Neill and grant him his lands in fee simple.

O’Cahan’s acceptance of this offer, and the breach of the bargain, led to consequences that have furrowed deep tracks in Ulster history. Hardly had the compact between him and Docwra in 1602 been concluded than O’Neill was also persuaded to cease insurgency. The Earl yielded upon a guarantee that his estate should be restored intact, and thus the undertakings to chief and sub-chief were wholly repugnant to one another. The treaty with O’Neill was signed on behalf of the Crown, that with O’Cahan on behalf of Chichester. State policy compelled the breach of one or other. For, when Elizabeth lay dying in March, 1603, the Lord Lieutenant thought it good to promise O’Neill pardon ere the Scotch King, with whom the Irish were in amity, ascended the united Thrones. O’Neill accepted conditions, knowing of the offer to O’Cahan, but not of the Queen’s death-sickness. He refused at first to parley, because a re-grant of his territory with undiminished rights was denied. The Lord Lieutenant, though loath to concede such terms, feared that, if the news of the accession of James I. reached Ulster before peace was concluded, O’Neill would surrender voluntarily, and so win grace with the new King. He, therefore, ordered Sir Garrett Moore and Sir William Godolphin to confer a second time with him, and to agree to all he asked. A treaty embodying the bargain was signed at Mellifont; and, when O’Neill afterwards visited England, a King’s Letter for Tyrone was handed to him. He returned in triumph in September, 1603, having had all his claims and those of his family honourably met at Court.

Naturally O’Cahan chafed at the breach of faith with himself; but, for the three years during which Devonshire survived, the arrangement with O’Neill—in spite of protests by Chichester—was respected. The death of Devonshire wrought a complete change of spirit. The new Deputy encouraged Montgomery to support O’Cahan, in order to curb O’Neill’s power and clip his acres. The Bishop first stipulated with Sir Donal that the Church should enjoy such lands as he selected in Derry, and then promised that O’Neill’s suzerainty, with its burdensome tribute of £200 a year, should be done away with. In edifying epistles to Cecil the prelate enlarged on the advantage which would accrue to religion from this scheme, and he backed up O’Cahan in his refusal to pay rent to O’Neill. The contract between the overlord and his vassal had been written down by the Brehons in clear Gaelic; but at Devonshire’s death O’Cahan disowned it, hoping to revive his peace-treaty with Chichester. Little did Sir Donal suspect that both Deputy and Bishop were using him as a pawn, or foresee the dire results that were to follow from his upsetting the decree of the Brehons.

CHAPTER VII.
CHIEFTAIN AND VASSAL.

O’Neill, seeing his brother-in-law fall under evil influences, tried to enforce payment of his rent by “distress.” In 1606 he resumed possession from O’Cahan of the fishery of the Bann, and took a prey of his cattle. This dispute was greedily welcomed by the enemies of the chiefs. O’Cahan lodged a protest with “the State” against the seizures; and O’Neill, although the King gave him sovereign control in his territory, was cited to appear before the Privy Council in Dublin to answer Sir Donal’s complaint. A splendid opening for the spread of the Gospel loomed in sight of the “reformers.”

When the case came on the Deputy majestically presided over the Council as supreme judge. The suit concerned a river for which, a year earlier, he issued a Patent to Hamilton, and then had it conveyed to himself. Montgomery attended the trial to give it a spiritual solemnity and support O’Cahan. Without at first entering deeply into the merits, Chichester—to gain time to prejudice the King—ordered O’Cahan to send in a formal petition and O’Neill to lodge a written reply. He then appointed the Attorney-General (Davies) and the Solicitor-General (Jacob) to act as counsel for O’Cahan, and adjourned the trial for a month. O’Neill, bereft of legal assistance, was left to his own devices. Before the next hearing Davies sent a report on the case to Cecil. He threw out that O’Neill’s Patent was bad, but spared mention of the fact that a petition for its amendment had been rejected on his advice—although in other cases “defective title” was cured for the asking. Nor did the Attorney-General relate that the Bann had been seized by the Deputy, or that he sat, and would again sit, to try the title to its waters without informing the litigants that he held spurious Patents for it in his pocket.

In June, 1607, the Court re-assembled in Dublin Castle, and Davies at once raised objections to O’Neill’s grant. He argued that, notwithstanding the treaty of Mellifont, “Tyrone” did not include “O’Cahan’s Country”: and, therefore, that the Earl’s seizures from his vassal were unlawful. As no map was attached to the Patent (which embraced several counties) it was easy to wrangle over boundaries. The Deputy and his confederates patiently listened to the Attorney-General. They thought his contention ingenious; although it was marred by the blot that its logic required a decision in O’Cahan’s favour. This would no more have suited than a victory for O’Neill. Sir Donal had served his turn. Davies, therefore, also argued that the Earl’s Patent was altogether bad. True, he was the lawful heir to Tyrone under a prior Patent to his grandfather, Con, from Henry VIII.; but that did not count, for had he not risen in rebellion against Elizabeth? His subsequent pardon by King James without attainder was not to be made too much of; and Davies rattled on by the hour berating the fallen chief. Chichester gloated over his victim’s plight; chid him betimes when he exploded against his adversary; and in the end gave judgment against both of them. This feat was unexpected by Sir Donal, but the decree was ingenious. It ran:—“Upon examination of the whole matter, it seemed to them that the right to that country still remaineth in his Majesty.” In other words, the Treaty of Mellifont was broken, and O’Neill’s Patent was declared void. Punic faith was honour bright with Sir Arthur Chichester.

A trap was then laid for the Earl by a proviso that, until his Majesty’s pleasure should be signified, O’Cahan was to have two-thirds of the lands, and the Earl one-third, but that meanwhile O’Neill was to repair to London before the following November, to await the Sovereign’s pleasure. As to the Bann, the decree was marvellously mute. Davies wrote to prepare Cecil for his victim’s visit, and make up the King’s conscience. His falsehoods, dated 1st July, 1607, were plenary:—“Plainly neither of them hath any title. It is now, and ever hath been, vested in the actual possession of the Crown since the 11th Elizabeth. Howbeit, the land lying in those remote parts, the ignorance and negligence of officers was such that it was never brought into charge.” All this, four years after the Patent of 1603, and the pardon from James I. which alone would have revived his rights (as grandson of Con O’Neill) under the Patent of Henry VIII.

After such a trial O’Neill felt that the command to proceed to London covered a plot to get rid of him altogether. London held a grim keep called the Tower, familiar to the owners of Irish estates, whither scores of chieftains had been lured aforetime. His experience disinclined him to make the pilgrimage. He knew that the Deputy had clouded the King’s mind with suspicions as to his loyalty, and he brooded over some earlier essays to compass his assassination. The dungeon or the scaffold was, he feared, to end the trip to Court. An estate so unwholesomely extensive as his forbade much hope of justice. The partition of Sir Con O’Neill’s patrimony in Claneboy was not two years old, and the alliance between Hamilton, who contrived it, and the Deputy, who abetted it, remained in full force. The Earl, therefore, came to the conclusion that he was a doomed man, whether he went to London or whether he remained at home. He took counsel at Mellifont with Sir Garret Moore (who had persuaded him to sign the treaty of 1603), and resolved to go into exile. Then he bade farewell to Moore, and having also taken leave of the Deputy at Slane, O’Neill, in September, 1607, sailed for France from Rathmullen, with Maguire, Lord of Fermanagh, O’Donnell, Earl of Tirconnell, and their kinsfolk. Such was the terror of Chichester that they were denied water for their ship in one creek in Donegal.

Bards and Brehons have lamented that these Gaelic lords did not hold their ground. Their critics have not explained whether the Earl of Tyrone should have gone to London and risked being mewed up in the Tower, or have disobeyed the order and resisted arrest without an army to back him. The victim himself, living and acting in days when he could measure and appreciate the consequences of obedience or revolt, decided on flight. It may not have been a heroic course, but it was a decision taken by a seasoned captain, who had faced death on a score of battlefields, and whose deeds of daring still rang throughout Europe.

CHAPTER VIII.
UPROOTING THE NOBLES.

Chichester had a second plan in reserve to undo O’Neill in case his London plot should miscarry. One of his creatures called Weston, whom he employed as a collector or farmer of “fines and amerciaments,” claimed to hold a mortgage on the Earl’s fisheries in the Bann and on those of O’Donnell in Lough Foyle. The Attorney-General certified that O’Donnell had “suffered a recovery” in a suit against him by Weston in 1605. O’Cahan was also registered as being in Weston’s toils. The Deputy’s reckoning was that, if the design to send O’Neill to the Tower failed, he could decree a foreclosure of his estate, or at least of the fisheries. The news of the Flight of the Earls reached him as unlooked-for good tidings. At one blow the great Ulster chiefs were got rid of, and with them away the lesser thanes could easily be dispatched or despoiled.

O’Cahan was the first of the remnant to taste the fruit of the downfall of Gaelic power which he so largely brought about. Instead of reaping the fulfilment of the hope that his bargain of 1602 would be carried out, Sir Donal was seized by Captain Phillips and, without cause assigned or pretence of trial, was lodged in Dublin Castle, and thence transported to the Tower. There he was kept a close prisoner till his death twenty years later. His treachery to O’Neill met its reward in the only sterling current at Chichester’s mint.

Other native aids of the Deputy were similarly guerdoned. Queen Elizabeth had no sturdier ally in Ulster than Niall Garve O’Donnell. In the belief that he would be rewarded with the chieftaincy of Tirconnell he gave her precious and constant help. When peace came Niall expected a Patent, but the royal pardon to the Earls forbade such a hope. Some years later he applied for a grant of the fishery of Lough Foyle as part of his inheritance. To make him this award would have been but a stunted acknowledgment of his loyalty, but Chichester had now seized that prize for himself. Hamilton was advanced from Tyrone to Donegal and put in possession when the Earls fled. So the Deputy, on the 22nd May, 1608, suavely replied to Niall Garve:—

“You shall have all the fishing which is the King’s on the Tirconnell side, and you may make use of it for this season; but what belongs to private men, as Mr. Hamilton and others, we cannot take from them without agreeing with them, which you may do if you desire it for your profit.”

This, of course, was mere byplay, and in a few months Niall Garve discovered that, as the Tower was so convenient for the caging of O’Cahan, he, too, was to be similarly housed. Blameless of aught against the State save the wish to have a living in his own glens, the Queen’s O’Donnell was arrested and deported to London. With him went his son, Naghten, and his two brothers. Everything was done quietly, without trial, charge, indictment, or legal parade. There was no scandal—not even a court martial. Niall Garve and his son, like O’Cahan, spent the rest of their lives in the Tower. His brothers, when the Plantation was complete, were set free, only to find on reaching their native shore that their lands were partitioned among strangers.

In the Tower with O’Cahan and O’Donnell was lodged Sir Cormac O’Neill of Augher Castle, Tyrone, a brother of the fugitive. His crime was that he was the first to inform the Deputy of the Earl’s departure and ask for a “custodium” of his estate while he was away. Sir Cormac was married to Red Hugh O’Donnell’s sister, and as the kinsman of suspects he, too, was deported to London and perished in the Tower. Before the Earl’s flight Chichester had hanged the most brilliant of the young O’Neills, Brian Art, for killing in self-defence a brawler who assaulted him. The humbled Tyrone vainly offered ransom for his kinsman (a brother of Owen Roe), whom he loved, but the Deputy’s justice was the greatest of all his works. So the youth was slain according to law.

This left few notables in the North. Young Sir Cahir O’Doherty, with his taking carriage, was an eyesore for a short time, but he was hunted down and killed without undue commotion. O’Doherty had been brought up by the English, to whom his father presented the site of Derry City. His Patent from King James in 1603 confirmed an arrangement made by Sir John O’Doherty with Queen Elizabeth, whereby in time of war his castle of Culmore, with 300 acres and the fishery of Lough Foyle, should be reserved to the Crown. Chichester took advantage of Sir Cahir’s youth to appoint in time of peace a crony, Captain Hart, Governor of Culmore. In further breach of treaty he gave Hart a “custodium” (or lease) of the castle in 1606, with its 300 acres and the fishery, at 10s. a year for 21 years. This faithless act he turned to his own advantage two years later. In October, 1607, O’Doherty was made foreman of the Grand Jury at Lifford to find the true bill which declared Hugh O’Neill an “outlaw” for the crime of quitting Ireland. Sir Cahir was thanked by King James for this service; but in May, 1608, on visiting Sir George Paulett, the Governor of Derry, about his private affairs, occasion was taken to insult him. The high-mettled stripling resented the affront, whereupon Paulett struck him before the soldiery. Stung to madness, Sir Cahir sought his kinsmen and flew to arms. He attacked Culmore, took Hart prisoner, burnt Derry, and slew Paulett. In July, 1608, he was himself killed by the forces which the Deputy held in readiness.

