In February, 1654, the London Corporation petitioned Cromwell to be restored to their Irish estates. The Protector readily consented. Indeed, his kingly victim had promised in 1641 to cancel the confiscations of the Star Chamber. A Commonwealth Patent regranting everything that had been seized from the City by Charles I. was enrolled at Westminster and Dublin in March, 1657. The Londoners retook possession beforehand, and once more became masters of the Bann.
Hardly were they reinstated when they fell victims to a second parchment-plot to filch the river away. This time it was contrived not by the Chichesters but by one of their prayerful pupils, Sir John Clotworthy. That adventurer (mentioned already as Pym’s tool in compassing the death of Strafford) was son to an old servitor of the “great Deputy,” Sir Hugh Clotworthy, who came to Ireland during the Elizabethan wars, and was appointed “Captain of the Boats” on Lough Neagh. In 1605 Hugh received from Chichester a grant of the lands of Massereene, and was afterwards knighted by him. In 1618 Sir Hugh was awarded a pension of 6s. 8d. a day for the joint lives of himself and his son, John, then not twelve years old.
Much history turns on this episode. Pensions for joint lives had just been prohibited by royal order, and Sir Hugh’s salary as “Captain of the Boats” was only £40 a year, while a pension of 6s. 8d. a day comes to £121 13s. 4d. a year. Even in Stuart days such a job could not stand. It took four years to unmask; and then, under pressure, the pension was gracefully “surrendered.”
After Charles I. came to the throne, Sir Hugh took advantage of the ignorance of the new Crown officials to ask for compensation for the “loss” of the pension. Although he deserved the stocks for having originally outwitted the Exchequer, the King in 1628 gave him £700, with a promise that his son should be appointed to a “company of horse.” Sir Hugh died in 1631; and, two years later, Sir John petitioned for his “company of horse.” The flight of time, and the changes in the personnel of the Government, had caused the case to be forgotten, so Sir John invented a new version of the pension, and kept back the fact that his father had received compensation for its loss. His petition was not granted; and when Strafford became Lord Lieutenant Sir John’s prayers ceased, for his political and religious leanings were not on the royal side.
As a member of the Irish Parliament, Clotworthy now began to mark himself out as a pugnacious Presbyterian. Hence Pym, and his backers in the English House of Commons, caused him to be elected for the pocket-borough of Malden, to abet their designs at Westminster against Strafford. There he became so zealous that for years he was an outstanding figure on all Committees manned by the anti-royalists. He helped to bring Strafford and Archbishop Laud to the scaffold, as well as his old school-fellow, Lord Maguire, and was of use to Cromwell in smoothing his path to power. In time, of course, Sir John met with the usual fate of the zealot, being expelled from the House of Commons and accused of embezzling war-stores intended for Ireland. In 1648 he fled to France; and, on venturing to return, was imprisoned. Cromwell released him, and later on admitted him to favour. To Clotworthy the saying is attributed that: “Religion should be preached in Ireland with the sword in one hand and the Bible in the other.”
When the wars ended, such a man found Oliver easy of approach, and he revived the demand for his “pension.” He had received his “company of horse,” and his father had pocketed £700 compensation; but, being a sturdy beggar, he got his petition referred to two leading Undertakers and friends, Lord Broghill (son of Lord Cork) and Colonel Arthur Hill. In spite of their kindliness towards him, they found his case too full of holes, and reported against it. On their advice the Cromwellian Privy Council resolved on the 25th April, 1656, that no claim for arrears of pension from the late King should be admitted. This was a courteous way of disposing of Clotworthy’s “grievance,” for they might have added that the pension was unlawful in its origin, and that both he and his father had been compensated for its loss. Yet, stale and untenable as Sir John’s pretensions were, his persistence carried the day. He stood in no awe of the Commonwealth Council; and, passing over its head, he appealed to his old friend the Protector, who called for a fresh report. This was enough. What were the terms of the report, or who made it, is unknown; but on the 13th May, 1656, Cromwell cited it as a reason for awarding compensation to Clotworthy. He surmounted the objections which subordinates had raised by basing his decision, not merely on the ground of extinguishing the “pension,” but of rewarding past services.
The reward took the form of a grant to Clotworthy of a lease of Lough Neagh for 99 years. Doubtless he craved the Bann also; but that was pledged to the City of London. A Signet Letter from Cromwell (patterned on a King’s Letter) authorised an Irish Patent in Sir John’s favour, at a rent to be settled by the Commonwealth Council in Dublin. That body was composed of his own cronies; Cromwell’s son, Henry, being chief of the Executive there. Irish grants were cheaply bestowed at that epoch; and, if the Lord Protector had been minded to give anyone a lease of the whole island, at a peppercorn rent, his power to do so could not be gainsaid.
