THE “FAMOUS PAPER.”
In July, 1660 (two months after the Restoration), Clotworthy learnt
that Sir Arthur Chichester, now Earl of Donegall, was travelling to
London to greet the new sovereign. Lord Donegall and his father had
fought for the royal cause as strongly as Sir John and his brother
had supported the usurpers. An earldom was conferred on Sir Arthur
in his father’s lifetime, at the request of the Duke of Ormonde,
for services certified to have been performed in Ulster when the
Scotch troops deserted Charles I. Lord Donegall was coming to town,
relying on Ormonde’s help and the King’s gratitude, to work for the
restitution of the fisheries surrendered to Strafford. Doubtless he
knew of Cromwell’s lease to Clotworthy, but he also knew that such
grants had become nullities. So, too, did Clotworthy, and a race
hotly contested began between them for time and favour.
On the 1st August, 1660, a frigate left Dublin by royal command
to fetch the Earl of Donegall to England. To forestall the enemy
Clotworthy presented a petition on the 6th August, 1660, praying
the King to confirm Basil’s lease. At the same moment the London
Corporation was moving for a royal charter to replace Cromwell’s.
Thus there were stirring around Whitehall three rival claimants
for the northern fisheries. Charles felt bound, as Cromwell did,
to respect the pledges made to the Corporation as to their Ulster
estate. He was largely a stranger to events in Ireland during
his exile; and was attended at Court for Irish affairs by Bishop
Bramhall, late of Derry, and formerly chaplain to Strafford.
Bramhall had followed Charles to the Continent, and exercised there
“curiously unepiscopal functions as a Royalist prize-agent.” To
him Clotworthy’s petition was referred; and, on the day it was
received, the Bishop reported in its favour, without making the
smallest inquiry. Such haste in an Episcopalian dignitary to help a
Presbyterian “malignant” shows how these Christians loved one another.
Sir John’s petition was a network of falsehoods. It re-hashed a
number of old fables about the long-lost “pension,” with a few new
ones for garnish. Beginning with a lie in point of date, it set
forth that Sir John had a pension of 6s. 8d. a day granted him by
Patent on the 2nd July, 1640. In 1640 Bramhall was Strafford’s
chaplain; and this romance cannot have imposed on him. Strafford
sailed from Ireland in April, 1640, to crush the Scotch rebellion,
knowing that Clotworthy was his bitter enemy. He left behind him as
Deputy a loving friend, Wandesforde, who was also Bramhall’s patron;
and Bramhall, of all men, was aware that Wandesforde would not
have sanctioned a pension to an opponent deep in intrigue with the
Parliamentarians to compass the Lord Lieutenant’s downfall. Besides
in 1640 Sir John was only 34 years old, and had performed no service
to merit reward. The pension to his father was dated the 2nd July,
1618, twenty-two years earlier. So a false date was put forward lest,
if 1618 were mentioned, inquiry might be set on foot to unravel the
mystery of a pension to a child under twelve years of age.
The Petition went on to pretend that Sir John had been “obstructed
in the receipt of his pension by the usurper Oliver.” This was
colossal mendacity, but the account given of Basil’s lease surpassed
it:—“On application, the late Oliver granted him, in lieu of the said
pension, a lease of 99 years for Lough Neagh and the River Bann, with
the fishing thereof.”
No relevant fact was truthfully stated, yet Bramhall certified to
the King that he had “studied the petition”; that Clotworthy “is
certainly entitled to some compensation in respect of the pension of
6s. 8d. a day”; that both the fishing and soil of Lough Neagh, and of
the Bann above Coleraine, were in the possession of the Crown, and
that a lease should be granted to Clotworthy on the same terms which
it was feigned Cromwell had sanctioned. Bramhall’s traffickings as a
prize-agent may explain why an Anglican Bishop, who owed everything
to Strafford, should favour the pietist who had not only sent his
patron to the block, but had embittered and disturbed Archbishop
Laud’s last moments on the scaffold.
The King (with Ormonde beside him) could see no reason for the
haste with which his courtier urged that Sir John’s lease should
be renewed. He put aside the petition and left the Bishop’s report
unnoticed. Secretary Nicholas was then moved to jog his Majesty and
request “that a warrant be prepared for his royal signature for
drawing a Patent in Sir John Clotworthy’s favour, according to the
report of the Bishop of Derry.” Still Charles made no sign. Possibly
some recollection of his engagements to the London Corporation
crossed his mind; perhaps the Duke of Ormonde dropped a hint in
Chichester’s interest; or his Majesty may have sought for a reason
why he should extend such benevolence to Cromwell’s righthand man. At
any rate, the King was not touched to persuasion.
