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.