No idea of duty to the King appeared among his officers. The habit of taking “presents” undermined their sense of public obligation; and money was freely spent on them by suppliants. Cash payments preluded the success both of Lord Donegall and of Lord Massereene. Even the English Solicitor-General, for drafting the Act of Settlement, in 1662, to suit the ex-Cromwellians, was presented with a “small token of thankfulness” by them on the motion of Lord Massereene in the Irish House of Lords. His lordship, though provided with such a willing penman as conveyancer, made no attempt to have inserted in the Act a clause to confirm his lease, while he availed of it to make all the rest of his estates secure. As a “Commissioner for the execution of the Royal declaration,” he wielded large influence in shaping its clauses, yet he avoided anything which would risk bringing the lease under discussion. Three years later he procured in the Act of Explanation (Sec. 55) a confirmation of his title to some property which he took under the Act of Settlement; but again attempted nothing to legalise the lease. It, therefore, never received recognition from either Statute or Patent. Lord Massereene died in 1665, and for three centuries afterwards his cajolement of Oliver Cromwell, Henry Cromwell, and Charles II. remained unknown. A like penumbra shrouded the Chichester conveyances, during the Irish “dark ages.” Some 35 years after the Restoration, laws which forbade the teaching of Catholics to read or write, or the sending of their children abroad to learn, were artfully fashioned by the Planters. Edmund Burke described their system as “wise and ingenious.” Illiteracy checked premature scandal against a new and frail nobility, and gave it time to become respectable before the story of the upstarts’ fortune and origin could be widely known. CHAPTER XXIV. LAWLESS LORDS JUSTICES.