At the height of Clotworthy’s intrigue for the confirmation of his lease Lord Donegall reached London, being wafted across the Channel in a royal frigate. He soon realised at Whitehall that those whom he regarded as the “King’s enemies” had grown to influence and had supplanted many of the “King’s friends.” Still he believed that olden services would not go unrewarded, and he knew that the Duke of Ormonde would stand by him. He and his father had hidden away Strafford’s Patent for twenty years, unenrolled. To obtain a new grant which should include Lough Neagh and the Bann was the wish of his heart. He came to Court, not merely to pay homage to Charles II., but to seek redress for the surrender forced on his family by the Minister of Charles I. Lord Donegall knew the favour shown to Clotworthy by Cromwell, and it roused his ire to think that the son of an old subordinate should carry off the fisheries which he looked on as a perquisite of the Chichesters. Were there gratitude in kings, he thought, Cromwell’s gift must be recalled and bestowed on himself.
Yet his lordship found his rival as highly esteemed by Charles II. as he had been by the Lord Protector. Nor did the support of the Duke of Ormonde countervail his influence. All that their joint exertions effected was to delay Clotworthy’s triumph. When the “famous paper” begot the new lease Lord Donegall was almost in despair, but he did not give up the struggle. The obstacles in his path which the lease created, not to speak of the royal engagement to the London Corporation to restore the Bann, seemed insurmountable. A tussle with Sir John at Whitehall taught him that it was hopeless to think of winning anything from that stout fighter. Still harder was it to prevail against the Londoners. He found the influence of his opponents overpowering, and their claims blocked his hopes. Lord Donegall, therefore, cast about for some indirect means of gaining his ends.
Wily councillors before long suggested a way out. He was advised to abandon his original purpose and send in a petition for a “reversionary” Patent for the fisheries. This was only to take effect at the end of Clotworthy’s lease, but for immediate consolation he also prayed for a grant of the rent payable under it to the Crown. The plan was a catching one to recover lost ground, but what reasons could be found to support it? None existed, so Lord Donegall proceeded to invent them. He had to get over the difficulty that Strafford compelled the surrender of 1640 as an act of restitution, and had compensated his father and himself by the grant of an indefeasible Patent for the rest of their ill-gotten estates with an allowance of £60 a year in the Crown-rent. Acceptance of the advantages conferred in 1640 could hardly be reconciled with a demand for further compensation in 1660. To blame Strafford for enforcing the surrender would be natural and tempting, but was unthinkable, as any slight on the memory of the martyr-Viceroy who had given his life to uphold Charles I. would be fatal in a suppliant to Charles II. Lord Donegall, therefore, had to present matters in a way which should make it appear that his father and himself in relinquishing the fisheries were the victims of arbitrary power, and at the same time find a scapegoat to accuse—an attack upon whom would not offend the King.
The position was delicate, and needed the best-considered falsehoods. Lord Donegall, however, was no witling, and the tradition of the “great Deputy” stirred his brain until at length the necessary culprit was hit upon in Deputy Wandesforde. He, in Strafford’s absence, signed the Patent of 1640, and on him all the blame for compelling the surrender was cast in 1660. The innocent Wandesforde was charged with having deprived Lord Donegall of a pension of £40 a year, and “forcing on him fresh Patents under colour of his having defective title.” This was as gross a myth as the fables of the Clotworthy pension or the promises of the “famous paper.” Wandesforde merely carried out arrangements previously made by the Lord Lieutenant; and had nothing to do with the surrender, or the question of an allowance. Yet this blameless subordinate, who had been dead twenty years, was saddled with the doings of his master and with the hagglings of the Commissioners for Remedying Defective Titles.
The “pension” story rested on the fact that originally Strafford agreed to allow the Chichesters £40 a year in lieu of the £100 received under the Londoners’ lease of Lough Neagh. This, to soothe the family, he increased to £60; and, instead of paying it by the clumsy method of a pension (as was at first intended), he reduced the rent under the Patent by £60. The change did away with the earlier proposal, and was gladly welcomed by Lord Chichester. Yet Charles II. was told that Wandesforde had robbed the persecuted and faithful peer of a £40 pension. To prove it Lord Donegall produced the first Order of the Commissioners as to the £40, and suppressed the second as to the £60. The first Order fitted in with Clotworthy’s £40 rental to the Crown, which Lord Donegall was seeking to capture, and balanced beautifully with the “equities” which he contended for. Any distorted story of this kind went unscrutinised by the gay advisers of Charles II.
It fell in with the purposes of Lord Massereene that Lord Donegall should secure a reversion of his lease. To him it was immaterial to whom he paid rent, or who succeeded to the fisheries after his term expired. Lord Donegall’s success would strengthen him against the Londoners as to the Bann, for each would have an interest in resisting their claims. Accordingly the twain “got together”; and thenceforth the new peer became the ally of his late rival.
