To outpace his competitors in securing the grant he accepted a lease from the King direct, instead of obtaining a Patent such as he got from Cromwell. No authority existed for the issue of a lease of Irish Crown property lacking the Great Seal of Ireland, and no such lease was binding. Nevertheless, by this means a sidelong Royal sanction was given light-heartedly to a grant of Lough Neagh as well as the non-tidal Bann. At that moment the new Charter for the Londoners, granting them the entire Bann, was being prepared, and was shortly afterwards enrolled, in repugnancy to the Lease. The new-made Lord Massereene next arranged to baulk Colonel O’Neill so that he could retain the lands he had promised to restore him. O’Neill was married to the Countess of Chesterfield and had been schooled a Protestant under the patronage of Archbishop Laud. He was famed as “of a courage very notorious.” The operation of the Act of Settlement in his case illustrates the fate which befell Royalists less favoured. To thwart O’Neill, a fair-seeming proviso was inserted in the draft Bill of “Settlement.” It declared merely that, for every estate given up by the Planters, they should receive equivalent lands elsewhere. Nothing could sound more reasonable. The new peer and his friends, however, were determined that the “joyful Restoration” of his Majesty should bring joy to no one in Ireland but the King’s late enemies. Their faction was led by men well versed in affairs of State; while their victims were either returned exiles or persons long estranged from Courts and Parliaments. The “Settlement” Bill was a purely Cromwellian composture, for, although it embodied the King’s recognition of the loyalty of his Irish soldiers, this was offset by an envenomed tirade against the mass of the people. The keynote was struck in a preamble which recited “the unnatural insurrection, murther, and destructions of the 23rd October, 1641,” while the massacres and dispossessions which had provoked the outbreak were left unnoticed.