No inquisition had been held (as the law required) to establish the right to make the Patent. Nor did any official notification of it apprise the Crown or the public of what had been done. A spell of black magic transmuted a military appointment into a life estate in the richest fishery in Ulster, and attached thereto a bogus “Admiralty.” Uglier even than the uncanny graft on the “command” at Carrickfergus was Sir Arthur’s crookedness as to the Bann. The river was nowhere mentioned in either King’s Letter from first to last; yet the new Patent captured it for Chichester. Ecclesiastics as well as laymen owned the stream on either bank. It belonged to Hugh O’Neill in part, to Sir Randal McDonnell in part, to the Bishop of Derry, to the Bishop of Down and Connor, and other magnates. They never learnt till too late that, by imposing the Great Seal on skins of vellum, Sir Arthur had stolen their property. The fresh-water “Admiral” kept his scrivenery secret until its victims were powerless and his sway assured. His day was coming; and the spirit in which he trampled down public and private ownership proves that the embittered captains of Elizabeth never intended to respect the treaties of peace which heralded the dawn of the Stuart reign. Chichester had as little compunction in thwarting the policy of James I. as in stripping chiefs and clansmen of their acres. To baffle research as to his misdeeds, he inserted a proviso in the Patents of 1604 declaring that those of 1603 should be annulled before their substitutes were sealed. He had cunningly left them unenrolled, lest their contents should rise up in judgment against him, and thus they were for ever withheld from scrutiny and subtracted from the archives of the State. Knowledge of them is derived only from the King’s Letter and recitals in the Patents of 1604. The germ of the stranger’s claim to Lough Neagh and the Bann, thus clandestinely called into being, animates the unnatural pedigree of the Chichester title. In no essay of his descendants to trace it back through the centuries to some legitimate source, nor in their lawsuits to maintain a hold on what he filched, are the Patents of 1603-4 ever mentioned. In no legal proceedings concerning the Bann or Lough Neagh (and they were frequent) was the pretenced life-estate ever relied on or referred to. A modern affidavit, which boasts a complete and accurate enumeration of the grants, piously avers that the first was issued in 1606, and suppresses those of 1603-4. The guilt-dyed originals were left buried out of sight, as if no tell-tale ghosts haunted the Record Office. Yet they represented the fairest flower of the handicraft which typified the majesty of the law in Ireland when the Brehon Code was overthrown.