The new Letter declared that:—“When Wandesforde was Deputy it was sought to force fresh Patents on Lord Chichester, under colour of his having defective title. These Patents, which were never enrolled or paid for, shall be vacated; and new Patents for his estates shall be given to Lord Donegall.” Plainly a fresh effort was to be made to include the fisheries in some legitimate grant covering the whole of the Chichester properties—as in 1621. It was a subtle purpose. For twenty-two years the Patent of 1640 had been left unenrolled; and now its owner wished to discard it altogether with a view to getting an omnibus Patent. Doubtless he calculated by this means to get rid of the blot on the family escutcheon cast by Strafford, but, whatever lay behind the scheme, it miscarried. An unlooked-for fatality overwhelmed his plans. While the new Patent was being prepared, Cromwellian strategy in the Irish Parliament was at work; and in 1665 the “Act of Explanation” provided that existing grants would become void unless enrolled within two years. Busily as he strove, Lord Donegall could not get out his new Patent in these two years; and, when the last days of the period were approaching in 1667, he was driven, through lack of time, to enrol the hated grant of Strafford. The new one was never issued, and his whitewashing processes came to naught. He had hoped that, with a title freshly furbished, the Chichesters would go down to history unspattered, and that all proof of past disgrace would be wiped out. Only by the aid of the parchments of 1640 and 1662 could the mazy story of a sixty-year fraud be pieced together; and these he strove to get rid of like those of 1603. The skeleton in the family closet, however, still lay unburied and remained as grisly as before. The failure to get the proposed Patent “past the Seal” in five years contrasts suggestively with the celerities of 1661, when ten days served the rinsings of a regicide Executive to produce a Patent disposing of the greatest fishery in the Three Kingdoms. No grant for the Donegall estates, therefore, exists (apart from that for the fisheries) save the misliked Patent of Strafford which Charles II. was prayed to “vacate”; after it had been sullenly left unenrolled for a generation. Despite the allegation that it was “forced” on Lord Chichester, it remains the sole title of a family of meritless intruders to the lands of the O’Neills and O’Dohertys. If Strafford’s wraith haunted Dublin Castle in 1667, what time his parchment was tardily lodged for enrolment, the ghost even of “Black Tom” must have wrestled with a smile.