Chichester’s breach of trust as to Culmore then bore fruit. Hart was sent to London to excuse himself for yielding up the castle, and was removed from the Governorship. To console him he received an adequate scope of ground elsewhere, but the transfer of his “custodium” to the Deputy underlay the exchange. Chichester took possession of Culmore, with its lands and fishery—as, by a like transfer of a “custodium” held by Sir Ralph Lane in 1603 he acquired a Patent for the castle and lands of Belfast. He dispatched Davies to London to crave a grant of O’Doherty’s territory, although Innishowen or Culmore was not the King’s, but the clan’s. James I. “granted” him Innishowen, with its fourteen castles; but in his Patent reserved Culmore to the Crown with the 300 acres and the fishery.

This the Deputy resented, and he removed the blot in his own staunch way. The assignment of Culmore from Hart lay in his coffers, and he applied it to defraud his Majesty of everything the King reserved. In spite of the restraints of the Patent, he brazenly held himself out as the owner of whatever appertained to the O’Dohertys. Their coveted fishery he at once got into his clutches, and it was only rescued later on by the payment of heavy compensation from the Crown. Davies, who had just been knighted for his share in browbeating and banishing Hugh O’Neill, abetted his patrons’ misdeeds.

In circumventing limitations in his own Patents and discovering flaws in those of others there was no such artist as Chichester.

CHAPTER IX.
WAR’S AFTERMATH.

O’Doherty’s destruction, coupled with the imprisonment of O’Cahan, Sir Cormac O’Neill, and Niall Garve O’Donnell, filled up the cup of Chichester’s happiness. The few difficulties remaining in his way in Ulster were easily adjusted. A degenerate Maguire skulked in Fermanagh; but what of him? Having opposed his clan in the war he was promised their seigneuries. When peace came Conor Roe Maguire tasted the common lot of recreants, and found himself bereft of every acre by the Deputy, save a petty ploughland. Such was “the State’s” ingratitude that, among British settlers, an outcry was provoked against the faithlessness of their rulers towards him. A Letter of James I. guaranteed Maguire the entire County Fermanagh. Before that, on 29th July, 1602, the then Deputy wrote to the Privy Council that Queen Elizabeth “hath given the chiefry of the country of Fermanagh” to Connor Roe Maguire, but in a flash the planters carved it up among themselves.

Sir Oghy O’Hanlon owned the Barony of Orier in County Armagh, and had always taken the English side. His son married the sister of Sir Cahir O’Doherty, and had joined in his outbreak. Sir Oghy was deprived of his property and given a pension of thirty shillings a week to thrive upon. His son was shipped to Sweden, where wars were toward.

In Cavan the scion of the O’Reillys was a minor, and naturally his lands were seized by “the State.” His grandfather, Sir John O’Reilly, fell on the English side at the Battle of the Yellow Ford, fighting against Hugh O’Neill. His mother was one of the Ormonde family, who never swerved in loyalty to the Crown. Accordingly the Deputy applotted young O’Reilly out of his estate as much soil as was allowed to any English ploughman who “planted” in Cavan. The purge of the Irishry in Ulster was thereby consummated.

The entire North now lay chieftainless. All that was left of its chivalry was represented by the Antrim Scoto-Irishman, Sir Randal MacDonnell. He was the King’s friend and hawk-purveyor, and the story of his persecution must be separately told.

Meanwhile Hugh O’Neill and his fellow-refugees were tracked through Europe by calumniators and assassins. A Proclamation issued by James I. imputed that they were base of birth, so as to lower their credit in the eyes of the Continental grandees who offered them hospitality. Spies dogged their footsteps while they lived, and when they died their heirs were strangled or poisoned wherever they could be trapped. At home their countrymen cowered in helpless humiliation. The native swordsmen were disarmed or deported to Sweden or Poland.

Sheriffs and escheators, who were merely licensed freebooters seeking what they might devour, quartered themselves on the country. The fields of the husbandmen were ravaged; the poor were without bread. Monks were cloisterless; priests churchless; harpers without a hall. The only requiem for the dead was the howl of the wolf. Official prelates and clergy, unmindful of duty to God or man, installed themselves in ancient fanes, and the echo of the stranger’s ritual in a strange tongue disturbed the slumber of the saints.

The upkeep of the discowled apostate or the Lutheran upstart was cast upon the clansmen who spurned their worship. Evil-livers like Miler Magrath, “Archbishop” of Cashel, or his mates from overseas, diverted to their pleasure the incomes which the ancient Church held in trust for the poor. Few of the imported divines could explain to a nation whose speech they scorned their message from on High. The gift of tongues was slow to descend on them.

Ecclesiastics who had escaped captivity or the sword, took to the hills or went into exile. The handful who apostatised were the scorn alike of the invader and the native. The gentry whose lands were forfeited in the cause of “Gospel extension” became “recusants,” for did they not reject the doctrine that they should be rooted out like the Amalekites or Jebusites? Queen Elizabeth had made a gift to the earlier missioners of a fount of Gaelic type, but the fund was embezzled. So Chichester ordered the Book of Common Prayer to be done into Irish; but disbelievers failed to recognise in him another Patrick. Order was taken that the Brehons, who treasured the roll of the mensal dues paid by each chieftain to the priests, should yield up their crumpled parchments at Assizes so that the tribute to the ancient Church might be earmarked as “tithe” for the new “Establishment.”

The Deputy assisted at these soulful inquiries, and blended delicately a spiritual jurisdiction with what was worldly. Who so zealous in the Lord as he, if advancing godliness assisted confiscation? Davies’ account of their progress in the North might serve in part as a model for the diary of Anti-Christ. It notes with wonder that, at this zero-point of national desolation, “all the common people have a whining tone or accent in their speech, as if they did still smart or suffer some oppression.” Other breeds of men, of course, would have waxed merry at the sight of the intruder enriching himself at the expense of their nobles, settling down cosily in their pleasaunces, seizing their churches, defiling their monasteries, corrupting their Courts, and becoming master of the fields, woods, and waters which had come down to them from countless generations.

The ancient code of justice, which the Brehons had administered for over a thousand years, was judicially decided to be “a lewd and barbarous custom.” The fictions of “John Doe” and “Richard Roe,” with all the follies of the feudal law, were set up in its place—to connote the higher civilisation. It was under a Scottish King that the absurdities and cruelties of the English Common Law were forced on Ireland, though the Scottish nation refused to adopt it. The Brehons as judges were in character and training far above the importations who administered the new system. In the native mind the stranger’s zeal for equity ranked with that of the new clergy for the religion to which they were asked to conform.

Spenser’s “View of Ireland” draws this contrast:—

“Wherein it is great wonder to see the odds which is between the zeal of Popish priests and the ministers of the Gospel; for they spare not to come out of Spain, from Rome, and from Rheims, by long toil and dangerous travelling hither, where they know peril of death awaiteth them, and no reward or riches is to be found, only to draw the people into the Church of Rome. Whereas some of our idle ministers, having a way for credit and estimation thereby opened unto them, and having the livings of the country offered unto them without pain and without peril, will neither for the same nor any love of God, nor zeal of religion, nor for all the good they may do by winning souls to God, be drawn forth from their warm nests to look out into God’s harvest, which is even ready for the sickle and all the fields yellow long ago. Doubtless those good old godly Fathers will (I fear me) rise up in the Day of Judgment to condemn them.”

Thirty years later Charles I., in a letter (written with his own hand) to the Irish Protestant Archbishops, complained that “the clergy of Ireland are apt to be careless of God’s service and their own honour.” One of his officials, Sir John Bingley, described them in March, 1629, as “a set of very profane and drunken fellows.” Sogarth aroon!

CHAPTER X.
THE HARRYING OF SIR RANDAL.

To complete the uprooting of the Ulster chiefs, an onslaught on Sir Randal MacDonnell was undertaken. The persecution of the other chieftains might be palliated by the plea of political necessity; but, with the passing of Elizabeth, no such excuse in MacDonnell’s case existed. He, like O’Cahan, had been induced by Chichester to forsake O’Neill in 1602, and the surrender at Mellifont was largely brought about by this desertion. His loyalty to James I. as a Scottish noble was undoubted, but for full seven years he was pursued by the malice of the Deputy, who thwarted the King’s wishes in his regard, to feed a personal grudge and win private profit. This vendetta ended in Chichester’s occupying the judgment seat to decide the title to Sir Randal’s fishery, after he had secretly grabbed it for himself.

MacDonnell’s Patent was the first issued by James on becoming King of Ireland in 1603. It was a favour shown to Randal as the Scoto-Irish Lord of the Isles, and the brother-in-law of Hugh O’Neill. It confirmed to him 333,907 acres in Antrim—an enormous estate—but reserved to the Crown three-fourths of the tidal fishery of the Bann. This grant (dated 6th July, 1603) was distasteful to the hungry Captains avid for spoil, and cavil was raised against it from the outset.

To meet opposition, Sir Randal obtained a second King’s Letter, instructing Deputy Cary to issue an amended Patent. Cary was slow in his obedience, and was recalled before complying. Chichester, on succeeding him, ignored the royal order altogether. He had forged for himself a life-estate in the Bann and Lough Neagh, by “amplifying” his Patents, and astutely worked to prevent recognition being given to the title of any legitimate owner. Delay drove MacDonnell to apply for a third King’s Letter, and James I. signed this in April, 1606. Chichester’s hand was thereby forced; but—nimble in resource—he dispatched Hamilton to London to crave permission to stay the Patent. He wrote to Cecil in June, 1606: “Sir Randal MacDonnell is neither faithful nor obedient ... as Mr. Hamilton can at large inform you.”

The pair who had fraudulently conveyed to themselves the entire Bann (tidal and non-tidal) with Lough Neagh, on the 14th February and 3rd March, 1606, now battled fiercely to block the making of a genuine grant to Randal. They failed, however, for, such was the King’s liking towards his Scoto-Irish liegeman, that MacDonnell, who travelled to London to checkmate the intrigue, returned triumphant with the royal warrant. The baffled Deputy was compelled to issue the amended Patent in July, 1606. Still he was not to be baulked, and cast about for a new expedient to undo the King’s will. Hot foot, he set on Hamilton to bring a suit before himself in the Privy Council, and allege a prior title in the Bann to that of Sir Randal. In this litigation the validity of the fishery grant was disputed; and Davies was enlisted to assail the Patent on that point. A trio such as Chichester, Hamilton, and Davies was not easy to match; and in legal jousting they easily outpointed the Lord of the Isles.

Bringing on the case in Randal’s absence, the Deputy, who had previously acted as judge in the trial of O’Cahan v. O’Neill, where his own claim to the Bann underlay the action, bettered that shameful precedent. Judicially weighing Hamilton’s “rights,” but without hearing the other side, he decided that MacDonnell’s “fourth” of the Bann should be put in sequestration “pending a suit at law”; and he appointed his henchman, Captain Phillips, Receiver over the profits. MacDonnell was then in London, and only learnt of the sequestration on reaching Ireland. Straightway upon his return he sent this protest to Cecil:—

“Upon my arrival I found myself dispossessed of the fourth part of the fishery of the Bann, which his Majesty was pleased to grant me by Patent, being the best stay of my living. This was wrought by means of one Mr. James Hamilton, who, searching and prying curiously into my Patent (as he doth into many other men’s estates), seeks to take advantage upon words and other sly causes, thereby to void my interest and to pass it to himself, upon other men’s grants, which he hath purchased.”

He added that Hamilton was abetted by Captain Phillips, who had been his own tenant of the fishing; and that they had laid two informations against him in the Star Chamber. He, therefore, begged Cecil to write to the Deputy “not to be a partial judge betwixt me and those that take my fishing from me.” Little did he know that Hamilton was only a stalking-horse for the Deputy, who, two months before, had taken a conveyance of his fishery.

Chichester, in a letter to Cecil of the 12th September, 1606, tried to blunt Randal’s complaint by slandering his victim anew. “There is not a more cankered and malicious person than Sir Randal MacDonnell, who from a beggar is made great, and yet rests unthankful.” His report, during O’Neill’s rebellion in 1601, belied the story of the “thankless beggar made great,” for Sir Arthur then certified that “Randal and O’Cahan are two of the richest and strongest adherents of Tyrone.” MacDonnell’s Patent merely gave him what his ancestors had held through several reigns, and, on an appeal to the King, the sequestration was quashed.

