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.