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.