T. M. Healy

“ The perfume of legality now sweetens the memory of the deeds of John Wakeman, Thomas Irelande, James Hamilton, Auditor Ware, Arthur Bassett, Arthur Chichester, Henry Cromwell, John Clotworthy, and Lord Donegall. Ermined innocence has arisen to bless their works. ”

“ Courtiers who boasted no virtue themselves did not look for shining examples from Irish officials. They knew these men had left England for their advancement, to make what they could out of a conquered country. The Castle in Dublin was a coarse replica of the Court in London. The spendthrift habits of James I. bred extravagance in his underlings. To deceive that slobbering pedant seemed a small demerit to the Anglo-Irish harpies who regulated their profligacy by London standards. ”

“ In the island which had been the most faithful of the Three Kingdoms to the Crown, Cromwellianism survived as hardily as in the days of Oliver himself. A packed Parliament, a ruthless Executive, and a venal judiciary made or declared the law to a prostrate people. In England and Scotland the Royalists came into their own again. In Ireland they were betrayed or plundered or forgotten. ”

“ No inquisition had been held (as the law required) to establish the right to make the Patent. Nor did any official notification of it apprise the Crown or the public of what had been done. A spell of black magic transmuted a military appointment into a life estate in the richest fishery in Ulster, and attached thereto a bogus “Admiralty.”
Uglier even than the uncanny graft on the “command” at Carrickfergus was Sir Arthur’s crookedness as to the Bann. The river was nowhere mentioned in either King’s Letter from first to last; yet the new Patent captured it for Chichester. ”

“ Earlier than Davies, Spenser of the “Faerie Queene” wrote in 1596:—
“The Irish are one of the most ancient nations that I know of at this end of the world.... They come of as mighty a race as the world ever brought forth ... very present in perils, great scorners of death.”
For the uprooting of such a breed, high political and moral reasons had to be invented, but when the natives were got rid of and their persecutors could discover no political or religious pretexts to cloak their greed, they fastened nakedly on the input and earnings of the settlers from England and Scotland. ”

“ Chichester’s freak surrender before Archbishop Jones, and Allen’s misconduct in fathering the Inquisition of 1621 in the teeth of his Derry verdict, may be said to have been concerned with the Bann alone. Still the grant of Lough Neagh was so intimately linked with the river that any tribunal would have felt itself assisted by a full disclosure of facts where questions of good faith and probabilities had to be determined. An artificial darkness as to the origin and bearing of the Patents prevailed, and in such murkiness the law pronounced on their authenticity. ”

“ By warping the Royal Warrant he endowed himself with the honour of “Admiral and Commander-in-Chief” in his watery jurisdiction, plus a life-estate in the fisheries of a great inland sea. Unsated by this immensity, he absorbed long leagues of the River Bann, the property of high-placed chieftains and unoffending prelates, in defiance of treaty and law. To crown all, an intrigue to gain the Deputyship was entered upon, to complete the work so masterfully begun. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ The concern of the public in it was immediate, for it created a new situation which affected everyone along the banks of Lough Neagh. When such powerful opponents confessed the validity of the Donegall grant, and accepted a lease thereunder, they became almost as much interested in maintaining it as the owner himself. Before their capitulation nobody had ventured to dispute the ancient custom by which the public fished in and trafficked over the Lough. The moment a great Corporation bent the knee to wrong, an unexpected impulse was given to the spirit of encroachment. ”

“ No overt act could be suggested against the Ulster lords. Their circumspection, after being pardoned and reinstated, was proportioned to their knowledge of the Deputy’s unscrupulousness. Chichester boasted that a dog could not bark in the North without his hearing of it, and this was not mere brag. Sheriffs, under-sheriffs, escheators, inquisitors, surveyors, mapsmen, tax-collectors, and tithe-collectors infested the Province. Kinsmen of the beaten chiefs who, in the hope of sharing their estates, had taken the English side, were watchful correspondents of Dublin Castle. ”

“ Public virtue had either ceased to exist or had not begun to be cultivated. When anyone complained of the conduct of Chichester’s servitors, most of whom were scoundrels apt for his purpose, he shielded them in dispatches as “very honest men.” He fetched from Devonshire his brother and two nephews to assist him, and was at pains to embellish his practices with a garniture of profuse loyalty and solid piety. ”

“ The dungeon or the scaffold was, he feared, to end the trip to Court. An estate so unwholesomely extensive as his forbade much hope of justice. The partition of Sir Con O’Neill’s patrimony in Claneboy was not two years old, and the alliance between Hamilton, who contrived it, and the Deputy, who abetted it, remained in full force. The Earl, therefore, came to the conclusion that he was a doomed man, whether he went to London or whether he remained at home. ”

