CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE FINAL FORGERY.
Apart from the mis-statements of the archivist, the absence of information which has since become available told heavily for the disputed Patents.
Although the King’s Letter to Thomas Irelande only authorised a gift to the value of £100 a year, the Courts were not advised that it had been drawn upon by a previous grant. Before 1606, if not then sterile, its fecundity had been much diminished. Yet the Patent of 1606 gave away a million’s worth of property besides the fisheries. The improbability of James I.’s consenting to this devastation of Crown estate would naturally attract suspicion as to the genuineness of the grant, had attention been called to its sweeping nature. Even if the tapster at the “Half-Moon” had presented the Crown with £1,678 6s. 8d., the likelihood of royal sanction for a grossly excessive requital was slight. “New lamps for old” may be given away in Aladdin-land; but in the England of James I. it was inconceivable that his Majesty would consent to so reward such a payment. In any case it was incredible that he would allow his subordinates to part with a million on a warrant for £100, with leagues of river and square miles of lake flung in as a “tilla” or “hors d’œuvre.”
The Courts were unaware of the extent of the Patent; and though, in one sense, the rest of its contents did not touch the question of the fisheries, its magnitude bore strongly on the question of a genuine emanation of the Royal will. The same challenge to the realities arose under the hasty conveyance of the plunder by Hamilton to Chichester, for which no honest explanation could exist. Again, its stowage away and muffling up in the bogus Patent to Bassett spoke shrilly of illegality, but as to all this no warning hint came from any expert to guide his Majesty’s Judges.
Chichester’s freak surrender before Archbishop Jones, and Allen’s misconduct in fathering the Inquisition of 1621 in the teeth of his Derry verdict, may be said to have been concerned with the Bann alone. Still the grant of Lough Neagh was so intimately linked with the river that any tribunal would have felt itself assisted by a full disclosure of facts where questions of good faith and probabilities had to be determined. An artificial darkness as to the origin and bearing of the Patents prevailed, and in such murkiness the law pronounced on their authenticity. Shade shaded shadiness.
This obscurity tended indirectly to the acceptance of another forlorn document concerning the modern history of the fisheries. The lease to May, which the House of Lords in 1878 was denied sight of, was at last put in evidence, and its value had to be appraised. When produced, the woeful spectacle it presented explained the reluctance to allow it to be examined at the trial in 1874.
Erasures, in which battalions of interlineations lay entrenched, pitted the parchment; and its plight spoke plainly of felonious mutilation. Who had been at work to change it, and to what purpose?
The author of the forgery was long dead, but the extent and nature of his operations could easily be traced. No sleuth hound was needed to follow the track. The original lease had been registered in the Dublin Registry of Deeds in 1805, and a “Memorial” of its contents, signed by Lord Donegall, was lodged there. Such Memorials must (by Statute) contain the description of premises in the exact words of the deed presented for registration, and this one had been framed on Lord Donegall’s behalf by his solicitor and was signed by his lordship with his own hand.
Registry officials only receive and file Memorials when, by a comparison with the originals, they are satisfied that the law has been complied with. When, therefore, the so-called “lease to May” was produced in 1908 its challengers straightway resorted to and compared it with Lord Donegall’s Memorial. A glance at the “Memorial” established that there had been foul play as to the lease. It showed that what had been registered in 1805 was a lease of the Bann only and of a salmon fishery therein, while the so-called “original” granted “the salmon, trout, and scale fisheries of Lough Neagh and the River Bann.” This laidly “fakement” explained the secret of the non-production of the lease in 1874-8. A forgery had been committed, and those who then had its custody felt too conscience-stricken to attempt to make it evidence.
Other differences also exposed its falsity. One of the most extraordinary was the contrast between the “Lease” and the “Memorial” as to the mode of witnessing Lord Donegall’s signature. Two witnesses attested the “lease,” whereas the “Memorial” showed there had been three to the original. The same three persons attested Lord Donegall’s signature to the “Memorial” itself. Had the case been reversed, and if the names of three witnesses figured on the “lease” while only two appeared on the “Memorial,” the absence of a name from the latter might be explained by carelessness or mischance. No such excuse could account for the disappearance of a signature from an “original” and its presence in a secondary document. Only one conclusion from such a variance seemed possible, yet the plaintiffs insisted that the “Memorial” was unreliable, and the piebald parchment genuine.