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.