By this compromise they acknowledged his ownership of their own waters, and the long struggle between the City which financed the Plantation and its adversaries fizzled out in a dismal attornment. A title, guaranteed to them by the charters and promises of three Kings and the parchments of Oliver Cromwell, was abandoned for ever. Holding genuine and undoubted grants, they did homage to the suspect scrivenery of the freebooters who for three centuries had plotted to despoil them. What could explain such a nerveless breakdown? No doubt Fitzgibbon’s bemusement as to the Act of Settlement misled them, but why was there no one to unravel the mystery of iniquity lurking behind the deeds of 1661, 1656, 1621, 1611, 1608, 1606, or 1603-4?

In 1872, when they capitulated, the work of the Irish and English Record Offices had shed much light on the grants and confiscations of the Stuart and Cromwellian periods. The documents in the Rolls and Exchequer Offices had been translated, calendared, and indexed. State papers, inquisitions, and MSS. from a number of libraries had been published. It was with all these sources of information thrown open that the Irish Society, having begun their assertion of title, tamely acknowledged the overlordship of their ancient enemy.

When the richest Corporation in the world, and the Imperial city of the Empire, could be baffled in such wise, what hope had the natives in days of yore of retaining their property against the greed of those who controlled the machinery of Irish government?

CHAPTER XXVII.
TWO GREAT TRIALS.

The acceptance by the Londoners of the parchments of Lord Donegall was an event of mournful significance for East Ulster. The concern of the public in it was immediate, for it created a new situation which affected everyone along the banks of Lough Neagh. When such powerful opponents confessed the validity of the Donegall grant, and accepted a lease thereunder, they became almost as much interested in maintaining it as the owner himself. Before their capitulation nobody had ventured to dispute the ancient custom by which the public fished in and trafficked over the Lough. The moment a great Corporation bent the knee to wrong, an unexpected impulse was given to the spirit of encroachment. Once they yielded, with what hope could poor men hold out?

The thought, therefore, struck the Donegall lessee who claimed Lough Neagh as being embraced in his demise that to turn a thousand free fishermen into toll-paying serfs would prove a profitable enterprise. To assert his “rights” he took proceedings to restrain them from catching salmon in the Lough. For five years this action dragged from Court to Court, and only ended in the House of Lords in 1878.

The plaintiff’s lease gave him dominion “within the known and accustomed limits of the fisheries as formerly in the tenure of Edward May.” What these limits were was not defined; and that they included Lough Neagh was disputed by the fishermen. To ascertain the extent of “the tenure of Edward May,” an examination of May’s lease was indispensable; but at the trial (which took place in Belfast in 1874) its production was refused. No explanation for withholding it was forthcoming, nor was the mystery which lay behind cleared up for 40 years. Nevertheless, on the strength of the Clotworthy grant and the Donegall Patent of 1660-61, Mr. Justice Lawson directed a verdict for the plaintiff—who, he afterwards ruled, had “as clear a documentary title as ever was submitted to a Court.”

The fishermen applied for a new trial, and the Court of Exchequer granted it, largely because of the failure to produce May’s lease. Against this decision the plaintiff appealed, but the Appellate Chamber was equally divided, so in 1878 he took the case to the House of Lords. There the “clear documentary title” produced small impression. For though the Patent from Charles II. granted Lough Neagh to Lord Donegall, the Law Lords agreed that the King’s power to make the grant must be proved in the same way as if he were a private individual.

Lord Chancellor Cairns laid down that it would be “a legitimate and necessary subject of inquiry how and from whom, and subject to what conditions or qualifications, this possession or proprietorship was obtained.” Its history, and especially how it became vested in the King, were “of very great importance,” and it was ruled that to make the Crown title perfect there must, generally speaking, be “office found.” The dispensation from the necessity for finding “office,” which the Patent contained, was treated as a nullity, while the withholding of May’s lease provoked adverse criticism. The plaintiff’s appeal was, therefore, unanimously dismissed, and after this defeat he troubled the fishermen no more.

The judgment of the House of Lords confirmed with remarkable precision a legal opinion obtained in 1636 by Sir John Coke, Secretary of State to Charles I., as to the title to a Wicklow property which he was about to acquire. This old “opinion” ran:—“The Letters Patent granted of those lands by King James to John Wakeman are clearly void, for that there was never any inquisition taken upon them whereby it could legally appear the King had title to those lands, and the King could not grant that which he had not.” The view of the law in 1636 was a pithy anticipation of that laid down in 1878.