“ Whatever his faults, the new Lord Lieutenant hunted down those who had preyed on the country since Elizabeth’s reign, and in the eight years he served as Viceroy he earned the hatred of every confiscator. Those whose avarice he checked or penalised, including Patentees like the Earl of Cork and Sir John Clotworthy, were Strafford’s chief enemies. When he perished on the scaffold, their self-interested testimony spoke his doom. Many of his processes were, of course, expedients to provide revenue for the King in order to dispense with the summoning of Parliament. ”

“ Once they yielded, with what hope could poor men hold out?
The thought, therefore, struck the Donegall lessee who claimed Lough Neagh as being embraced in his demise that to turn a thousand free fishermen into toll-paying serfs would prove a profitable enterprise. To assert his “rights” he took proceedings to restrain them from catching salmon in the Lough. For five years this action dragged from Court to Court, and only ended in the House of Lords in 1878.
The plaintiff’s lease gave him dominion “within the known and accustomed limits of the fisheries as formerly in the tenure of Edward May.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ Such was the terror of Chichester that they were denied water for their ship in one creek in Donegal.
Bards and Brehons have lamented that these Gaelic lords did not hold their ground. Their critics have not explained whether the Earl of Tyrone should have gone to London and risked being mewed up in the Tower, or have disobeyed the order and resisted arrest without an army to back him. The victim himself, living and acting in days when he could measure and appreciate the consequences of obedience or revolt, decided on flight. ”

“ When the richest Corporation in the world, and the Imperial city of the Empire, could be baffled in such wise, what hope had the natives in days of yore of retaining their property against the greed of those who controlled the machinery of Irish government? ”

“ Each development reveals a fresh crime, and evokes renewed wonder at the miscreant’s resourcefulness. As fertile in the closet as he was ruthless in the camp, Chichester may be regarded as the embodiment of those vices which, amongst the people he oppressed, made a byword of the rule he represented and the creed he sought to spread. ”

“ This, of course, was mere byplay, and in a few months Niall Garve discovered that, as the Tower was so convenient for the caging of O’Cahan, he, too, was to be similarly housed. Blameless of aught against the State save the wish to have a living in his own glens, the Queen’s O’Donnell was arrested and deported to London. With him went his son, Naghten, and his two brothers. Everything was done quietly, without trial, charge, indictment, or legal parade. There was no scandal—not even a court martial. Niall Garve and his son, like O’Cahan, spent the rest of their lives in the Tower. ”

“ 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) . [Pg 33] 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. ”

“ Even the layman must realise the patient and laborious scholarship that has gone to the making of this book, and cannot fail to be impressed by his power of marshalling great unwieldy masses of facts and the subtlety and dexterity of his analysis.... It abounds in strange contrasts and dramatic surprises, unravels a tangled tale of corruption and chicanery that might have inspired a score of novels of intrigue, and links up in a startling fashion the events of three hundred years ago with the happenings of the day before yesterday.”—Northern Whig. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Chichester ordered the Antrim inquisition, not to help Hamilton, but to block him. They were then rivals, if not enemies. When they became allies soon afterwards no Crown title existed to justify Hamilton’s Patent for Lough Neagh and the Bann. Every stretch of the river was in legitimate private ownership under English law, save the monastery reaches. The Lough lay in no man’s private wallet—as was then notorious.
Never before was “fancy” History invented to decide the fate of real property in the House of Lords. ”

“ Every presentation of Irish records is rated by the ruling caste as distorted or perverse unless oppression is garbed in justification and rapacity garnished with slanders on its prey. The cant of conquest always seeks to make the invaders paladins of virtue, and their victims brutish monsters. ”

“ In England and Scotland, neither Thames nor Tweed, Lake Windermere nor Loch Lomond, is an appanage of royalty. The frontagers who own the banks enjoy therewith the “bed and soil,” which is nowhere a “flower of the Crown.” To enforce a contrary rule in Ireland strong reasons should appear. Nevertheless, the Patents, in the light presented by the archivist, satisfied Lords Halsbury, Macnaghten, and Dunedin. They not unnaturally assumed that such grants would not have been issued without the King’s sanction, nor unless the Crown owned everything they gave away. ”

“ The Londoners had, between 1744 and 1760, erected four traps in the Bann at the Leap of Coleraine near the sea for the capture of salmon. These necessarily diminished the catch further up, and Lord Donegall, without impugning their Charter, objected that their mode of fishing injured his rights in a corner of Lough Neagh. He laid his complaint of damage in a pool on the Armagh shore, forty miles from the traps, instead of in the Bann, and singled out as his quarry the lessee of the unpopular “Irish Society” to serve as defendant. ”

“ For an Ulsterman, Lord Macnaghten showed slight acquaintance with the history of his Province. When he came to deal with May’s lease he said it described the Bann “as being in the County of Tyrone as well as in Antrim and Londonderry; and I suppose the Bann was never in Tyrone since the days of the Flood.” Every Ulster peasant knows that until the Planters carved up O’Neill’s dominions the Bann always ran through “Tyrone.” The county now called “Londonderry” formed part of “Tyrone,” and was only shorn from it in Stuart times after Derry was allotted to the Londoners. ”