The Deputy, however, returned to the attack. On the 2nd April, 1607, he procured a King’s Letter reciting:—“Sir Randal’s followers having riotously asserted his right to the fourth part of the fishing of the Bann, and having by surprise obtained King’s Letters dissolving the sequestration of said fishings made by the Deputy and Council pending a suit at law, the sequestration is to be re-imposed until the suit at law be determined.” This missive arrived in Dublin just as O’Cahan’s petition against O’Neill was being heard in the Castle Chamber. Taught by the treatment meted out to his brother-in-law, MacDonnell realised that, if he submitted himself to this tribunal, he was lost. Being not only an Irish, but a Scottish chieftain, he wielded influence at Court which the Earl of Tyrone could not command, and was less afraid to trust himself there. So he faced for London a third time, and again urged and won his suit before the King. A warrant from his Majesty announced his victory on the 22nd August, 1607, and commanded Chichester “to dissolve the sequestration of the Bann and to take order that Sir Randal MacDonnell should enjoy his portion of it.”

The decision would have worked a complete overthrow of the Star Chamberers but for an unexpected turn in affairs. In September, 1607, the Flight of the Earls startled the kingdom and threw supreme power into Chichester’s hands. The event was revolutionary, and the confiscation of Ulster was its consequence.

With the knowledge that a Plantation was resolved on, the Deputy, on the 13th January, 1608, raised anew the question of Sir Randal’s “fourth.” He coolly referred to it in a letter to Cecil as “the case in controversy between Sir Randal MacDonnell and Mr. James Hamilton, concerning the fourth part of the fishery of the Bann, sometime debated before me, and order thereupon made by myself and the Council.” He went on to announce that he had “caused the King’s learned counsel here to draw the case according to the records,” and was sending it to London for the information of the Privy Council.

This admission that he had acted as judge in the action might seem to show candour, but no one then was aware that MacDonnell’s fishery had been conveyed to him. The Deputy’s adjudication in Hamilton’s favour was the counterpart of his decision in O’Cahan v. O’Neill; yet, so obscure were his devices, that the fact that he was personally interested in the suit lay hidden for three centuries. The Attorney and Solicitor-General, who “drew the case according to the records,” knew the truth, but suppressed it. So, the Privy Council, unaware of the guilty secret, allowed the sequestration to be re-imposed for the third time, to the despair of Randal, who hastened to London in June, 1608. This time he met with failure there, for Chichester was now all-powerful. His journey, however, so much upset the Deputy that, to baffle MacDonnell beyond hope of recovery, he resorted to a desperate shift. It took the shape of transferring his fishery to a stranger; by which device it was hoped to raise an insurmountable obstacle in his path. To give solemnity to the stratagem, Chichester, by an act of State, gave it validity in the King’s name. On the 1st July, 1608, while MacDonnell was making his way to the steps of the Throne his “fourth” was conferred by Patent (with much other gear) on “our dear Arthur Bassett of Dublin.”

Here indeed was legerdemain. James Hamilton we know; Thomas Irelande we know; Auditor Ware we know; John Wakeman we know; John King we know; Carew and Cary we know; but who was this new ensign of the brigand troupe? He appeared in the lists with vizor down, and was previously unknown to fame. The stranger, however, was no less a person than Chichester’s nephew—fresh landed a year before from Devonshire.

The manufacture for him of a Patent purporting to affectionately embody the royal wishes was a masterstroke.

CHAPTER XI.
THE DEPUTY’S NEPHEW.

“Our dear Arthur Bassett of Dublin” was not of Dublin, but of Umberley, in the County of Devon. He was brought over to serve as jackal for his uncle, and the Patent suddenly made out for him was simply a link forged in the chain of confiscation. It granted Bassett all the enormous territories captured by Chichester through Hamilton on the 14th February, 1606, with Sir Randal MacDonnell’s “fourth” of the Bann thrown in. No King’s Letter authorised it, and the Patent was issued without the knowledge of his Majesty or any of his Council. Nevertheless, it emerged duly sealed from the Irish Chancery; and its formal validity could not be denied. Here the cunning hand of Davies was again at work, and the processes of law were twisted by him to purposes which no one else had dreamt of. The minting machine, the dies, the cranks, the pulleys, and every handy engine for counterfeiting stood ready; but it was the brain of Davies which turned them to account. How came he weaponed for this work?

Two years earlier a “Royal Commission for the Remedy of Defective Titles” had been established by James I. on the Deputy’s advice. It was set up as a local convenience, to enable Patents to be issued in Dublin to owners whose grants had been held defective, without the necessity of suing out King’s Letters from London. On payment of a fine by approved applicants, the Royal Commissioners, who comprised all the leading members of the Executive (17 in number), headed by the Deputy and the judges, were empowered to make amended grants. Their integrity and good faith were relied on by the King to exercise the regal privilege entrusted to them without any check or supervision.

This delegation of royal authority Chichester perverted to his own purposes. His nephew owned no property in Ireland, and had no title to be “remedied.” Yet to this landless upstart a parchment was presented, as if he were some ancient and blameless Patentee in whose deeds a flaw had been detected. His Majesty never heard of “our dear Arthur Bassett,” who was “of Dublin” only because he had been fetched there to abet a crime. He was for the moment Provost Marshal for Munster, it being the Deputy’s habit to quarter as many of his relatives as possible on the taxpayers; but there was no other link to connect him with Irish soil. The property stolen through Hamilton was all conveyed to him by this means, and with it was included the “fourth” of the tidal Bann which MacDonnell was given by James I. on his accession five years before.

This pilferage must be reckoned as one of Chichester’s most dexterous fetches. In skill it outdid even the budding of the life-estate in Lough Neagh on the thirteen-and-fourpenny “command” at Carrickfergus. Still, its success was influentially contributed to by others. The trick required the collusion of the Attorney-General, the Solicitor-General, the Chancellor-Archbishop of Dublin, the Chief Justice, the Chief Baron, the Master of the Rolls, the principal Secretary of State, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Every high official was needed as an accomplice; and not one of them flinched. These were the men who embodied the civilising influences which replaced the less facile justice of the “lewd” Brehon Code.

Latent merit also lurked in the Patent, as an instrument of chicane. It vested great estates in an outsider, who could assign them to the Deputy with a title free from apparent taint. It overlaid with veneer the frauds connected with John Wakeman, John King, Thomas Irelande, Auditor Ware, and James Hamilton. It wafted an air of kingly approval over a barefaced theft. It stripped Sir Randal quite noiselessly, and handed his fishery to a stranger alleged to be “dear” to his Majesty. In form it was a royal grant, which, though obtained by the prostitution of the Commission, was redolent of legality.

When these shifts, re-shifts, and makeshifts to secure a semblance of lawful origin for Chichester’s booty were accomplished, the grant was garnished with the Great Seal of Ireland. Within six months of that solemn rite Bassett transferred everything back to his loving uncle. The conveyance from him, of course, was kept a secret, like Hamilton’s assignment, and was never enrolled. A knighthood was Bassett’s reward, and the Deputy prescribed in his will that he should be buried in the same tomb with himself at Carrickfergus. There each worthy now lies awaiting the judgment of the Resurrection.

Contrasted with Chichester’s refusal to remedy, by the same machinery, the pretended blot in the Patent of Hugh O’Neill, the parchment issued to Bassett attracts lasting interest. O’Neill’s grant was the outcome of a National treaty which ended a nine years’ war. Bassett’s was a swindle carried out against the King and his subjects. Criminality permeated it even to minor details. The fine due to the Crown on its being issued was left unpaid, in spite of a recital that £20 had been lodged in the Exchequer, and in this way the King was both pettily and grossly cheated.

While this Patent was a-making, Sir Randal renewed his appeal to the King. He was, however, unexpectedly thwarted at Court, and for the first time tasted defeat. Umbraged and disconsolate, he was sent home from London, but immediately recommenced his efforts, and not altogether without success. The discouraged chief, who had never even heard of Bassett, wrote to Cecil on the 19th August, 1608:—

“When I took leave of your lordship at the Court at Greenwich, you were pleased that my fourth part of the fishing of the Bann, being in controversy between Mr. Hamilton and myself, should remain, as it was the former year, in sequestration; and that neither of us should reap any benefit of the rent of the same, until the controversy was decided by law.”

He went on to complain that the sequestrator, Captain Phillips, “pays the yearly rent of the fishing privately unto whom Mr. James Hamilton will appoint there; and thereby thinks to deprive me of my rights to the fishing, to my great loss.” He, therefore, besought Cecil to let him have the fishery again, and that meanwhile the Bishop of Derry should be appointed sequestrator.

This protest led to an Order of the Privy Council on the 31st October, 1608, setting Phillips aside. It runs:—“As Mr. Hamilton has prayed that Sir Thomas Ridgeway be appointed sequestrator, and Sir Randal MacDonnell has demanded that the Bishop of Derry be appointed, the Lords of the Council suggest that they be appointed joint-sequestrators; and, if they are not content with this arrangement, the Deputy shall appoint some indifferent person as sequestrator.” Chichester’s reply is not preserved. The State Papers are at times mournfully vacant as to his correspondence. Cecil, whose “Cabinet,” as the Earl of Northampton complained, “had been made the treasury of the State’s whole evidences and intelligence,” lacked at his death many precious papers. The “saint” and the sinner understood one another.

Whatever answer Chichester sent, or rejoinder Sir Randal made, it dawned on the Privy Council by the end of 1608 that the Bann had been alienated by the Deputy. The King took the news bitterly. After the Flight of the Earls he contemplated a grant of the river to the London Corporation; and his anger was kindled against the devastators of Ulster’s spoil. In January, 1609, Cecil was ordered to demand explanations. He had commanded Sir Arthur in June, 1608, “not to dispose of an acre” without authority from England. James I. assumed that the grants fathered on Hamilton had been made in disobedience to this injunction; but Chichester stoutly replied that they were gifts for the benefit of the Earl of Devonshire under the Wakeman Letter. A discreet silence was preserved as to the fact that he had transferred to himself the non-tidal Bann and Lough Neagh along with MacDonnell’s “fourth” under bogus patents.

Little as the Lords of the Council guessed the extent of his profligacy, they grew suspicious. In April, 1609, Sir Randal obtained an order that the Deputy should “direct trial of the controversy with all convenient speed,” and “that his Majesty may be no further importuned in the matter.” This command Chichester pigeonholed, and his victim was left remoter than ever from justice.

New influences, however, were setting in which affected every claimant to property in Ulster. The King, finding the North swept of its Chiefs, and knowing naught of the practices of the Deputy, determined to root Scottish and English settlers in the seats of the stubborn septs. A Plantation would solve the Irish difficulty. Chichester differed from his Majesty as to the future of the Province, and saw in its desolation a means of personal aggrandisement. James hoped to strengthen his garrison by planting the battle-wasted area with British Protestants. The Deputy felt that disarmed natives would be easier to deal with than cross-Channel adventurers protected by royal favour. The King’s policy, besides, exposed him to the risk that his crimes might be laid bare. He could show no title, save what Bassett’s Patent afforded, to his most important acquisitions. Excluding that document, the only parchment he held for Lough Neagh and the Bann, or the countless acres seized therewith, was a secret assignment from Hamilton. This had, for its sole foundation, grants as shaky as Bassett’s, springing from his own wrongdoing.

James I., ignorant of all this hocus-pocus, busied himself throughout the year 1609 with the question of bestowing County Derry, the Bann, and Lough Foyle, on the London Corporation. In January, 1610, a treaty with the City was signed on behalf of his Majesty, and the Ulster Plantation was begun. The play of forces in the struggle between MacDonnell and Chichester now took new forms, and the final bout in their long duel was postponed.

CHAPTER XII.
CHEATING KING JAMES.

When Chichester realised that the Charter to the Londoners was to include the Bann and Lough Foyle, he began a game of cross-purposes to undermine the royal project. On the return of Sir John Davies from London, bringing him the gift of O’Doherty’s barony of Innishowen (July, 1609), he got the Attorney-General to join him in a fresh intrigue against the King. They planned an excursion to Ulster, ostensibly for the purpose of executing a Commission—long out of date—to ascertain the ecclesiastical lands of the Sees of Derry, Raphoe, and Clogher; but in reality to devise means to thwart his Majesty’s policy.

The Commission was issued on the 2nd May, 1606, three years earlier, and, therefore, was utterly stale. The Flight of the Earls was already an event two years old, and one which left Bishop Montgomery in undisputed enjoyment of Catholic dues. Yet the Deputy was smitten with such heady zeal for Church interests in 1609 that he must needs visit the Ulster vineyard in haste to care for the elect under the pastoral eye of the Attorney-General.

Before setting out he performed a miracle worthy of his pen. This was to “annex” to the spent Commission of 1606 “certain articles of instruction under the Great Seal of Ireland” so that he should be enabled “to inquire of divers things in the said Commission and articles of instruction.” In vagueness nothing could be more studied. The added “articles” were dated the 21st July, 1609, and they completely altered the scope of the Commission. The King had directed a merely ecclesiastical inquiry, but the Deputy, who for three years neglected to hold it, “amended” the royal instructions in his own behoof. Great was the magic of “amendment.” He was careful not to enrol or record the alterations; and, therefore, the added “articles” remain as undiscoverable as the Bassett-Hamilton conveyances, or the Patents of 1603.

