The total revenue which the Crown had derived from these six counties in the year immediately preceding their transfer to John was a little over £4000.[127] But their money value was a consideration of trifling importance compared with the territorial and political power which accompanied it. Such an accumulation of palatine jurisdictions in the hands of one man was practically equivalent to the setting up of an under-kingdom, with a king uncrowned indeed, but absolutely independent of every secular authority except the supreme king himself; and that exception, as every one knew, was only for the moment; Richard was on the eve of his departure for the Holy Land, and as soon as he was out of reach John would have, within his little realm, practically no superior at all. Moreover, his “lordship of Ireland” had changed its character at his father’s death. Until then it had been, save during his five months’ visit to that country in 1185, merely titular. Most of the few known charters and grants issued in his name during his father’s lifetime are dateless, and it seems possible that, with one exception, all of them may have been issued during that visit.[128] On Henry’s death, however, John’s lordship of the English March in Ireland became something more than a name. In virtue of it he already possessed a staff of household officers whose titles and functions reproduced those of the royal household itself. Henry had had his seneschal, his butler, his constable for Ireland as well as for England; and this Irish household establishment had apparently been transferred to John, at any rate since 1185. No doubt the men of whom it consisted were appointed by Henry, or at least with his sanction, and were in fact his ministers rather than the ministers of his son; but to the new king they owed no obedience save the general obedience due from all English or Norman subjects; from the hour of Henry’s death their service belonged to the “Lord of Ireland” alone, and John thus found himself at the head of a little court of his own, a ready-made ministry through which he might govern both his Irish dominion and the ample possessions which Richard bestowed upon him in England, as freely as the rest of the English realm was governed by Richard himself through the ministers of the Crown.[129]