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.