Clotworthy at once journeyed to Ireland with the Signet Letter; and in July, 1656, presented it to Henry Cromwell. Instead of being content with the valuable gift he had received, he began an intrigue to enlarge it. In this he was abetted by the son of the great Puritan and his Council, who showed themselves as corrupt as the worst parasites of the murdered King. They fixed the rent on Lough Neagh at £5 per annum for the first seven years, and £6 thereafter. Then they conspired to extend the lease enormously beyond what Oliver bestowed. The men who had taken off a King’s head to found a Commonwealth, and who opened business with a psalm, leaned to all the vices which had made the monarchy of the Stuarts odious.
The Republican Attorney-General for Ireland was a person named Basil, who had come over to “plant” in Donegal some years earlier. Basil’s good fame in his own country was scanty; and when the House of Commons nominated him as escheator in Ireland the House of Lords for years withheld their approval to his appointment. His behaviour justified their forebodings. Taking Sir John Davies for his model, Basil played towards Clotworthy the part Davies had acted for Chichester. Untrammelled by supervision, he smuggled into Sir John’s lease of Lough Neagh a grant of the fishery of the Bann, from the Lough to the Salmon Leap at Coleraine. It was an exploit as remarkable in a Republican as any theretofore wrought in the name of a King.
Basil knew, of course, that the entire river was pledged to the Londoners, as his predecessor had known it in 1609. But, just as Davies abetted its capture by Chichester, so the Commonwealth Attorney-General in 1656 made State policy subservient to sordid private interest. Indeed the excuse could be invented for Davies, when he betrayed his trust, that the bargain with the Corporation was not then finally settled by the King. Basil, in 1656, knew that it had been perfected by the Lord Protector, and that the Bann was actually in the Londoners’ possession, when he conveyed it to Clotworthy. Moreover, having drafted a fraudulent lease, he certified that it was framed “according to the tenor of his Highness’s Letters of the 13th May, 1656.”
Every man of the Dublin Cromwellian Executive—viz., Henry Cromwell, R. Pepys, Miles Corbett, Robert Goodwin, and M. Thomlinson, signed the lease. These were the saints who represented all that was godly in a land “darkened by the mists of Popish superstition.” Of the five, Pepys was Chief Justice, and Corbett Chief Baron. That they subscribed with consenting minds, and not mechanically, sufficiently appears. Oliver’s Letter, in granting Lough Neagh, asked them to decide on the rent which the State was to receive for it. To carry out the cheat as to the Bann they had to fix two separate rents, one for the Lough and the other for the river. The Bann they set down at £35 for the first seven years, and £44 thereafter, and this brought home to them the fact that the river was seven times a more valuable fishery than Lough Neagh. Yet their instructions never mentioned the Bann. To complete the trick the Clerk of the Council, Thomas Herbert, certified that he had “entered and examined” the documents on which the lease was issued. Guilt, therefore, sat on the consciences of all, for not only had they given away Lough Neagh for a song, but they sacrificed without authority what on their own showing was seven times more valuable. The Londoners deemed the Lough worth £100 a year in 1622.
When the lease was enrolled the gang grew alarmed. Clotworthy, therefore, got Henry Cromwell to apply to his father’s secretary in London, John Thurloe, to cloak the fraud. In December, 1656, Henry implored Thurloe to obtain from his father a fresh Signet Letter sanctioning a grant which would include the Bann. Thurloe ignored his supplications, and thus the hypocrites were left in the plight of men who, to rob the City of London, had betrayed their master.
The Commonwealth Charter, which restored the estate of the Corporation, including the Bann, was issued three months later, and thus two repugnant grants came into existence. The Dublin junta kept their secret to themselves. Thurloe also held his peace, and in the following year Cromwell died. Thurloe, however, carefully preserved the correspondence, and after the Restoration hid it behind the ceiling of a garret in his chambers at Lincoln’s Inn, with other Cromwellian literature. There it was found fifty years later—embalmed in the odour of sanctity.
Cromwell’s death soon led to a flood of intrigue among his Anglo-Irish retainers. Each was intent on asserting one great principle—how best to hold on to the spoil with which confiscation had endowed them. If Republicanism would secure this, they were Republicans. If possession must be tempered by monarchy—then “Long live Charles II.”