After Devonshire’s arrival in England in June, 1603, he was held in thrall by a love affair with the wife of Lord Rich, and never returned to Ireland. He was made Lord Lieutenant by James I., and was able at Court to lend countenance to the malpractices of his friends. To hide his own share in them he worked behind nominees, the principal being henchmen named John Wakeman and John King. The latter he sent over from England to a post in Dublin. Devonshire’s participation in the loot began on the 8th November, 1603. He then secured a King’s Letter for a grant of lands to the value of £100 a year in favour of John Wakeman, on the plea that it represented the Royal gratitude for “services done unto Us and to be done and also in regard to a valuable consideration in money paid and to be paid by our order to an ancient and well-deserving servant of ours in Scotland” by Wakeman. The “old servant” was a myth. So was the money payment by Wakeman to him. So was the £100 a year limit of recompense. From November, 1603, till the Earl’s death in April, 1606, a stream of grants, nominally to John Wakeman, but really for the Lord Lieutenant, flowed from this source. In yearly value they amounted to several thousands of pounds. Wakeman was a servant of the Levant Company who in 1603 had returned from trading with the Emperor of Morocco. That he had made any payment among the Moors to “well-deserving” Scotchmen in Elizabeth’s reign was unlikely, yet over a dozen Patents of enormous value were passed in his name, on pretence of rewarding him to the extent of £100 a year. Devonshire’s second go-between, John King, was made Clerk of the Crown in Dublin on the 12th July, 1603, and received much property on pretexts equally flimsy. In order that these practices might be safely carried out, the Lord Lieutenant arranged with Cecil to dispatch to Ireland, as soon as John King was appointed, a law officer on whom they could rely. This was John Davies, a hungry lawyer from the Middle Temple, who afterwards was knighted for his part in fleecing Hugh O’Neill. Davies was nominated in September, 1603, and was sworn-in in Dublin during November, 1603. His unscrupulousness and cunning were beyond the common even of those spacious days. To him must be ascribed the feats of conveyancing, the multiplication of Patents, the shady trusteeships, the magnification of grants, and the plunder of the Gaelic gentry, which defile the reign of James I. His arrival worked an immediate improvement in the fortunes of Chichester and Carew.