Under their authority Chichester sat with Davies and others at Limavady on the 30th August, 1609, and held a Court. His purpose was to set up a claim to the Bann in order to oust the Londoners, and so overreach them that their Charter in that respect must prove a nullity. In the castle of his prisoner, O’Cahan, knowing that the Crown was striving to perfect the contract with the Undertakers, he empanelled a jury of Brehons and leading natives to defeat the intentions of his royal master. The jury, under the original Commission, could only have ascertained the title to and scope of Church rights, but under the invented “articles of instruction” the Deputy got them to add a finding which declared that the Bann, from Coleraine to Lough Neagh, with its bed and soil, belonged to himself.

The Brehon jury was first set on to make voluminous ecclesiastical pronouncements; and, having spent the day thereat, they completed their work with the verdict in Chichester’s favour. He presided over the inquiry himself, as he did in the suits of “O’Cahan against O’Neill” and “Hamilton against MacDonnell.” Doubtless, he strove to impress the “lewd” Brehons by his judicial bearing, but they understood little of his purpose. They spoke Gaelic and Latin, but not English; and Sir Arthur laid before them his grant of the river to Hamilton in Latin, and Hamilton’s Latin assignment to himself. Their “finding” he set down in English—a tongue then rarely used in legal documents. Its import was unknown to them, and his scribes, doubtless, wrote out whatever he desired. It is tacked on at the end of a long ecclesiastical verdict, with which it is wholly disconnected. The Brehons had been assembled to declare and earmark the local belongings of the Church, and were asked by the presiding judge to decide that the Bann was his property. If they really did so and if the “tack” was not subsequently made Davies must have enjoyed the sight of the Deputy “charging” a wild Irish jury in Latin in his own interest, and availing of their lack of English to cheat the English King.

The verdict when engrossed was personally signed by Chichester. The Archbishop of Armagh and the Bishop of Derry added their saintly names. These were followed by the signatures of the Attorney-General, the Chief Justice, the Surveyor-General, and the Vice-Treasurer. The “lewd” Brehons’ finding was worthily witnessed in Church and State. As Parsons subscribed it his mind must have turned back in placid contemplation to the Antrim Inquisition of 1605, when he first shuffled the cards to jink success to his master in the great game he was playing.

The Deputy, from beneath O’Cahan’s roof, dispatched an austere account of the proceedings to the King. Having circumvented the royal policy, he edified his Majesty by inveighing against “the insatiable humours of craving men,” and held forth on “the duty and service I owe to my sovereign.” He wound up with the boast that “the justice of the land, without being thought a praiser of myself, was never distributed with more clean hands in this kingdom.” Davies sent a companion report which glowed with ecstacy over their visit, but omitted everything that the King ought to have known. As they compared notes for these dispatches the walls of O’Cahan’s castle must have rocked with laughter. The augurs sometimes enjoyed themselves.

While this sport went forward the Corporation of London, which was about to levy a heavy assessment on its citizens to defray the cost of the Plantation, had its agents in the North to view the country. They met the Deputy at Limavady just as his letters were being sent off to James I. They discussed with him the terms of the proposed Charter, and he gave them much wise counsel as to the carriage of their adventure. The one point he forgot to mention was that he was an adverse claimant against them for the Bann and Lough Foyle—the chief ingredients in their bargain.

As they took their leave the agents warmly gave thanks, believing him to be a stout ally; and, on reaching London, they reported in favour of the Plantation. Five months later (28th January, 1610) the City accepted a grant of County Derry, with the Bann and Lough Foyle, and agreed to “plant” the North. No more solemn State contract is on record. Yet it was cankered from its inception by official duplicity.

When James I. learnt through Sir Randal MacDonnell of the transfer of the tidal Bann to Hamilton he did not realise—angry though he was—that the non-tidal river and Lough Neagh had also been granted away. He therefore promised to reacquire for the Londoners at his own expense what he supposed had been inadvertently parted with. Chichester never openly asserted ownership of the fisheries, for he hoped that a breakdown would occur in the negotiations with the City. These, indeed, were often on the verge of miscarriage; but, as time and argument went on, one obstacle after another was overcome. Finally the agreement of 1610 became the Charter of 1613.

Towards the end of 1610 the agents of the Londoners arrived to take possession of their new estate. Their coming forced the Deputy to change his tactics. He saw that the waters he had seized could not all be retained, and arranged with Hamilton to make a partial surrender of them and seek compensation for the “sacrifice.”

James I., unaware of the pretensions of any claimant to Lough Foyle and the Bann, had covenanted to give the Londoners an unclogged title. They naturally expected that all blots on it would be removed before they made a venture costing (in present moneys) £600,000. The Charter guaranteed that, if necessary, their rights would be confirmed by Acts of Parliament both in England and Ireland.

The “bag” of the Ulster fisheries by Sir Arthur and his partner then stood:—

Lough Foyle and CulmoreChichester’s.
Lough NeaghChichester’s.
The non-tidal BannChichester’s.
One quarter of the tidal BannChichester’s.
Three-quarters of the tidal BannHamilton’s.

As deserving owners they were ready to make sacrifices for prompt cash to further the royal policy, and yield up what had been contracted to the Londoners. The Deputy modestly kept in the background, and Hamilton represented him as Claims Agent.

With tradesmanlike particularity, the “Scot” sent in a bill to his Majesty through Chichester, who frigidly transmitted it to London as an impartial broker. It prettily set out that Hamilton, with seven mythical partners, disbursed £4,760 in buying up the estates of “sundry persons” in the Bann and Lough Foyle—over and above “the costs and charges expended as well in suits of law as otherwise for the clearing of sundry titles and claims.” This account was vouched by the Deputy as accurate, and his disinterested corroboration of its fairness was accepted by his royal master. Without further investigation £4,500 (or, in modern values, £45,000) was paid to Hamilton in June, 1610.

The King’s undertaking to defray the expense of clearing the title for the Londoners weighed heavily on his cramped resources. Shrinking at the outlay, he refused to provide more than £2,500, and left the balance, £2,000, to be paid by the other victims—the Corporation. Between regal meanness and viceregal greed, the Londoners were effectively squeezed.

The Lords of the Council had, in April, 1609, commanded a trial of Hamilton’s dispute with MacDonnell as to the “fourth” of the tidal Bann; and, although Chichester then showed no sign of compliance, he saw his advantage in reviving the quarrel, as soon as the money was received. He and Hamilton for him had taken “compensation” on making over to the Crown, fisheries which did not belong to them, and which, as regards the Bann, were owned either by the Church or by O’Neill, O’Cahan, and Sir Randal MacDonnell. O’Cahan was a captive, O’Neill in exile, and against neither fugitive nor hostage had any forfeiture been decreed. MacDonnell being a royal favourite could not handily be banished, attainted, or imprisoned, yet his “fourth,” which the Deputy had “put in sequestration pending a suit at law,” was airily disposed of as a chattel of “the Scot’s.” Then a ponderous scheme to “legally” divest Sir Randal of it was thought out. This grotesque conception is described in the staid pages of the earliest volume of law reports officially published to illustrate the wondrous workings of English justice in Ireland when the overthrow of the Brehon Code was decreed. The decision, like that which set aside as “barbarous” the native system of equity, fell from caitiffs robed as Judges, as inferior in worth and reputation as they were in learning, culture, and honesty to the Brehons they replaced.

CHAPTER XIII.
DIVIDING THE SPOIL.

In November, 1610, the Deputy assembled his men-of-law in the Star Chamber and proceeded to blot out the rights of Sir Randal in a way the King could find no fault with. A report of the business was published in 1615 under the title, “The Case of the Royal Fishery of the Bann,” by Sir John Davies, in his collection of the new legal decisions. This sets forth the Attorney-General’s contentions, as if they were not mere byplay with a confederate posing as an impartial judge. With great show of learning Davies argued that the tidal Bann was a “royal river,” and its salmon fishery a “royal fishery,” and that a grant of anything “royal” must be made by express words. MacDonnell’s Patent, he said, only used words of exception—i.e., it granted him fisheries “excepting three-fourths of the fishery of the Bann.” This lack of express granting words failed, he maintained, to pass the remaining “fourth” by implication. For, quoth he, words of reservation pass nothing “royal” and make no good grant.

On behalf of Sir Randal nobody seems to have been allowed to say a word. It was the second time the case was tried behind his back. If any defects existed in his grant, Davies was the culprit, for the King in 1606 had ordered them to be cured by a new Patent, which the Attorney-General should have supervised. Nevertheless “the chief judges of the Privy Council” cheerfully decided that no part of the river belonged to MacDonnell.

Every inch of the Bann had, in the previous January, been granted to the Londoners without regard to MacDonnell’s rights, while Hamilton and Chichester, in the teeth of Sir Randal’s Patent, had taken pay for it as the true owners. Yet with pompous cynicism the Star Chamber, at Chichester’s call, elaborately took steps to overlay the felony, and deck it with legal splendour in the shape of a State Trial ostentatiously held in pretended vindication of the prerogatives of the Crown. Lawless as the Star Chamber was, even its procedure was befouled by the device adopted to mask the illicit grants and their transfer to the Deputy. Thus was a love for English law first implanted in the heart of Ulster! Davies blazons the decision in Norman-French in his publication of the cases which established the English Common Law as the basis of Irish justice. With like emanations of the bewigged knavery of the period the judgment is still cited as an authority in modern legal text-books.

The proof of Chichester’s participation in the £4,500 levied off the Crown and the Corporation endures under his own hand in a parchment which for 300 years mouldered unnoticed. In the compost of conveyancing with which his Deputyship reeks no document is more striking than that in which he commemorates this transaction. Weighted with the winnings collected for him by Hamilton, Sir Arthur, in April, 1611, thought it prudent to set down and enrol a pretext for having pocketed them. By formal “surrender” he caused a deed in the King’s favour to be witnessed before Jones, Archbishop of Dublin, renouncing all claim to the Bann and Lough Foyle.

Jones, being Lord Chancellor, was head of the Rolls Office, and entitled as such to accept “surrenders” without the authority of a King’s Letter. The deed which Chichester executed set forth the lie that the Castle of Culmore, with 300 acres and fishings (Lough Foyle), had lately been given to him by two Letters Patent; that the non-tidal Bann and one-fourth of the tidal Bann had been sold to him by Hamilton, who had paid him £550 “for and in behalf of the King’s Majesty, who hath given satisfaction to the said Hamilton for the whole fishing of the Bann.” Then it granted the fishings, land, and castle to the King; and wound up with this stately flourish:—“To that part of these presents remaining with his Majesty, the said Sir Arthur Chichester hath set his hand and seal; and to that part of these presents remaining with the said Sir Arthur, his Majesty hath caused a seal to be set.”

This masterly composition was mere make-believe. Smoothly smacking in law-prate, it rose to the highest level of legal fiction. His Majesty never heard of the surrender. Jones set his own seal to it without James I. being the wiser. In all material respects the “preamble” festers with falsehood. Chichester, it is true, got a “custodium” of the Castle of Culmore on the 24th October, 1609, with provision for the payment of gunners and warders. Three parchments issued in the following year changed this arrangement, and Culmore Castle, its fishings, and 300 acres were reserved to the Crown on the 22nd February, 21st June, and 16th July, 1610. The new bargain was made “for the furtherance of the intended Plantation by the Londoners,” to whom they were given. Other benefits were conferred on Chichester in exchange.

The pretence that he received only £550 out of the £4,500 is in keeping with the rest of his romantic prose. If Hamilton took the lion’s share it is strange that the surrender should show that his interest was confined to three-fourths of the tidal Bann, while the rest of the stolen property stood in the Deputy’s name. To suppose that the captain of the brigands netted only an eighth of the profits does injustice to his voracity.

If the surrender had been a reality, James I. would have learnt the disagreeable news that, when he presented the Bann and Lough Foyle to the Londoners fifteen months previously, he had had no title to make the grant. Yet so formally was the surrender framed that Chichester joined his wife, “Dame Lettice,” in the deed—in accordance with the law governing feudal tenures. This told of the nicety of the expert who (to facilitate confiscation from the natives) abolished the ancient right of Irishwomen under the Brehon Law “to have sole property in a certain portion of their husbands’ goods during coverture”!

Chichester was then in straits. It appeared later that he had embezzled £10,000 from the Crown out of the rents of the forfeited Ulster estates, though he suffered from no lack of income. His salary and allowances were enormous, without reckoning what came in from confiscated lands. He even feigned poverty to cloak his defalcations, but after his death his heir was called upon by Charles I. to make them good.

