The King (with Ormonde beside him) could see no reason for the haste with which his courtier urged that Sir John’s lease should be renewed. He put aside the petition and left the Bishop’s report unnoticed. Secretary Nicholas was then moved to jog his Majesty and request “that a warrant be prepared for his royal signature for drawing a Patent in Sir John Clotworthy’s favour, according to the report of the Bishop of Derry.” Still Charles made no sign. Possibly some recollection of his engagements to the London Corporation crossed his mind; perhaps the Duke of Ormonde dropped a hint in Chichester’s interest; or his Majesty may have sought for a reason why he should extend such benevolence to Cromwell’s righthand man. At any rate, the King was not touched to persuasion.
The feverish Clotworthy now tried another stratagem. He knew that if a King’s Letter were sent to Ireland authorising a Patent (as Secretary Nicholas recommended), this would involve delay and inquiry, and that the arrival of Lord Donegall, or the intervention of the Londoners, might prove fatal to his hopes. He, therefore, changed his hand; and, instead of an Irish Patent, pressed for a lease direct from the King at Whitehall. This would involve an innovation in procedure startling to Crown lawyers. Even Cromwell had not attempted any such inroad on ancient usage, but carried out his behests by the olden method of sending a Signet Letter to Dublin to authorise a Patent there under the Great Seal of Ireland. The needs of Sir John, however, brooked no delay, and sticklers for form could be “squared.” Still the King, in spite of the pressure put upon him, refused to yield, and for three months he held firm.
Towards the end of September, 1660, Lord Donegall reached London, greatly to Clotworthy’s discomfiture. To anticipate his arrival Sir John sent £20 to the Crown Office in Dublin to pay a half-year’s rent which would come due under Basil’s lease on the 29th September. This thrusting of payment on the royal officials was an attempt to rivet his claims and pretend they had been recognised on behalf of the King. The rent was dispatched almost to the day, though the lease gave six weeks for payment. Whether he had been as punctual in the time of the “usurper”—if he paid at all—is more doubtful; and no evidence of any other payment, before or after, exists. Then to strengthen his influence at Court Sir John threw another cast, and struck up relations with Colonel Daniel O’Neill, Groom of the Bedchamber and head of the princely house of Ulster.
O’Neill was the intimate and trusted friend of Charles II., on whom the growing difficulties of the Irish situation were pressing awkwardly. He expected to be restored to his estates in Down, having battled for the Crown on nearly every field in the three kingdoms. O’Neill had no love for Clotworthy, but still less for the Chichesters, because of the imprisonment of his father, Sir Con, in Carrickfergus by the “great Deputy” in 1603, and the forced partition of Claneboy with Hamilton and Montgomery to purchase pardon for a trumped-up “treason.” Sir John to enlist his help promised to secure the restitution of his property, part of which he had himself come by, and an understanding between them was arrived at in the crisis of Irish affairs at Court. Charles II., beset by conflicting and distracting demands, saw no way of keeping his word to the rival claimants who thronged upon him. In the Breda Declaration he had pledged himself equally to the Catholic Royalists and to their Republican supplanters. Compromise seemed impossible, and the King was caught in a vice, without hope of honourable escape, for both sides pressed pleas that could not be overlooked.
Coote’s faction, at the Convention in Dublin, demanded by resolution that all the estates of the Adventurers, as they stood on the 7th May, 1659, should be confirmed by Act of Parliament. Under such an arrangement, Clotworthy’s lease, and many other frauds, would have been legalised. A “settlement” so one-sided would destroy the hopes of the natives, and the Catholic soldiers who had surrounded Charles abroad raised such a protest that it was rejected by his Majesty. The disappointed Cromwellians waxed wrathful, and to soothe them it became known that any alternative they put forward which offered an outlet for the King’s embarrassment would be accepted.
On the 9th November, 1660, there waited on Charles at Whitehall a trio consisting of Clotworthy, Lord Broghill (Boyle), and Sir Audley Mervyn. They produced a paper showing that all-round justice could be done, and that there was land galore for every claimant. The ingenious Clotworthy had found the key to the maze in which his Majesty was enmeshed. It was a blessed discovery. His acreages and estimates were accepted with royal grace and a total absence of investigation. The scheme he broached—known afterwards as “the famous paper”—became the basis of the “Act of Settlement” of 1662, and was hailed by courtly experts as a solution of the insoluble. The King could now turn away from a knotty problem to lighter themes, and naturally his obduracy towards Sir John’s petition for a lease melted away. Such was his gratitude that he not only promised to confirm it, but conferred on the author of the “famous paper” the peerage of Massereene. The lease secured the Bann, as well as Lough Neagh, to Clotworthy, although the river had for years been in the possession of the Londoners.
The “famous paper” in effect embodied the original demand of the Cromwellian Convention under a different guise. More fair-seeming than that project, it was equally fatal to Royalist hopes. Thus Sir John was the artificer of both his own and his party’s fortune on that famous night at Whitehall. When he bade his Majesty “good evening” he might well deem himself a thrice-lucky adventurer. He must have chuckled heartily as he strode to his lodgings at the “Three Elms” in Chandos Street at the thought of the great ones he had hoodwinked and the obstacles he had overcome. To take in Cromwell over the “lost pension” and win his Signet Letter for Lough Neagh; to bribe Henry Cromwell and the Dublin Executive to super-add the Bann; were strokes of genius; but to beguile Charles II. into giving kingly confirmation to a fraudulent lease about which even Cromwell had been deceived, and gain a peerage in the process, was a success almost uncanny. The King and the doomsman of his father alike outwitted; the Corporation of London and their enemies, the Chichesters, alike befooled; the friends of Laud and Strafford enlisted and placated; and every minor difficulty surmounted—these made up a combination of achievement which entitles the student of villainy to bespeak for Clotworthy a special niche in the gallery of rogues.
To outpace his competitors in securing the grant he accepted a lease from the King direct, instead of obtaining a Patent such as he got from Cromwell. No authority existed for the issue of a lease of Irish Crown property lacking the Great Seal of Ireland, and no such lease was binding. Nevertheless, by this means a sidelong Royal sanction was given light-heartedly to a grant of Lough Neagh as well as the non-tidal Bann. At that moment the new Charter for the Londoners, granting them the entire Bann, was being prepared, and was shortly afterwards enrolled, in repugnancy to the Lease.
The new-made Lord Massereene next arranged to baulk Colonel O’Neill so that he could retain the lands he had promised to restore him. O’Neill was married to the Countess of Chesterfield and had been schooled a Protestant under the patronage of Archbishop Laud. He was famed as “of a courage very notorious.” The operation of the Act of Settlement in his case illustrates the fate which befell Royalists less favoured. To thwart O’Neill, a fair-seeming proviso was inserted in the draft Bill of “Settlement.” It declared merely that, for every estate given up by the Planters, they should receive equivalent lands elsewhere. Nothing could sound more reasonable.
The new peer and his friends, however, were determined that the “joyful Restoration” of his Majesty should bring joy to no one in Ireland but the King’s late enemies. Their faction was led by men well versed in affairs of State; while their victims were either returned exiles or persons long estranged from Courts and Parliaments.