In June, 1661, Lord Donegall set sail for Ireland, furthered by Treasury permits freeing him from Customs duties. On arrival in Dublin, he sued for a Patent under the King’s Letter of the previous February. No Lord Lieutenant was yet installed, as Monck (the newly-made Earl of Albemarle) failed to come over. Three temporary Lords Justices formed the Executive—viz., Lord Chancellor Eustace and the now ennobled Coote and Boyle. £1,500 a year apiece rewarded them for carrying out their functions, and they discharged them exactly in the spirit of the Council of Henry Cromwell five years before. The King’s Letter was addressed to this trio. Doubtless they had been privily bespoken by Clotworthy in Lord Donegall’s interest, for they responded to his requirements with such alacrity that a new Patent was sealed ten days after he landed. Usually years were occupied from the time the King’s Letter was lodged before a grant could be got out. Many legal formalities had to be complied with; and amongst these the law prescribed, as the most essential, a prior public inquiry in order to guard against encroachment on the rights of others. So vital to validity was this Inquisition that the Statute governing Patents declared void any grant made without it. The Lords Justices ignored the law, and issued to Lord Donegall a Patent which snatched the Bann from the Londoners, and Lough Neagh from the public, without inquiry or notice to anyone. A dispensation called a “non obstante” was inserted in the Patent, which purported to make it valid despite the non-holding of the inquiry. To include in it a waiver of the Statute was but an added illegality. The Lords Justices could not “dispense” with an Act of Parliament; and the King’s Letter did not pretend to authorise the dispensation. Yet the Patent of these ’prentice hands loftily announced itself good “notwithstanding the Statute.” By the agency of this paltry trio, Lord Donegall on the 3rd July, 1661, was allowed to consummate the iniquity which the “great Deputy” begot in 1603-4. Their grant empowered him to assert anew a claim to Lough Neagh and the Bann, which had been branded as untenable five times in the previous half-century. Scotched by Strafford, assailed by Sir Arthur Forbes and Sir William Power, denounced by Baron Oglethorpe, exposed by Sir James Balfour, arraigned by Deputy St. John, and blighted by a pedigree entailing every vice, it was revived by a tricky exercise of power in an unsettled State, as a sequence to Lord Massereene’s lease. So rank was the repute of its illegality that Lord Donegall in the following year applied for another King’s Letter to give it a lacquer of legality. With this object he induced Charles II. to affix his signet to a second Royal Letter containing the falsehoods already exposed.