The feverish Clotworthy now tried another stratagem. He knew that
if a King’s Letter were sent to Ireland authorising a Patent (as
Secretary Nicholas recommended), this would involve delay and
inquiry, and that the arrival of Lord Donegall, or the intervention
of the Londoners, might prove fatal to his hopes. He, therefore,
changed his hand; and, instead of an Irish Patent, pressed for a
lease direct from the King at Whitehall. This would involve an
innovation in procedure startling to Crown lawyers. Even Cromwell had
not attempted any such inroad on ancient usage, but carried out his
behests by the olden method of sending a Signet Letter to Dublin to
authorise a Patent there under the Great Seal of Ireland. The needs
of Sir John, however, brooked no delay, and sticklers for form could
be “squared.” Still the King, in spite of the pressure put upon him,
refused to yield, and for three months he held firm.
Towards the end of September, 1660, Lord Donegall reached London,
greatly to Clotworthy’s discomfiture. To anticipate his arrival Sir
John sent £20 to the Crown Office in Dublin to pay a half-year’s
rent which would come due under Basil’s lease on the 29th September.
This thrusting of payment on the royal officials was an attempt to
rivet his claims and pretend they had been recognised on behalf of
the King. The rent was dispatched almost to the day, though the
lease gave six weeks for payment. Whether he had been as punctual
in the time of the “usurper”—if he paid at all—is more doubtful;
and no evidence of any other payment, before or after, exists. Then
to strengthen his influence at Court Sir John threw another cast,
and struck up relations with Colonel Daniel O’Neill, Groom of the
Bedchamber and head of the princely house of Ulster.
O’Neill was the intimate and trusted friend of Charles II., on
whom the growing difficulties of the Irish situation were pressing
awkwardly. He expected to be restored to his estates in Down,
having battled for the Crown on nearly every field in the three
kingdoms. O’Neill had no love for Clotworthy, but still less for the
Chichesters, because of the imprisonment of his father, Sir Con, in
Carrickfergus by the “great Deputy” in 1603, and the forced partition
of Claneboy with Hamilton and Montgomery to purchase pardon for a
trumped-up “treason.” Sir John to enlist his help promised to secure
the restitution of his property, part of which he had himself come
by, and an understanding between them was arrived at in the crisis
of Irish affairs at Court. Charles II., beset by conflicting and
distracting demands, saw no way of keeping his word to the rival
claimants who thronged upon him. In the Breda Declaration he had
pledged himself equally to the Catholic Royalists and to their
Republican supplanters. Compromise seemed impossible, and the King
was caught in a vice, without hope of honourable escape, for both
sides pressed pleas that could not be overlooked.
Coote’s faction, at the Convention in Dublin, demanded by resolution
that all the estates of the Adventurers, as they stood on the 7th
May, 1659, should be confirmed by Act of Parliament. Under such an
arrangement, Clotworthy’s lease, and many other frauds, would have
been legalised. A “settlement” so one-sided would destroy the hopes
of the natives, and the Catholic soldiers who had surrounded Charles
abroad raised such a protest that it was rejected by his Majesty.
The disappointed Cromwellians waxed wrathful, and to soothe them it
became known that any alternative they put forward which offered an
outlet for the King’s embarrassment would be accepted.
On the 9th November, 1660, there waited on Charles at Whitehall
a trio consisting of Clotworthy, Lord Broghill (Boyle), and Sir
Audley Mervyn. They produced a paper showing that all-round justice
could be done, and that there was land galore for every claimant.
The ingenious Clotworthy had found the key to the maze in which
his Majesty was enmeshed. It was a blessed discovery. His acreages
and estimates were accepted with royal grace and a total absence
of investigation. The scheme he broached—known afterwards as “the
famous paper”—became the basis of the “Act of Settlement” of 1662,
and was hailed by courtly experts as a solution of the insoluble. The
King could now turn away from a knotty problem to lighter themes,
and naturally his obduracy towards Sir John’s petition for a lease
melted away. Such was his gratitude that he not only promised to
confirm it, but conferred on the author of the “famous paper” the
peerage of Massereene. The lease secured the Bann, as well as Lough
Neagh, to Clotworthy, although the river had for years been in the
possession of the Londoners.