The symmetry of the proposal that the “lost pension” of one nobleman should be supplied from the rent due to the Crown by the other, captivated the courtiers at Whitehall. It was such a pretty arrangement, and so historically just in the eyes of all who had been bribed to promote it. In the golden days of the Restoration, the thinnest coating of fact served to veneer any romance put forward by a favourite. Charles II. was an accommodating prince. What cared he for recitals in parchments? There was no one even to remind him that, in the draft of his Charter to the Londoners (then almost ready for his signature), the Bann was once more declared their property. So three months after Clotworthy’s triumph the King yielded to Lord Donegall’s prayer, and, on the 28th February, 1661, a “Letter” was made out authorising a Patent to him of “the reversion” of Lough Neagh and the Bann, with an immediate gift of the rent of £40 a year coming from the new lease of Lord Massereene.
The Royal Letter was embellished by recitals drafted by Lord Donegall and crammed with untruth. It set forth that James I., in 1621, granted the fishings unto Arthur, Lord Chichester; that in 1638, “to comply with our late royal father’s occasions,” they were surrendered to Charles I.; that in consideration of this generosity, the Chichesters should have received “an annuity, pension, or yearly rent-charge of £40 per annum,” with liberty to fish for the provision of their households; but that they were disappointed as to all these promises. This was a moving tale of unrequited loyalty; yet the brows of even the Merrie Monarch would have knit had he been told a tithe of the truth.
The parchments of the previous half-century contradicted every item of this rigmarole and showed what an accurate recital should have disclosed. This was:—
That James Hamilton, through the abuse of spent warrants, came by extravagant grants in collusion with Chichester;
That Hamilton made over much of the property to the Deputy, who, to cloak his rapine, issued a Patent for it to his nephew without kingly sanction, and by the misuse of a Royal Commission;
That the nephew assigned to his uncle all that the Patent conveyed, including the Bann and Lough Neagh;
That, after the Bann was given by Charter to the City of London, £4,500 was paid by his Majesty to “compensate” Hamilton and Chichester;
That a bogus “surrender” to the Crown of the Bann was then made;
That, seven years later, Chichester (after his removal from the Deputyship), as Lord Treasurer, asserted title to the River by means of false entries in the Crown ledgers;
That, by “favour” of the Duke of Buckingham, a King’s Letter was procured in 1620 for a regrant of his estates;
That on this warrant, through the knavery of escheators and inquisitors, another Patent giving him the non-tidal Bann was fabricated in 1621;
That in 1640 Strafford, on discovering the facts, enforced against his heirs a surrender of the river, with Lough Neagh; and
That for this they were lavishly recouped by a Patent granting them valid title to vast properties unjustly come by, with an allowance off their rent of £60 a year.
In the days of the Stuarts, truth and patents were estranged.
On the 10th April, 1662, the Charter to the Londoners was signed. Charles II. gave them once more the River Bann, from Lough Neagh to the sea, as if no adverse grant had been made to Chichester or Clotworthy. He did so in the same words as it had been conveyed to them by James I. and Cromwell.
Two Patents of the river to different interests, within 18 months, was a monstrosity, even for Anglo-Ireland; but not a ripple was raised thereby on the surface of official calm.
No idea of duty to the King appeared among his officers. The habit of taking “presents” undermined their sense of public obligation; and money was freely spent on them by suppliants. Cash payments preluded the success both of Lord Donegall and of Lord Massereene. Even the English Solicitor-General, for drafting the Act of Settlement, in 1662, to suit the ex-Cromwellians, was presented with a “small token of thankfulness” by them on the motion of Lord Massereene in the Irish House of Lords.
His lordship, though provided with such a willing penman as conveyancer, made no attempt to have inserted in the Act a clause to confirm his lease, while he availed of it to make all the rest of his estates secure. As a “Commissioner for the execution of the Royal declaration,” he wielded large influence in shaping its clauses, yet he avoided anything which would risk bringing the lease under discussion.
Three years later he procured in the Act of Explanation (Sec. 55) a confirmation of his title to some property which he took under the Act of Settlement; but again attempted nothing to legalise the lease. It, therefore, never received recognition from either Statute or Patent. Lord Massereene died in 1665, and for three centuries afterwards his cajolement of Oliver Cromwell, Henry Cromwell, and Charles II. remained unknown. A like penumbra shrouded the Chichester conveyances, during the Irish “dark ages.”
Some 35 years after the Restoration, laws which forbade the teaching of Catholics to read or write, or the sending of their children abroad to learn, were artfully fashioned by the Planters. Edmund Burke described their system as “wise and ingenious.” Illiteracy checked premature scandal against a new and frail nobility, and gave it time to become respectable before the story of the upstarts’ fortune and origin could be widely known.