On the 9th November, 1660, there waited on Charles at Whitehall a trio consisting of Clotworthy, Lord Broghill (Boyle), and Sir Audley Mervyn. They produced a paper showing that all-round justice could be done, and that there was land galore for every claimant. The ingenious Clotworthy had found the key to the maze in which his Majesty was enmeshed. It was a blessed discovery. His acreages and estimates were accepted with royal grace and a total absence of investigation. The scheme he broached—known afterwards as “the famous paper”—became the basis of the “Act of Settlement” of 1662, and was hailed by courtly experts as a solution of the insoluble. The King could now turn away from a knotty problem to lighter themes, and naturally his obduracy towards Sir John’s petition for a lease melted away. Such was his gratitude that he not only promised to confirm it, but conferred on the author of the “famous paper” the peerage of Massereene. The lease secured the Bann, as well as Lough Neagh, to Clotworthy, although the river had for years been in the possession of the Londoners. The “famous paper” in effect embodied the original demand of the Cromwellian Convention under a different guise. More fair-seeming than that project, it was equally fatal to Royalist hopes. 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; were strokes of genius; but to beguile Charles II. into giving kingly confirmation to a fraudulent lease about which even Cromwell had been deceived, and gain a peerage in the process, was a success almost uncanny. The King and the doomsman of his father alike outwitted; the Corporation of London and their enemies, the Chichesters, alike befooled; the friends of Laud and Strafford enlisted and placated; and every minor difficulty surmounted—these made up a combination of achievement which entitles the student of villainy to bespeak for Clotworthy a special niche in the gallery of rogues.