The part played by his spiritual confederate in this legal pantomime was worthy of “that rascal Jones.” His Grace wielded the Great Seal on Chichester’s behalf like a burglar’s “jemmy.” Whether the signet he affixed to the “surrender” was great or small it boots not to enquire. Large as was the gain made by the Archbishop out of the Church Establishment, he supplemented it by grants from the Deputy which lacked the King’s sanction.

Such depredations would have been impossible without the connivance of Court favourites who shared in the profits. Public virtue had either ceased to exist or had not begun to be cultivated. When anyone complained of the conduct of Chichester’s servitors, most of whom were scoundrels apt for his purpose, he shielded them in dispatches as “very honest men.” He fetched from Devonshire his brother and two nephews to assist him, and was at pains to embellish his practices with a garniture of profuse loyalty and solid piety.

In the Castle Chamber (or Star Chamber) he dealt with land, descent, and ownership. Removable judges, flanked by a few men-at-arms, with the Law Officers occasionally thrown in, formed its judicial ingredients. Before them were haled those who were to be fleeced or tortured. Excuse may be attempted for the profligacy of the officials who then found salary and place in Ireland by reference to the hardships of their service. They had to put up with much discomfort; and to confront, at times, the perils of war, famine, and pestilence. Conquest is a hard school. If they returned to London their journey might end in the Tower and their fee be the scaffold. The sea between the islands was infested with pirates lying in wait to assail their ships, and when they reached the metropolis it was part of their science accurately to know whom to bribe, whom to squeeze, whom to favour, and whom to flatter. Such was the age in which Chichester throve.

CHAPTER XIV.
THE PLANTERS’ PARLIAMENT.

With the coming of the Planters, Chichester, being by law disabled from holding land without the King’s sanction, grew anxious as to the title of his ill-gotten estates. Many of his Deeds were open to attack, and safety could only be found in confirmation by Act of Parliament. James I. had contemplated, on his accession, the calling together of the Irish Legislature. His order of the 11th September, 1603, as to the pardoned chiefs, mentions “an Act to be passed in the next assembling of Parliament there for the restoration in blood of the Earl of Tyrone, his brother, and their heirs.” On the 16th October, 1604, when appointing Chichester Deputy, he informed him that he “intended to call a Parliament” in Ireland. Sir Arthur disliked the idea and blocked it, as he wished to compass the ruin of the native princes. Besides, a Parliament would have created a counter-authority to dwarf his power.

After the Flight of the Earls and the Plantation of Ulster the situation changed. Sway had forsaken the Gael, and a Parliament which native chiefs might control was no longer to be feared. As for the mass of the people, if the manufacture of a majority were attended to with foresight the Deputy knew they could easily be mastered. Conquered Ireland was now shired and sheriffed, with 17 new counties added. In the previous Parliament of Elizabeth only fifteen counties were represented. The drawback that the greater part of the inhabitants of the island were Catholics was one which called for circumspection lest a majority of their representatives should belong to that “damnable superstition.” It had become a cardinal part of State policy that the handful of imported Protestants should control everything, and arrangements were made accordingly.

In 1612 the King agreed that a Parliament should be summoned for the following year, and the Deputy was to see to it that the Planters should be enabled to outvote the natives. When Henry VIII. shired Wales, and admitted its representatives to a voice at Westminster, a different spirit prevailed. No trickery was practised on the Cymri; but in Ireland King James issued charters to 40 hamlets whereby sham “Corporations” exclusively Protestant, returning two members each, were set up at various cross-roads. In the quaint language of the day:—“They were erected in places that constantly pass the rank of the poor villages in the poorest country in Christendom.” Bunches of “freemen,” numbering a dozen or a score, were named in each charter to elect a brace of representatives, and thus at a stroke 80 reliable Protestants were secured. The sheriffs did the rest. In 1613 by this strategy a Protestant majority of 28 was created in the House of Commons of a country where the Catholics were twenty to one. To mark the King’s approval of Chichester’s courses he was made a peer and highly commended.

The Anglo-Irish gentry of the ancient faith protested against his electoral arrangements, but were laughed at. They carried their plaints to the King in London, and were imprisoned or abused as “recusants.” Such of them as were not lodged in the Tower or the Fleet were only allowed to return home to witness the Deputy’s triumph. “Hurly-burlies and other unnecessary stirs were moved in sundry places,” but all to no purpose. The packed Parliament met, and the Commons made Sir John Davies Speaker, after a feverish protest from the Anglo-Irish. When it proceeded to business its first enactment was that O’Neill and the Northern chiefs, dead or alive, stood attainted of high treason; that their estates were forfeited, and their Letters Patent void. The cleavage between the Anglo-Catholics and the disfranchised natives was such that the Bill of Attainder passed unanimously, and was proposed by Sir John Everard, the “recusant” candidate for Speaker, who had renounced a judgeship rather than take the oath of apostacy. Six Ulster counties were then made the Royal demesne.

Now came the moment for Chichester’s privy turn. He had a year before procured the assent of the English Privy Council to the “heads” of several measures which he desired to pass, including one “to confirm the Patents of Ulster Undertakers.” Some shift of wind afterwards set in at Whitehall against him, and his Majesty, scenting his purpose, thwarted it. No sufficient ground for this sudden disfavour anywhere appears. The records of State are often a blank at the most critical moments.

Perhaps the King was smarting at the havoc wrought by his lordship’s grants; perhaps he bemoaned the £2,500 “compensation” paid from his purse to free the Bann and Lough Foyle; perhaps he grudged the Deputy the £10,000 he extracted from Parliament “for extraordinary equipage and porte.” Perhaps he learnt of the £10,000 of the embezzled Ulster rents. At any rate, James I. was vexed with his new peer, and determined he would not allow him to “cook” statutes as he had cooked Patents. Cecil was dead, and the influence which the hunchback wielded was lacking. In the royal councils Cecil’s enemies openly complained of the way in which he had tolerated the devastation of Crown lands. Sir Richard Cooke, the Irish Chancellor of the Exchequer, urged Chichester’s removal, and wrote bitterly of the disorders he witnessed, although formerly he had supported the Deputy.

The first sign of royal estrangement appears in a Letter of the 25th March, 1615, which complains of slackness in forwarding the Plantation. To it the King added a postscript in his own hand, requiring “zeal and uprightness” from the Deputy. Accompanying this querulous dispatch came a request for a subsidy, and his Majesty promised that, if it were voted, the sittings of Parliament would be prolonged. Chichester meekly bore the rebuke in order to get the Bills he wanted passed, and asked Parliament to grant the money. Both Houses obsequiously agreed, but no sooner had the subsidy been sanctioned than James, in spite of his promise, dissolved the assembly before the Bills could even be brought in.

This blow fell on the 22nd August, 1615; and deadlier thunderbolts were to descend. The King’s excuse for breaking faith was the expense to the public of “Members’ wages.” It was a hollow plea, for the total cost only came to £223. Chichester dispatched a protest against the Dissolution, and sent Davies to London to represent how important, in the interests of a distracted people, were the measures he needed. He hurried to Ulster himself, and from there sent a cunning letter to the King describing the hardships of the Planters and his zeal in their regard.

James was not moved, and even displayed a temper which the “subsidy” had not sweetened. The crestfallen Attorney-General brought back word from Court that “heavy imputations” had been laid against the authors of the mis-government and maladministration of the country. The alarmed Deputy tremblingly penned an elaborate defence, but a week later (22nd November, 1615) a royal missive dismissing him was signed. The packed Parliament had been dispersed without doing anything to validate his grants.

The want of “zeal and uprightness” in forwarding the Plantation, of which James I. accused the Government, is probably the smallest fault that can be laid at the ex-Deputy’s door. The character of the Planters affords some clue to this lack of enthusiasm. Chichester had no wish to stimulate the import of undesirables, whereas the King knew nothing of their calibre. The best justification of the slackness alleged in encouraging such migrants is to be found in the description of them by their own clergymen. Who and what they were is told by the Rev. Mr. Stewart:—

“From Scotland came many, and from England not a few, yet all of them generally the scum of both nations; who, from debt or breaking and fleeing from justice, or seeking shelter, came hither, hoping to be without fear of man’s justice, in a land where there was nothing, or but little as yet, of the fear of God. And in a few years there flocked such a multitude of people from Scotland that these northern counties of Down, Antrim, Londonderry, etc., were in a good measure planted, which had been waste before. Yet most of the people were all void of godliness, who seemed rather to flee from God to this enterprise than to follow their own mercy.... Thus on all hands atheism increased, and disregard of God; iniquity abounded, with contention, fighting, murder, adultery, etc., as among people who, as they had nothing within them to overawe them, so their ministers’ example was worse than nothing.... For their carriage made them to be abhorred at home in their native land, insomuch that going for Ireland was looked on as a miserable mark of a deplorable person. Yea, it was turned into a proverb; and one of the worst expressions of disdain that could be invented was to tell a man that Ireland would be his hinder end.”

Professor Reid, the historian of the Irish Presbyterian Church, paints the same picture:—“Ulster was now occupied by settlers, who were willing enough to receive and respect ministers when sent, but who were far from being generally characterised by a desire for enjoying religious ordinances. On the contrary, a great number of those who accompanied the original proprietors, and who occupied their lands, were openly profane and immoral in their conduct, and were generally inattentive to the sacred institutions of the Gospel.”

A third minister, the Reverend Mr. Blair, writes:—“The most part were such as either poverty, scandalous lives, or, at the best, adventurous seeking of better accommodation, had forced thither, so that the security and thriving of religion was little seen to by those adventurers; and the preachers were generally of the same complexion with the people.”

The Londoners sent a respectable contingent to County Derry; and Chichester’s antipathy to them can only be connected with his designs on the fisheries and his hope to break down the Plantation. Constant complaint of his henchman, Captain Phillips, was made by the Corporation, who, doubtless, represented their grievances to the King. They left on record a protest against the antagonism of Phillips, who was but a stirring-stick of mischief for the Deputy.

Commentators on the sudden “disburthenment” of that powerful satrap have groped in the dark for an explanation. There can now be little doubt that it was provoked by the remonstrances of the Corporation. His lordship’s hostility to them sprang from the wish to upset their enterprise in order to fasten a hold on Lough Neagh and the Bann.

CHAPTER XV.
A SCOTCH “DISCOVERER.”

Chichester’s place in Dublin Castle was taken by his old servitor, Sir Oliver St. John. The veteran himself retired to Carrickfergus, and there awaited his opportunity, spreading his nets patiently and preparing for the future. Davies was retained as Attorney-General, and this became a great comfort to the ex-Deputy.

St. John was a Lincoln’s Inn lawyer of the Davies School. He served in the Elizabethan wars, and was a protégé of Devonshire and Cecil. After James I. came to the Throne care was taken to provide him with suitable posts in Ireland. As Deputy, St. John was not without sympathy for his old master, although formerly he had smarted under his lash. Before a year went by the position of Lord High Treasurer fell vacant through the death of the Earl of Ormonde, and St. John and Davies secured the place for their fallen friend. Chichester, greatly mollified thereby, assured the Privy Council, on 24th December, 1616, that “as matters are handled, I think Ireland is at the height of her happiness.” Probably from anything that has since occurred this was true enough.

The new post gave him control over the Crown rentals and other records serviceable to his designs. It also helped him to cloak (for the moment) the embezzlement of the rents of the fugitive Chiefs. Accusing voices as to his misdemeanours were however raised, and James I. tried in vain to fathom them. St. John (with the facts staring him in the face) hesitated to expose his former patron. Still the King was not blind; and in October, 1618, the storm broke. Sir James Balfour was dispatched to Dublin with secret orders from his Majesty to rip open the Patent scandal, and have Hamilton cross-examined in the Star Chamber by St. John.

Balfour was a Scottish “discoverer” (or informer), who ferreted for reward to lay bare the tricks of estated magnates against the Crown. Having laid informations before the King as to the orgies of the late administration, he was commissioned to unearth its misdeeds. His arrival in Ireland caused consternation. St. John sent for Hamilton; and, as his Majesty ordained, questioned him straitly. The perturbed Deputy treated Balfour’s revelations as something which had suddenly burst upon him; and Hamilton was naturally disinclined to add to his knowledge. His uncommunicativeness led to a request for the production of the originals of his Patents. No record of these had been officially kept, in order to defeat investigation; and Hamilton, aware of his advantage, demurred. He was, therefore, commanded by St. John to take down in writing, as from the King, a behest to bring them in forthwith for inspection. This was an awkward moment; and the culprit, having written out the command, asked for time, and got it.

