In June, 1661, Lord Donegall set sail for Ireland, furthered by Treasury permits freeing him from Customs duties. On arrival in Dublin, he sued for a Patent under the King’s Letter of the previous February. No Lord Lieutenant was yet installed, as Monck (the newly-made Earl of Albemarle) failed to come over. Three temporary Lords Justices formed the Executive—viz., Lord Chancellor Eustace and the now ennobled Coote and Boyle. £1,500 a year apiece rewarded them for carrying out their functions, and they discharged them exactly in the spirit of the Council of Henry Cromwell five years before. The King’s Letter was addressed to this trio. Doubtless they had been privily bespoken by Clotworthy in Lord Donegall’s interest, for they responded to his requirements with such alacrity that a new Patent was sealed ten days after he landed. Usually years were occupied from the time the King’s Letter was lodged before a grant could be got out. Many legal formalities had to be complied with; and amongst these the law prescribed, as the most essential, a prior public inquiry in order to guard against encroachment on the rights of others. So vital to validity was this Inquisition that the Statute governing Patents declared void any grant made without it.

The Lords Justices ignored the law, and issued to Lord Donegall a Patent which snatched the Bann from the Londoners, and Lough Neagh from the public, without inquiry or notice to anyone. A dispensation called a “non obstante” was inserted in the Patent, which purported to make it valid despite the non-holding of the inquiry. To include in it a waiver of the Statute was but an added illegality. The Lords Justices could not “dispense” with an Act of Parliament; and the King’s Letter did not pretend to authorise the dispensation. Yet the Patent of these ’prentice hands loftily announced itself good “notwithstanding the Statute.”

By the agency of this paltry trio, Lord Donegall on the 3rd July, 1661, was allowed to consummate the iniquity which the “great Deputy” begot in 1603-4. Their grant empowered him to assert anew a claim to Lough Neagh and the Bann, which had been branded as untenable five times in the previous half-century. Scotched by Strafford, assailed by Sir Arthur Forbes and Sir William Power, denounced by Baron Oglethorpe, exposed by Sir James Balfour, arraigned by Deputy St. John, and blighted by a pedigree entailing every vice, it was revived by a tricky exercise of power in an unsettled State, as a sequence to Lord Massereene’s lease.

So rank was the repute of its illegality that Lord Donegall in the following year applied for another King’s Letter to give it a lacquer of legality. With this object he induced Charles II. to affix his signet to a second Royal Letter containing the falsehoods already exposed.

The new Letter declared that:—“When Wandesforde was Deputy it was sought to force fresh Patents on Lord Chichester, under colour of his having defective title. These Patents, which were never enrolled or paid for, shall be vacated; and new Patents for his estates shall be given to Lord Donegall.”

Plainly a fresh effort was to be made to include the fisheries in some legitimate grant covering the whole of the Chichester properties—as in 1621. It was a subtle purpose.

For twenty-two years the Patent of 1640 had been left unenrolled; and now its owner wished to discard it altogether with a view to getting an omnibus Patent. Doubtless he calculated by this means to get rid of the blot on the family escutcheon cast by Strafford, but, whatever lay behind the scheme, it miscarried. An unlooked-for fatality overwhelmed his plans.

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.