LAWLESS LORDS JUSTICES.
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.