Before the day fixed for the next heckling, Hamilton consulted Chichester; and, fortified by his courage, instead of obeying, sent an evasive letter pretending that he did not understand the royal wishes. At this St. John affected to be nonplussed; but the truth was that the task of playing inquisitor against his old confederates was distasteful to him, and ill became his past. So, instead of putting on pressure, and forcing Hamilton to produce the parchments, he weakened and suspended the inquiry.

Sir James Balfour, keen for the chase, beset him and demanded effective action in the King’s name; but the sore-pressed Deputy feared either to refuse or to comply. In his perplexity, he hit on the expedient of sending a messenger to Court, begging to be spared further part in an odious duty. His envoy was the Vice-Treasurer, Sir Francis Blundell, an underling of the Lord High Treasurer. To him the errand was entrusted of seeking out Villiers, Marquis of Buckingham, the royal favourite, and plying him with “arguments” to hush up the inquiry. Villiers (soon to be Duke of Buckingham) was all-powerful with James I.

“Those who wanted to gain the King to their ends learned that the easiest way was to approach him through his favourite.” So intimate were their relations that his Majesty would say:—“Christ had his John, and I have my George.” Buckingham took “presents” from suitors, pestered the Lord Chancellor with attempts to interfere in Chancery suits, and secured largesse for his pains. He retained his mastery at Court into the following reign, when his excesses led to his assassination. With such a courtier, no well-weighted appeal could fail, and Sir Francis Blundell set out from Dublin supplied with a letter from St. John, and other gear for the all-powerful Marquis. The only copy of this letter which has been preserved was found amongst the papers of Chichester’s relatives. It, therefore, probably was composed by the Lord High Treasurer himself. It runs:—

“It has pleased his Majesty to employ Sir James Balfour hither, for the examination of some articles exhibited unto his Majesty against Sir James Hamilton, with especial warrant, by his princely letter unto me and some of the Council here, to receive such informations as his Majesty had committed unto Sir James Balfour’s trust, to be imparted unto us. In obedience to which, we have, with all care and secrecy, proceeded therein, and given his Majesty a just account of what we have found, wherewith I hope his Majesty hath received good satisfaction. And, albeit my duty must ever tie me to obey his Majesty’s Royal commandments before all other respects, yet I have suffered much in the opinion of noble and worthy personages, as well in England as here, as if I had entered into a business unfitting the place of his Majesty’s Deputy, who ought tenderly to preserve his Majesty’s subjects in peace and contentment, and not be an instrument of blemishing the reputations and questioning the estates and fortunes of any man. The business of Sir James Hamilton is now brought to that estate as I hope I shall hear no more of it.

“Yet, lest his Majesty may, by information given unto him in the like nature, be drawn to employ my services again in that kind of examination concerning the lives and estates of any of those who are, by his Majesty’s princely favour, committed to my charge and government, I hope his Majesty will be graciously pleased to join to mine assistance his principal servants and councillors of this kingdom, and that his warrants and commissions may be open, and the proceedings in them fair and legal. Otherwise, if I be commanded to handle them in a private manner myself alone, or with some only, whatever misfortune shall light upon any, I shall be reputed the causer of it, and cast myself into general hatred, and shall be unable to do his Majesty that service in this kingdom which he may expect from an officer employed in so weighty a charge.

“I humbly pray your lordship to hearken to Sir Francis Blundell, whom I have entreated to wait upon your lordship in this particular, and to vouchsafe unto me your honourable care for my preservation.”

This could only mean that Buckingham was to get the secret procedure (which the King had ordained) quashed; and allow St. John to hold any future inquiry in public before the Privy Council, where Chichester’s creatures held the majority. Blundell’s “arguments” were so powerful that Buckingham prevailed on the King to drop the proceedings, and Balfour’s mission ended in smoke. The “articles exhibited” by him, and the correspondence between the English and Irish Executives, are not given a place in the State Papers. Only for disjointed entries and letters in the family archives of Hamilton and Chichester, posterity would never have heard of the perils they ran or the struggles of St. John to rescue them. The official records must have been made away with. Balfour before long was consoled for the abandonment of the investigation. To keep his mouth shut he was presented with lands in Ulster after his return to England, and therewith rested content. Amongst his papers printed in 1837 by the Abbotsford Club (Edinburgh) were copies of Hamilton’s “Thomas Irelande” Letter of the 6th December, 1604, and that of the 16th April, 1605, granting Sir Con O’Neill’s estate. These evidently formed part of his “brief” for the Discovery.

Even if Balfour’s inquiry had been pressed home, the resourceful Chichester would not have been taken unawares. He had skilfully tampered with the State ledgers to prepare a bulwark of defence if challenged as to his part in the seizure of the fisheries. On becoming Lord High Treasurer, the rent-rolls of the Exchequer lay under his hand, and these were manipulated with clerkly art. An insertion in them in 1618 correlates with the period of Balfour’s inquiry. It casually records that Lord Chichester is owner of the Bann and Lough Neagh, although everyone knew that the river had been granted to the Londoners in 1610—apart from the “surrender” by the ex-Deputy in 1611. The entry seemed quite business-like, and reads:—“Arthur, Lord Chichester, assignee of James Hamilton, knight, holds the entire fishery of the lake called Lough Neagh, and the river Bann—per annum 12s. 6d.” A casual scribe might have ledgered it; yet the words amounted to a royal recognition of his title. No earlier Crown rent-roll contains such a record, and it was made seven years after the Bann had been awarded to the Londoners, by Charter, rent free.

Chichester’s “surrender” disclaimed the river and acknowledged the receipt of compensation. Still, embedded in the Crown rental, by way of a scrivener’s note of the trifling rent of 12s. 6d., lurked an official declaration that the Bann and Lough Neagh belonged to him. The humblest clerk in State employ knew that no rent for the Bann was due by anybody. Yet a ledger in Government custody was burdened with this falsehood in the year in which Balfour “exhibited articles unto his Majesty against Sir James Hamilton.” No reason can be assigned for the entry save one—an attempt to build up a defence to meet an expected attack by the “discoverer.”

The “cooked” ledger consorts with the Lord Treasurer’s past, and with what remains to be told of his future. The sequel unfolds the same unending game of grab. Each development reveals a fresh crime, and evokes renewed wonder at the miscreant’s resourcefulness. As fertile in the closet as he was ruthless in the camp, Chichester may be regarded as the embodiment of those vices which, amongst the people he oppressed, made a byword of the rule he represented and the creed he sought to spread.

CHAPTER XVI.
THE ESCHEATOR FOR ULSTER.

Once Buckingham’s protection had been purchased by the Lord High Treasurer his confidence grew apace. Alive to the danger he had escaped, Chichester strove to prevent further risks by providing legal cover for his acquisitions. His attempt to shelter them behind an Act of Parliament in 1615 had failed, but they would still, he hoped, be safe if he could obtain a Patent for everything he held, lawful or lawless, in his own name. The grants which Sir James Balfour assailed rested on unenrolled assignments from Hamilton and Bassett. Their origin could easily be traced by legal or official prying; and Balfour’s foray, though thwarted, filled him with concern. Since he had been appointed Deputy in 1605, Chichester had not dared to take out any Patent in his own name unless with royal authority, however freely he practised in the names of others. He felt, nevertheless, that the stalking-horse system was out-worn; and resolved to apply for an omnibus grant, directed to himself, which should include the whole of his possessions—and as much of other people’s as could be arranged for.

In 1619, assured of Buckingham’s help, he besought a King’s Letter sanctioning a fresh Patent in his own name. In 1620 his Majesty’s consent was signified; but it was limited to “a confirmation of all his former grants by a re-grant.” The King, as a further precaution, ordered a Commission “to ascertain the other persons in possession of the territory, and to establish their rights.” His Majesty evidently suspected his former Deputy’s pranks; but the royal attempt to prevent their repetition was in vain. Chichester overleaped every barrier; and, now armed with the King’s Letter, accomplished a feat more daring than any he had previously ventured on.

The provision that the Commission was “to establish the rights of others” he overcame by having his own backers named as Commissioners. With a view to beguiling the Londoners as to the Bann, these partisans ordered an inquisition respecting its ownership without giving the city notice of their sittings.

They were given no authority to inquire into the Londoners’ property, yet they met in Chichester’s pocket-borough of Carrickfergus, and empanelled a jury of his friends and underlings to decide on the title to the river. The legal extravaganza there enacted seems so grotesque that, were it not vouched for by stiff parchment, it would be scouted as impossible.

The principal Commissioner was Stephen Allen, Escheator for Ulster, who owed his post to Chichester. At Derry, a fortnight before, Allen held an inquisition for the Barons of the Exchequer, to ascertain by a local jury the number of “royal” fisheries in Ulster, and the rents payable thereout to the Crown. Allen truthfully recorded the Derry jury’s finding as to the Bann, which was that the Londoners owned the entire river from the sea to Lough Neagh, rent free. In this verdict its fishing-places, tidal and non-tidal, were enumerated in the most formal way. Yet, scarcely was the ink dry upon it when, at Carrickfergus, the same Allen got a jury to make a wholly contrary finding, and to bring in a verdict that the Bann, from Lough Neagh to Coleraine, was Chichester’s. He bolstered up this enormity by another. Allen’s duty was to lodge forthwith the Derry “return” in the Exchequer in Dublin. Instead of doing so, he kept it back for nine years. On the other hand, he lodged the Carrickfergus “return” instanter, knowing that it was to be made the basis of a Patent granting the Bann to his old patron. Highly-placed Commissioners, including a Bishop, abetted this misconduct.

In framing the verdict, care was taken that the assertion of Chichester’s title should be made indirectly, only. The jury were got to do just enough to enable the Dublin confederates, when the “return” reached them, to shape the grant in the form he required. Nor was what Allen put on record untrue. All that was set forth was that Hamilton and Bassett obtained Patents for the Bann and Lough Neagh, and that these were assigned to Chichester—no more. There was no falsehood here—omission alone conveyed untruth. The Commissioners “forgot” the Charter to the Londoners; they “overlooked” Allen’s proceedings at Derry a fortnight before; they failed to remember the “surrender” of 1611 before the Archbishop of Dublin; or the “compensation” paid to Sir Arthur. As skilled practitioners they operated on the sheltry side of the law, and left the draftsmen of the Patent to do the rest.

If the trick had been discovered before the Patent was ready, Allen would have explained that no wrong to the Londoners was intended; and would rely on the fact that he had previously registered at Derry their title as the real owners. Any repugnancy between the two verdicts, he would protest, was for lawyers to settle, and not for a poor escheator like himself. Others of the Commissioners might have found it less easy to invent a plausible excuse if exposure had befallen them; but in those days honesty had no sentinel, and the ruse was entirely successful.

“Our trusty and well-beloved, the right reverend father in God, Theophilus, Lord Bishop of Dromore,” and Sir Francis Annesley, “knight and baronet, one of our principal Secretaries in our Kingdom of Ireland,” were of the party. They endorsed at Carrickfergus the verdict which gainsaid the Londoners’ Charter, and handed over the Bann to the official who not only did not own it, but had been rewarded for giving up a fraudulent claim to it. Both magnates were acquainted with State policy. They knew the wishes of the King, and of the gift of the river to the City. Yet they soiled their hands as readily as if they had served an apprenticeship to the office of Deputy. Nothing was then too dirty for a dignitary.

As for the Londoners, being denied notice, they were left in the dark and made no sign. Their title having been affirmed by Allen at Derry on the 26th March, 1621, they could hardly have foreseen that on the 6th April, 1621, he would strive to undermine it at Carrickfergus. Still less were they likely to imagine that the nobleman, in whose Deputyship the Bann was made theirs, could be engaged in a plot with a prelate and a Secretary of State to filch it for himself. So they lost the non-tidal river. When the Carrickfergus “return” reached Dublin Chichester’s joy was made full. A Patent was sealed for him on the 20th November, 1621, in which the Bann, from the Salmon Leap at Coleraine to Lough Neagh, with its bed and soil, were declared his property, in the King’s name. Lough Neagh, too, was included, and the grant conferred a power to spread nets on the banks both of river and lake.

Everyone responsible for this knew that justice was outraged, but that mattered not. Lord Chichester could now boast that the fisheries were set in his grasp as firmly as parchment and the Great Seal could assure them. This achievement placed him on the pinnacle of conveyancing greatness. He had successfully brigaded a Bishop and a Secretary of State with an escheator, to flout the King, and got his Deputy to grant a Patent by which the Londoners were robbed. No treachery to Irish chiefs, or slaughter of kern or cleric, could compare with such a triumph.

In one respect he slightly changed his tactics. Instead of working on a single Patent, he got two made out for him—one containing the estates lawfully his, and the other those he had crookedly come by. This plan of a double issue had not been sanctioned by the King, and in other respects he also disregarded the Royal Letter.

