LORD DONEGALL’S ROMANCES.
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.