While the new Patent was being prepared, Cromwellian strategy in the Irish Parliament was at work; and in 1665 the “Act of Explanation” provided that existing grants would become void unless enrolled within two years. Busily as he strove, Lord Donegall could not get out his new Patent in these two years; and, when the last days of the period were approaching in 1667, he was driven, through lack of time, to enrol the hated grant of Strafford. The new one was never issued, and his whitewashing processes came to naught. He had hoped that, with a title freshly furbished, the Chichesters would go down to history unspattered, and that all proof of past disgrace would be wiped out. Only by the aid of the parchments of 1640 and 1662 could the mazy story of a sixty-year fraud be pieced together; and these he strove to get rid of like those of 1603. The skeleton in the family closet, however, still lay unburied and remained as grisly as before.
The failure to get the proposed Patent “past the Seal” in five years contrasts suggestively with the celerities of 1661, when ten days served the rinsings of a regicide Executive to produce a Patent disposing of the greatest fishery in the Three Kingdoms. No grant for the Donegall estates, therefore, exists (apart from that for the fisheries) save the misliked Patent of Strafford which Charles II. was prayed to “vacate”; after it had been sullenly left unenrolled for a generation. Despite the allegation that it was “forced” on Lord Chichester, it remains the sole title of a family of meritless intruders to the lands of the O’Neills and O’Dohertys. If Strafford’s wraith haunted Dublin Castle in 1667, what time his parchment was tardily lodged for enrolment, the ghost even of “Black Tom” must have wrestled with a smile.
As for the fishery Patent, hurriedly rushed forth by casual Lords Justices to cheat the Londoners and the public, it is the only warrant of the Deputy’s descendants to control Lough Neagh and the Bann. By its “virtue” the right enjoyed by the people of a province from time immemorial to earn a livelihood as their fathers did was challenged, and an exasperating monopoly attempted to be established.
Those who applaud the statecraft which resulted in the spoliation of the princes of Tyrone and Tirconnell may well ask themselves whether the breed which supplanted them is such a vast improvement. No catalogue heretofore drawn up of the sins of Irish chieftains brands them as cheats or forgers—though many other libels against them are extant from the pens of those by whom they were robbed.
CHAPTER XXV.
HOW TO LOSE AN EMPIRE.
In the century which followed the reign of the Stuarts no record worth mention remains of the doings of Lord Donegall’S descendants. Gaelic annalists, who would have cherished local chronicles, had been driven out; and British civilisation had not overtaken or undertaken their work. That the Chichester frauds formed part of a long-continued system practised by the heads of the Executive appears from another exposure made, nearly a century later, in the English House of Commons. After the Revolution, Charles Montagu (subsequently Earl of Halifax, who was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1694), was accused on the 16th February, 1698, of having in the previous year obtained for himself a grant, under the name of Thomas Railton, of forfeited estates in Ireland worth some £13,000. The lands included those of Lord Clancarty. Montagu, having a majority in the House, defiantly admitted the charge. In 1701, however, he was impeached, on this and other grounds. He again did not deny the facts, and pleaded the authority of King William III. Ultimately, the impeachment was abandoned as impracticable, but Montagu was struck off the Privy Council.
Many of the Elizabethan and Stuart grants reveal a purpose, not only to seize the land of the natives, but to reduce them into slavery. Elizabeth’s charter to the Smiths in 1571 gave, with the territory to be conquered, “native men and women” as chattels. Chichester declared in 1602 that the Irish “should be made perpetual slaves to her Majesty”; and he wished to send O’Cahan to the Virginias instead of to the Tower. In 1605 Hamilton was awarded by James I. “native men and women villeins and their followers.” In 1613 the charter to the Londoners enabled them to take “estrayed bondmen and bondwomen and villeins and their followers.” A Patent of Charles I. presented Hamilton, after he became Lord Claneboy, with “natives and villeins with their sequels.” Cromwell’s shipments of Irish youth as slaves to the Barbadoes was merely a development of this policy.
Small additional infamy, therefore, attaches to the “Protector” for giving effect to the designs of his predecessors. The spirit of the 17th century monarchs and his was the same towards the nation of which Attorney-General Davis declared:
“The Irish be a race of great antiquity, wanting neither wit nor valour. They received the Christian faith above 1,200 years since, and were lovers of music, poetry, and all kinds of learning, and possessed of a land abounding with all things necessary for the civil life of man.”
Earlier than Davies, Spenser of the “Faerie Queene” wrote in 1596:—