Not long, however, was he left in peace. Probably the Corporation got wind of the cheat, for within two months James I. took significant action. The Lord High Treasurer was suddenly ordered abroad on a mission to the Palatinate in January, 1622. His co-mate and brother-in-exile, Sir Oliver St. John, who had just been raised to the peerage as Lord Grandison, was at the same time removed from the Deputyship. It was an unexpected downfall; and evidently some detractor had again slandered them to his Majesty. Both had to quit Ireland forthwith; but their removal was dignified with solemn rites, as befitted their estate. No occasion for malicious glee was afforded to the watchful natives. Wholesome monitions were privily administered, and a new discipline as to Patents was laid down, but public scandal was avoided.

In the following May, when they were well away, the King issued a biting direction to “make stay” of future grants, surrenders, and confirmations “till some safe course might be taken for the preserving of his rents and tenures.” Chichester, too, was forced before his departure to make a lease of Lough Neagh to the Londoners in perpetuity at a rent of £100 a year. As the Lough feeds the Bann, this undid much of his victory, and amounted to an admission that the river belonged to the Corporation.

It was through Buckingham’s favour that the Lord High Treasurer was sent abroad, and, as his cash defalcations had probably became as notorious at Court as his Patent conjurings, the King, doubtless, sanctioned his German mission to rid Ireland of his presence. An outcry which, had he remained at home, might have led to his being brought to justice, was thereby stifled. He was told to his face in the King’s presence by one of the Privy Council that he had so profited by the Plantation that his conduct was “against the honour of the King and the justice of the Kingdom.”

Chichester never returned to the country which for twenty years he had afflicted. In January, 1625, he died in London, three weeks before the death of James I. Within three months steps were taken by Charles I. to compel his heir to make good the £10,000 embezzled from the Crown out of the rents of the forfeited estates.

Fact-free Mr. Froude frames the wretch’s portrait as “the great Viceroy of Ireland—of all Englishmen who settled in the country the most useful to it.” Mr. Bagwell certifies in “Ireland Under the Stuarts” that “his integrity is unquestionable”!

CHAPTER XVII.
MORE “DISCOVERERS.”

Lord Falkland was appointed Deputy on the 1st April, 1622. This change James I. emphasised a month later by the protest just mentioned against the abuse of his Royal Letters under former Deputies.

Shortly after Falkland’s coming (Chichester being in Germany) the grants to Hamilton were impugned in the Irish Courts. Since the breakdown of Sir James Balfour’s Inquiry in 1618, “discoverers” had been dumb; but, in 1623, the Exchequer Barons took action, and several “Wakeman” Patents were held to be invalid. The judgments which condemned them are not extant; but Falkland was made aware of their effect, and was urged to pursue still more sweeping investigations. Counter-pressure, placed upon him by those to whom exposure meant ruin, prevailed. He halted, and nothing further was done.

At first the new Deputy (heedful of the warning of the King) tried to enrich himself by ways which differed from those of his predecessors. His most original proposal was to make Ireland a base for Algerine corsairs, so as to draw wealth from their inroads on international commerce. Large sums were offered by him to the Duke of Buckingham, the Prince of Wales, and the Secretary of State for permission to attract these raiders to prey on shipping from Irish harbours. The design bespoke the man, and when it was rejected he gave “protections” to Dutch pirates and other Freebooters who haunted the coasts, trafficked with them, and dealt in their cargoes. Unsatisfied by his gains from such sources, Falkland sought riches in other fields. He applied for leave to confiscate the property of the loyal Corporation of Waterford in order to seize it for himself, and when courses like these proved unprosperous he fell back into the beaten paths of previous Deputies.

Naturally he set his face against any attempt to unravel the threads of the Patent scandals, but Chichester’s memory grew more and more unfragrant, and in 1627 a Munster notable, Sir William Power, lodged informations that the Wakeman Grants were “fraudulently passed without the intention of King James.” Sir William at the same time denounced the Patents lavished on Boyle, the new-made Earl of Cork. Power was connected by marriage with Boyle, but was at enmity with him over boundaries. On his complaint the English advisers of the Crown proceeded to ransack Boyle’s title to the 42,000 acres of the Desmond Estate, which he captured from Sir Walter Raleigh. The Attorney and Solicitor Generals for England, with three Serjeants-at-Law, pronounced it void, yet no step was taken against the “Wakeman” grants. A mysterious hand seemed outstretched to protect them.

On the 28th August, 1627, Charles I. declared the Crown was rightfully entitled to the Desmond lands annexed by Boyle under Chichester, and in 1628 Sir William Power journeyed to London to feed his grudge and fill his pocket. He saw Mr. Hadsor, the King’s Lawyer in Irish affairs, who certified that Lord Cork’s Patent of 1614 was unsigned, and that he “believed it may be false.” The reflection on Chichester’s Deputyship which this carried was far-reaching. Hadsor valued the Royal interest in the lands at £50,000 (now half a million). He complained that the Attorney-General gave away his legal secrets to Lord Cork, and on the 23rd August, 1628, the murder of the venal Duke of Buckingham by Felton at Portsmouth removed one mainstay to dishonesty. So on the 3rd September, 1628, King’s Letters condemning the grant were sent to Lord Falkland by Hadsor. As to the rest of Power’s “discovery” Hadsor (as before) said nothing. Possibly after the Attorney-General’s treachery he thought his hands too full to attack the Wakeman Patents. He was well-advised, for hardly had he taken action when the inevitable fairy godfather to rascaldom lit upon the scene. Lord Cork invoked the help of other corrupt courtiers, and a “coat of darkness” was thrown over the traffickings of landsharks both in Munster and Ulster. This saved the Desmond Estate for Boyle, and by the same agencies the onslaught on the Wakeman Patents was broken down. The knaves were all interlinked.

Later in the same year (1628) Colonel Forbes, a Scotch laird (ancestor of Lord Granard), who had come to Ireland in 1620, with his clan, to quell disturbances, appeared as a “discoverer.” Forbes had been rewarded for past services with a baronetcy and grants of land in Leitrim and Longford. Undiscouraged by former failures, he brought the Wakeman Patents anew under the eye of Charles I.—probably reckoning that Buckingham’s death had banished the chief obstacle to justice.

Forbes’s petition was referred to the Commissioners for Irish Causes in London, and they reported favourably on it to the King. Falkland was ordered by his Majesty to recover the property for the Crown and to confer on Forbes one-third of the Ulster Fisheries with a gift of £300.

By this time, however, the Deputy was plunged in the throes of a scandal springing from his own misdeeds. He had promoted the attempt to seize the estate of the last Gaelic Chief, O’Byrne of Wicklow, and dared not suffer his assistants to be impeached for former wrongdoing. To allow Forbes to take the lid off the cauldron in which the hell-broth of the previous reign lay simmering was not Falkland’s notion of statecraft. The new “discovery” was no more to him than that of Sir William Power or Sir James Balfour, and less than that of the Exchequer Barons. Possibly he quieted Forbes with the gift of £300, for the “discoverer” went abroad soon afterwards and never returned, being killed in a duel in Hamburg in 1632. Still his shipping-off did not benefit Falkland, whose agony was about to begin. The eyes of England, as well as Ireland, were fastened on his treatment of the O’Byrnes, and both kingdoms resounded with rumour against him. Throughout two reigns and three Deputyships the persecution of the O’Byrnes lasted. It comprised the whole art and mystery of Patent-shuffling and confiscation. To understand the story is to understand the methods and policy of Chichester and his successors. It is the Southern counterpart of the Ulster tragedy.

The reasons which impelled the Northern Lords—O’Neill, O’Donnell, and Maguire—to go into exile can best be realised by studying the doom of the Wicklow chief who held his ground. Carte (an English Protestant historian), writing in 1736, summarises the case as “very extraordinary, and contains in it such a scene of iniquity and cruelty that, considered in all its circumstances, it is scarce to be paralleled in any age or country.” Since then, Carte’s disclosures have been supplemented by State papers and other records which furnish dates and details that he lacked. They confirm the judgment on his work passed by Dr. Johnson, who styled it “that book of authority.” Carte’s narrative largely follows the “Remonstrance” lodged on behalf of the O’Byrnes, which fails to disentangle the parts played by Chichester, by St. John, and by Falkland, but mingles all together. In the following condensed account the action taken by each Deputy is separately shown, while needful particulars are added from the State Papers and Patent Rolls.

CHAPTER XVIII.
LORD FALKLAND’S SHAME.

The harrying of the O’Byrnes under Chichester was largely carried out through Sir William Parsons, his Surveyor-General—a seasoned and hardy pillager. Parsons was a Commissioner at Limavady in 1609, when the inquisition which “found” the Bann for Sir Arthur to forestall the Londoners was concocted. In 1621 St. John nominated him to take “office” for the fabrication of the “Carrickfergus” Patent which abstracted the non-tidal Bann from the Corporation. He was the chief author of the Antrim inquisition of 12th July, 1605, which “found” that the King owned the “pool” of Lough Neagh “towards Claneboy.”

For twenty years Parsons’ leisure had been devoted to trying to rob Felim O’Byrne, who stood by the Crown in trying times, despite the slogans of O’Neill and others to “rise out.” O’Byrne’s father (fighting Feagh MacHugh) had been made prisoner, and his head spiked over the Tower of Dublin Castle. His mother (Rose O’Toole) was convicted of treason and sentenced to be burnt on the 27th May, 1595.

Queen Elizabeth, however, in 1598 ordered Felim Patents of his estate as a reward for good service, and issued a “general pardon” to him and his helpers on the 3rd March, 1603. James I. on 16th September, 1603, in his “instructions for Ireland,” commanded that O’Byrne’s “country” be given to Felim according to such limitations as the Lord Lieutenant should prescribe. Nevertheless Sir Richard Graham, one of the Commanders at the victory of Kinsale, obstructed the issue of any Patent, and got two “offices” taken by Parsons as Surveyor-General on the 14th March, 1604, to try to oust Felim altogether. These inquisitions—strive as they might—went in favour of O’Byrne, and on 26th March, 1606, he received a Patent. His territory was set down (by the usual trick of diminishing coveted land) at twelve thousand acres, exclusive of bog, wood, and mountain. It included the districts of Ranelagh and Cosha in Co. Wicklow, and the owner’s proved loyalty was certified by Devonshire. A fortnight after the date of Felim’s Patent, Devonshire died, but for some years O’Byrne was left in peace. Then came the Ulster Plantation and the dispersal of its Chiefs. When the North was crushed Chichester, in spite of Royal Letters and “offices,” authorised Graham to seize part of Cosha for himself.

Knowing to what this must lead, O’Byrne petitioned the English Privy Council for justice. An Inquiry was ordered, and Graham thereat contended (in the teeth of English policy) that the clan-lands belonged to the kerns as freeholders, and not to the Chief. The Commissioners scouted this doctrine and reported in Felim’s favour. To hold otherwise would have knocked on the head the Tudor system of vesting the tribal territories in the Chiefs and then voiding their Patents so that escheats might be easily obtained. Sir Richard Graham, smarting under defeat, and doubtless primed by Chichester (although he had now ceased to be Deputy), sent his son to London to bribe Villiers, afterwards Duke of Buckingham, to influence his Majesty to disregard the Commissioners’ report.

The Earl (afterwards Duke) of Richmond, another favourite, was procured to crave fair play for O’Byrne. The strife at the Council table between the courtiers grew so high that the King allowed them each to name two Commissioners to re-try the case. This was unjust to Felim, who had already proved his right twice. Still he had to take such mercy as he could buy. Mr. Hadsor and Sir Francis Annesley were on this Commission, and Hadsor spoke Gaelic.

When the third hearing was opened, Parsons came forward to confirm Graham’s story that the clan-lands were those of freeholders and were not O’Byrne’s. He produced a book written out by himself to prove it, but O’Byrne demolished the invention by giving in evidence the “inquisitions” previously taken under Parsons’ hand. These certified the Chief’s ownership, and proved that the “book” was trumped up. Unabashed, Parsons and Graham fell back on the shift practised by Sir John Davies in 1607 at the trial of O’Cahan v. O’Neill. They reshuffled the cards and argued that the lands belonged to neither disputant, but had escheated to the Crown on the death in rebellion of Feagh MacHugh.

In England no escheat without trial and no post-mortem attainder could take place unless Statute authorised it in a special case. There an attainder after death was not tolerated, even against Jack Cade (an Irishman), but Anglo-Irish lawyers disregarded everything that tempered a violent prerogative. Therefore, although both King James and Queen Elizabeth had granted the estate to Felim, and Graham’s pretensions were exploded, the Commissioners adjourned the Inquiry.

