On being invested with the “Sword of State” he displayed a rapacity in keeping with his increased power, but the more he robbed the Crown the more redolent of loyalty and piety grew his dispatches. He had written of Cary words which quickly waxed applicable to himself:—“The Deputy made such a hand of enriching himself in this land, as the like was never done by any other that supplied the place.” He marked down the pardoned Ulster Chieftains as his especial prey. Upon their possessions he had long cast envious eyes, and with cold watchfulness he set himself to weave a web around them. Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, after three months at Court, had, on the 11th September, 1603, secured from James I. an order for the “restoration in blood” by Act of Parliament of himself and his brothers, and the re-grant of their lands by Patent. The King wished a Parliament to be summoned so that the Irish Princes and people should universally enjoy (for the first time) the protection of English Law. Two documents published in the year of his accession attest in this particular the statesmanship of the Stuart. Yet no Parliament was called, nor did any Patent issue in favour of the Chiefs from the Dublin fount of grants whose parchments alone a crafty Executive treated as binding. In the words of a Spanish Don, O’Neill and his comrades were “a very simple sort of men.” They had Latin pat, but little skill in lawcraft. Their warlike prowess won European renown, but they were easily outmatched in legal tourney. Despite Royal pardon, Royal parchments, and Royal promises, the Earls O’Neill and O’Donnell and their titles were blotted out within less than five years of the Treaty of Peace by the relentless Devonian. Shortly after Chichester became Deputy (February, 1605) there appeared before him a Scottish suitor bearing “King’s Letters” entitling him to unexpected bounties. Their magnitude astonished the “Admiral of Lough Neagh.” At first he gibed at the stranger and thwarted his projects. Then he trounced him in letters of alarm to Cecil. The nature of the replies he received, however, was not encouraging. For Sir Arthur had to do with a Royal favourite—James Hamilton—reputed to be a mighty hunter of holes in other men’s grants. The son of a clergyman at Ayr, Hamilton during Elizabeth’s reign, served the Scottish Crown as a spy both in Ireland and England. His career is a romance of the Fee-Simple, and he ended his days as a Peer of the Realm, owning, as Lord Claneboy, an estate in Ulster and elsewhere as extensive as the greediest of the freebooters. In his youth Hamilton was a Scholar of Dublin University, which was then newly founded by Queen Elizabeth on lands seized from St. Mary’s Abbey. Afterwards he kept a Latin School near Dublin Castle with James Fullerton, and the pair acted as intelligencers for the Scottish Crown.