The “famous paper” in effect embodied the original demand of the
Cromwellian Convention under a different guise. More fair-seeming
than that project, it was equally fatal to Royalist hopes. Thus
Sir John was the artificer of both his own and his party’s fortune
on that famous night at Whitehall. When he bade his Majesty “good
evening” he might well deem himself a thrice-lucky adventurer. He
must have chuckled heartily as he strode to his lodgings at the
“Three Elms” in Chandos Street at the thought of the great ones he
had hoodwinked and the obstacles he had overcome. To take in Cromwell
over the “lost pension” and win his Signet Letter for Lough Neagh; to
bribe Henry Cromwell and the Dublin Executive to super-add the Bann;
were strokes of genius; but to beguile Charles II. into giving kingly
confirmation to a fraudulent lease about which even Cromwell had been
deceived, and gain a peerage in the process, was a success almost
uncanny. The King and the doomsman of his father alike outwitted;
the Corporation of London and their enemies, the Chichesters, alike
befooled; the friends of Laud and Strafford enlisted and placated;
and every minor difficulty surmounted—these made up a combination of
achievement which entitles the student of villainy to bespeak for
Clotworthy a special niche in the gallery of rogues.
To outpace his competitors in securing the grant he accepted a lease
from the King direct, instead of obtaining a Patent such as he got
from Cromwell. No authority existed for the issue of a lease of Irish
Crown property lacking the Great Seal of Ireland, and no such lease
was binding. Nevertheless, by this means a sidelong Royal sanction
was given light-heartedly to a grant of Lough Neagh as well as the
non-tidal Bann. At that moment the new Charter for the Londoners,
granting them the entire Bann, was being prepared, and was shortly
afterwards enrolled, in repugnancy to the Lease.
The new-made Lord Massereene next arranged to baulk Colonel O’Neill
so that he could retain the lands he had promised to restore him.
O’Neill was married to the Countess of Chesterfield and had been
schooled a Protestant under the patronage of Archbishop Laud. He was
famed as “of a courage very notorious.” The operation of the Act of
Settlement in his case illustrates the fate which befell Royalists
less favoured. To thwart O’Neill, a fair-seeming proviso was inserted
in the draft Bill of “Settlement.” It declared merely that, for every
estate given up by the Planters, they should receive equivalent lands
elsewhere. Nothing could sound more reasonable.
The new peer and his friends, however, were determined that the
“joyful Restoration” of his Majesty should bring joy to no one in
Ireland but the King’s late enemies. Their faction was led by men
well versed in affairs of State; while their victims were either
returned exiles or persons long estranged from Courts and Parliaments.
The “Settlement” Bill was a purely Cromwellian composture, for,
although it embodied the King’s recognition of the loyalty of his
Irish soldiers, this was offset by an envenomed tirade against the
mass of the people. The keynote was struck in a preamble which
recited “the unnatural insurrection, murther, and destructions of the
23rd October, 1641,” while the massacres and dispossessions which had
provoked the outbreak were left unnoticed.
When the Bill became law a Court of Claims was appointed to hear
applications for restoration from ancient owners, and applot the
territory to be awarded in exchange. This tribunal was presided
over by Sir Audley Mervyn, Speaker of the Irish House of Commons,
one of the trio who promoted the “famous paper.” He was a venal
parasite who ruled against every contention on behalf of the Irish.
To make sure that the Cromwellians should suffer no deprivation, his
“Court” announced, at an early sitting, that there were no lands
available out of which the Undertakers could be “reprized”—i.e.,
receive equivalent estate. This was in flat contradiction of the
assurance to the King in the “famous paper”; but it was true, for
the Adventurers so managed that all such property had meanwhile been
given away among themselves. This was done by way of what was blandly
called “cautionary reprize,” which meant that—taking time by the
forelock—they had annexed everything for their faction.
Colonel O’Neill, Protestant though he was, could not get back a rood
of his land. Even Charles II. proved powerless to help him. The King
created him Postmaster-General of the United Kingdom, but nothing
in the way of restitution could be wrung from Lord Massereene. When
O’Neill died his Majesty interested himself on behalf of one of his
cousins, Sir Henry O’Neill, whose lands were also in Massereene’s
hold. Pressed to make restitution in a debate in the Irish House of
Lords, the new peer rose and, taking the Royal Declaration in one
hand, he drew his sword with the other, exclaiming: “I will have the
benefit of it with this.”
When any Royalist soldier or “innocent Papist” asked for
reinstatement, the Planter in possession demanded what equivalent
land he was to get before being ousted? None was to be had, and the
intruders, after a fine parade of legality, retained their domains,
while the natives were left out in the cold. The promises made them
in the King’s Declaration, in the “famous paper,” and in the Act of
Settlement remained a dead letter.
Certain Catholic officers were mentioned by name in the Act and
guaranteed restoration by its clauses. This created a difficulty, so
they were left to die in London of hunger and plague. Charles II.
would not as much as pay their way to Dublin to enable them to seek
redress.