It was probably in connection with a previous investigation that the “Egmont MSS.” record, under date 20th November, 1612, that Sir Richard and Thomas Graham were fined and imprisoned for disturbing a Commission which sat at Imaal, Co. Wicklow, to inquire into concealed lands of the Crown. They beat the witnesses, calling them “a company of garron-stealers and thieves,” threatened Peter Delahyde, one of his Majesty’s counsel, and drew swords on a gentleman who rebuked them. Years were now wasted over the dispute, and in 1616 St. John succeeded Chichester. Parsons asked the new Deputy to appoint himself and other choice spirits to inquire on behalf of the Crown into the alleged escheat. St. John, as became a pupil of Chichester, cheerily agreed, and on the 4th July, 1616, Parsons made a “return” declaring that O’Byrne’s lands were the inheritance of Feagh MacHugh killed in rebellion.

This naked statement was true, but not the whole truth. Its half-truth was equivalent to a finding that the property had escheated to the Crown in spite of the Royal Letters of Elizabeth and James recognising Felim. Zeal for the Crown was the pretext for Parsons’ inquisition; but once an escheat was declared the King’s interest sank out of sight and Graham was empowered to seize O’Byrne’s estate for himself. Once more the Chief appealed to England. There justice was slow, far off, and dear; but he got it; and on the 4th November, 1616, Felim obtained a King’s Letter requiring St. John to regrant him the lands. This command was flagrantly disobeyed. Piety was the badge of all plunderers, and Graham had promised to endow two churches in Cosha to spread the Lutheran gospel. Such love for religion, pure and undefiled, moved St. John on the 24th February, 1617, to give him a Patent for Cosha.

Again Felim resorted to London, and again a fresh Commission was issued to do him right. The new Commissioners, on the 17th December, 1617, confirmed O’Byrne’s title, but with dogged tenacity Graham got St. John to appoint judges to re-hear the dispute. The struggle seemed unending, and although evidence was taken afresh by the judges they dared not announce a conclusion either way. On the 23rd January, 1618, St. John transmitted their notes to London and asked for directions. Delay and expense provoked a compromise, and Felim by a new order was restored to three-fourths of his lands, but Graham’s piety in purveying a brace of churches for Cosha was rewarded by one-fourth. To leave O’Byrne insecure, no fresh Patent was issued to him; and soon afterwards Lord Falkland became Deputy.

Parsons was now promoted head of the Court of Wards and Receiver-General, but he remained as of yore a-swoop for prey. The plot against the O’Byrnes was revived. Felim, being the only Chief left in Erin, was treated as a blot on the landscape, and in 1622 Falkland reported him to the Privy Council as an ill-disposed person. He owned too big a property to be allowed to remain in his mountains undisturbed. The reply to the Deputy from England, however, discouraged attack. The “Spanish marriage” was at that moment being negotiated by Buckingham, and Falkland learnt that, if the heir to the throne were to wed a Catholic, a fresh persecution of his bride’s co-religionists might appear untimely. When the match with Spain was broken off in 1623 he took a freer hand.

On the 27th August, 1624, he authorised Parsons to hold a Commission to examine O’Byrne’s title, as if it were a new problem troubling the sages of the law. The Surveyor-General held “office,” and returned a finding that Felim’s estate had been forfeited by his father’s rebellion and death—ignoring both grants and pardons from King James and Queen Elizabeth. Falkland, ablaze for law and order, wrote to the Privy Council on the 25th March, 1625, asking them to consider “how vain a thing it is to suppose to content Felim and his sons by indulgently suspending the taking of the lands in his country.” The English authorities gave this presentation of the equities no countenance, and King James, in one of the last dispatches before his death (March, 1625), begged Falkland “to maintain inviolable the credit of his great office.”

Yet Charles I. was not a year on the Throne when the Deputy engaged himself in a still more cruel plot to uproot the O’Byrnes.

On the 13th March, 1626, he ordered the eldest and youngest of Felim’s sons, Brian and Turlough, whom he described as “the most civilly bred of all his sons,” to be arrested as “dangerous conspirators.” They were kept prisoners in Dublin Castle for five months; and all the enginery of the State was employed to suborn witnesses against them. Neighbours were seized and subjected to torture. One Archer “was put naked on a burning gridiron and burnt with gunpowder under his buttocks and flanks, and at last suffered the strapado till he was forced to accuse the brothers.” Two poor wretches named Kavanagh yielded on the rack and consented to swear falsely; but, when their agonies ceased, they retracted. For this they were sentenced to death, and were offered “pardon” if they would repeat the “evidence” in court. Their constancy remained unshaken, and both were hanged. This shortage of perjurers led to a crisis. “True bills” on which Brian and Turlough could be arraigned had to be “found” by a Grand Jury. Being Wicklowmen, the brothers were ordered for trial to another venue. Carlow was as illegal as any, but the Grand Jurors there twice declined to find “true bills.” Twice were they brought up in batches to the Star Chamber in Dublin and fined, but twice they refused to yield. They would not “find” for any fining. Perhaps they recalled the reward meted out to the foreman of the Lifford Grand Jury, Sir Cahir O’Doherty, for declaring Hugh O’Neill an “outlaw” twenty years earlier. Thanks to their obstinacy, the brothers were set free, and Brian O’Byrne sailed in triumph for England. There he was received at Court, and on the 29th August, 1627, he secured two fresh Letters from Charles I. recognising the family title.

Thus the warrants of three British Sovereigns—Elizabeth, James, and Charles—affirmed their rights. Still Falkland entertained no idea of being hindered by royal stumbling-blocks. The only effect of Brian’s success on his mind was to resolve him to a fiercer vendetta. This time he proceeded on a grand scale, and on the 2nd November, 1627, ordered Felim with his five sons (including Brian and Turlough) to be committed to prison in Dublin Castle. There they were loaded with irons, denied food for a long period, and were deprived of visits.

The crime of which they were accused was that they had relieved a banished man named Kavanagh who returned home before his seven years of deportation had run out. This was true, but the man was unknown to them. Kavanagh had never been convicted, nor was he outlawed, and hospitality was merely given to a passing stranger. This was no offence, although it might be docketed in the twentieth century as “hostile association.”

Falkland, having now the whole family in his clutches, prepared the finishing stroke. On the 5th July, 1628, he represented to Charles I. how “absolutely inconvenient” it would be to allow the O’Byrnes to hold “the territory of Ranelagh.” They were already bereft of Cosha, and on 22nd July, 1628, he began taking depositions against them, in secret signed with his own hand—with Sir William Graham (son to Richard) as Gaelic interpreter. A week later, without waiting for any reply or authority from his Majesty, or procuring their attainder, the Deputy proceeded to distribute the remainder of O’Byrne’s estate piecemeal amongst his confederates.

Seven Patents for Ranelagh (unsupported by any King’s Letter) were issued by Falkland to his subordinates in August, 1628. The recipients were Sir William Parsons, Sir William Graham (the translator), Lord Docwra, Lord Esmond, Sir Roger Jones (the “rascal’s” son, afterwards Lord Ranelagh), Sir Thomas Stockdale, and Lord Chancellor Loftus. The last-named, although an enemy of the Deputy, had as Lord Chancellor to be given a morsel, to keep his mouth shut, and consent to apply the Great Seal to the parchments of the other six.

That the Patents were without Royal sanction is clinched by the answer the King gave on the 4th September, 1628, to Falkland’s dispatch of the 5th July. Therein Charles I. tells him, after the Patents had been issued: “It is our pleasure that you shall set down your further opinions precisely what is the best course to be taken for the settling of those lands,” and he promised then to “declare his resolution touching the same.” A month previously the Patents had been distributed amongst the Seven Champions of Law and Order. Having stolen the property of the O’Byrnes, Falkland next proceeded to concert measures to do away with the family altogether.

In August, 1628 (the month in which the Patents were sealed) the Chief and his sons were arraigned at Wicklow. Warned by the Carlow fiasco, Parsons saw to it that the Grand Jurors should be men having no qualification to serve. He mustered a faction of stalwarts in Wicklow Courthouse as a counterfeit Grand Jury, who readily found “True Bills” against the prisoners. Their guilt, however, had still to be proved before a Petit Jury; so the trial was put off, and everyone likely to be a witness for them was seized under martial law and put on the rack, or hanged.

These oppressions, tortures, and captivities shocked the country, and the wail of the Clansmen arose on the westering winds. Its echo was heard even in England. Wherefore, Sir Francis Annesley (Lord Mountnorris), who had acted as one of the Commissioners in the dispute raised by Sir Richard Graham, as to Felim’s title, flamed up against Falkland. Annesley had assented to the Patent-outrage at Carrickfergus in 1621 in behoof of Chichester, but the Wicklow tragedy was too black for him. Largely by his influence a Royal Warrant of unusual peremptoriness was dispatched to Dublin on the 3rd October, 1628. It ordered the suspension of all proceedings against the O’Byrnes, and commanded the Deputy not to reply, lest he should make correspondence an excuse for delay. It appointed a Commission consisting of the Protestant Primate—Ussher; the Protestant Archbishop of Dublin—Bulkeley; Lord Chancellor Loftus; the Chief Justice (Sir George Shurley), and Sir Arthur Savage, Vice-Treasurer, to inquire into the case. Felim, however, was first declared by the Privy Council to be “not only unblamable, but to have been of extraordinary obedience.” The Duke of Buckingham’s assassination in the previous August had laid a powerful opponent low.

The Commissioners sat in Dublin for a fortnight in November and December, 1628, and took the depositions of 37 witnesses. They probed no point of title and confined themselves to the criminal charge; but in the result the O’Byrnes were fully exonerated, and were restored to liberty after a close confinement of 14 months. This blow at oppression resounded through the land; but it came too late to undo the Patents of August, 1628. The plunder of Felim, after a struggle lasting a quarter of a century, had been consummated. He died within a year of his release. His wife, heartbroken by the action of Parsons’ Grand Jury, which she supposed meant destruction for her sons as well as her husband, perished within two days of its finding. By order of Falkland her body was dug up and carried away three weeks after its burial in Wicklow Churchyard. The local vicar, Fox, attended to the exhumation, and the remains were removed to Rathdrum. There they were again disturbed, but after identification “the State” allowed the earth to be closed over the corpse. This indignity has never been explained or denied.

Falkland, in a letter to the Privy Council (8th December, 1628) tried to excuse his courses against the family, but his dispatch makes sorry reading. It consists of abuse of the Royal Commissioners (except the Primate and Chief Justice), and of attacks on the reputation of Felim. The father of the gallant who fell at Newbury attempts no reply to any of the evidence taken by the Commission as to the arrests and cruelties. That remains unanswered to this day.

In April, 1629, Falkland was recalled by the unanimous voice of the Privy Council. He wrote to Charles I. on the 13th April, 1629:—“I hear that the question of Felim is to be made the ground of my recall owing to the machinations of the Chancellor and Commissioners. It is a disgrace to your Royal Justice that I should be recalled before being heard in my defence.” The King did not reply. In July, 1629, the Lord Chancellor (Loftus) and Lord Cork were ordered to “take up the Sword” and act in his place.

Falkland remained in Dublin for several months, and the spirit which beset him burns fiercely through his final dispatches. He threatened Sir Francis Annesley with the Star Chamber for his “undutiful contempt” in saving Felim. He sued Sir Arthur Savage for alleged debt; and his warning to the English Secretary of State gleams with a comic touch:—“I pray you think of the results that will follow if Patents (which Gondomar[1] did term the common faith) be overridden. Your fortune rests on the sanctity of such Patents.”

He returned to England not hopelessly disgraced, for he was appointed to the Privy Council; and the King allowed him to name a Committee of that body in November, 1629, to investigate his conduct. If the Committee reached any conclusions or took any evidence they have been withheld from the world. On the 12th November, 1629, he boastfully wrote to Primate Ussher that at Court there was “not one wry look in any creature towards me.”

Falkland’s daughter married Sir Terence O’Dempsey, who was also implicated in the conspiracy to strip the O’Byrnes. In 1631 the ex-Deputy’s retirement was soothed by O’Dempsey’s being translated into “Lord Glenmalire.”

The King having ridded Ireland of Falkland, thought Deputies a trifle out of fashion. So Lord Cork and Chancellor Loftus were allowed to govern the country for nearly four years as “Justices.” In that interval their own Patents, at least, were safe from scrutiny. Lord Cork sometimes scattered gems of wisdom through his correspondence as lustrous as Falkland’s. In 1631 he sighed:—“This place is not a comfortable one unless a man consoles himself by making a private fortune—as has been the custom of my predecessors.”

Under Strafford, in 1639, a Statute was passed whereby the “Birns Country” with “Ranelagh, Cosha, Shillela and Vartry” were declared the King’s. This was done, apparently, for the purpose of enabling valid Patents to be issued. By this arrangement some of the O’Byrnes must have recovered patches of their estate, as they paid the Crown £17,000 for “remedy of Defective Title.” Ere the century ended Cromwellian and Williamite confiscations made this investment a barren one for the family.