A VICEROY’S LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT.
If any interest in Wakeman’s Letter lingered, grants under it would
belong, not to Hamilton or Chichester, but to the Lord Lieutenant.
That lovesick absentee was now on his honeymoon in England. He had
of late mysteriously begun to fail in health; so his underlings
thought some additional risk might be taken. That Wakeman was privy
to cheating his master is hard to believe. Ware certainly was; and it
is more than probable that the power of attorney, which purported to
substitute him for Sir Richard Cooke, was a counterfeit. True, it was
enrolled, but enrolments during the Stuart epoch, when forgery was a
fine art, are not trustworthy. They can no more be accepted without
corroboration as proof of the existence of genuine deeds than those
of the Puritans. It is significant, too, that Cooke afterwards became
one of the Deputy’s severest critics.
Vast as were the annexations so effected, the artificers remained
unglutted. On the 13th March, 1606, they again plied the Thomas
Irelande Letter, and a Patent was issued under it to Hamilton of
lands in six counties—Meath, Queen’s, Wexford, Mayo, Galway, and
Dublin. Four days later (17th March, 1606) by a fifth Patent, a few
Westmeath castles were thrown in. On the 11th April, 1606, they
shifted back to the Wakeman Letter; and by its potency Hamilton
received a Patent of the Customs of Down and Antrim.
None of the Patents contains any recital showing how the property so
granted was supposed to have come to the Crown. No right existed to
confiscate lands without attainder (save those of the monasteries,
which vested in the King by Statute). No great Ulster proprietor had
then been attainted. To overleap this obstacle, the Deputy’s plan
was first to declare the estates to be Hamilton’s by Patent, next to
obtain an assignment to himself, and lastly to discover a pretext for
hunting the native owners out of the country or out of the world.
On the 3rd April, 1606, a tragic event thrilled England and smote
Ireland. It came as a portent athwart a troubled sky to both
conquerors and conquered. On that day the Earl of Devonshire died;
and his unlooked-for taking-off changed the course of history.
The influence of the victor of Kinsale over a prostrate country
was not without benignity. He restrained mere vengefulness after
O’Neill’s surrender in 1603, and bent towardly on the defeated
nobles. The new Court in London he despised, and, doubtless, ranked
his long-descended antagonists in Ulster high above the rabble who
infested Whitehall or “Tibbald’s” to importune scullions for writs to
plunder.
Between 1603 and 1606 the absentee Lord Lieutenant advised the
Privy Council on Irish affairs; and, by correspondence with his
subordinates, loosely governed Ireland. He befriended Hugh O’Neill,
and his death left the Earl without a protector at Court, where
Chichester sought to instil poison against the Ulster lords, in
order to forfeit their territories for his own benefit. Devonshire
had, a few months before his death, gone through a form of marriage
with Lady Rich, greatly to the King’s displeasure. The ceremony
was performed by his chaplain, Laud—who afterwards perished on
the scaffold under Charles I. as Archbishop. Devonshire’s will
(signed the day before he died) shows plainly that he was party
to the unmiraculous multiplication of loaves and fishes by the
Patent-mongers.
The frame of the will (a long Latin document) makes it evident that
he was ignorant of the giving of the power-of-attorney by Wakeman to
Auditor Ware to enable Hamilton to annex the tidal Bann. One of the
executors, Sir William Godolphin, was the lessee of that fishery from
the Crown under a demise made during the rebellion in 1600; and he
would hardly have kept silent had he learnt of the making of a grant
which might affect his lease. The will appointed John Wakeman and
John King “trustees” to enable Lady Rich to receive “the residue” of
grants to which they were entitled under the King’s Letter, though
that was already long exhausted. This was an ugly disclosure to
appear in the hurried will of a dying Statesman, for it made plain
that the intent of the King’s Letter to recoup “money paid to an
ancient and well-deserving servant in Scotland” was a mere device to
benefit the Lord Lieutenant. The appointment of Cecil as one of the
executors revealed the fact that the Secretary of State was also in
the secret.
Other Court nobles, including Lord Southampton, the patron of
Shakespeare, were named executors, and were thus saddled with notice
that the Royal revenues had been made away with, and were to be
further embezzled for a misliked woman. Yet they made no protest and
asked no questions. This put them all in Chichester’s power, and
emboldened him in depredation. On the 25th April, 1606, he wrote to
Cecil praying that his letters to the late Lord Lieutenant should not
be allowed to fall into the hands of any other member of the Privy
Council; and that “all my papers” in the dead man’s drawers should be
taken up by Cecil. This was treating the Secretary of State on the
footing of an accomplice, and Devonshire as a fellow-culprit.
Even the Earl’s widow became the victim of Chichester’s rapine.
Bequeathed everything springing from the Royal Letters to John
Wakeman and John King, she received nothing after her husband’s
death. Being out of favour at Court because of her divorce and
re-marriage, Lady Rich was further prejudiced by the fact that
Devonshire’s estate-broking had been furtive and illicit. The Deputy
availed of this to divert the profits from her into his own pocket.
Every official knew that the King’s Letters mentioned in the will
were over-spent, but Devonshire fondly supposed he could rely on them
to create grants for her benefit. Chichester tricked the widow, as
he had tricked the husband; and kept everything for himself. He even
used the death of his patron to saddle him with abuses committed in
his own interest.
In Chichester’s earlier dispatches after Devonshire’s death no coarse
suggestion of confiscation directed against the estates of the Ulster
lords appears. Ostensibly his sole concern was lest the chiefs
(who, as O’Neill complained, could not quaff a cup of wine without
chronicles of carouse being sent up by spies to Dublin Castle)
should suddenly amass force to overwhelm the might of England. His
dispatches are worded to suggest that he could hardly sleep o’ nights
in his alarmed loyalty for the safety of the kingdom. Diurnally by
post he trembled lest scathe should befall the interests of the
princely Scotchman whom he loved. He reported everyone who had
anything to lose by treason, as hourly engaged in plotting against a
benign Sovereign—with a view to pocketing the escheats.