If any interest in Wakeman’s Letter lingered, grants under it would belong, not to Hamilton or Chichester, but to the Lord Lieutenant. That lovesick absentee was now on his honeymoon in England. He had of late mysteriously begun to fail in health; so his underlings thought some additional risk might be taken. That Wakeman was privy to cheating his master is hard to believe. Ware certainly was; and it is more than probable that the power of attorney, which purported to substitute him for Sir Richard Cooke, was a counterfeit. True, it was enrolled, but enrolments during the Stuart epoch, when forgery was a fine art, are not trustworthy. They can no more be accepted without corroboration as proof of the existence of genuine deeds than those of the Puritans. It is significant, too, that Cooke afterwards became one of the Deputy’s severest critics. Vast as were the annexations so effected, the artificers remained unglutted. On the 13th March, 1606, they again plied the Thomas Irelande Letter, and a Patent was issued under it to Hamilton of lands in six counties—Meath, Queen’s, Wexford, Mayo, Galway, and Dublin. Four days later (17th March, 1606) by a fifth Patent, a few Westmeath castles were thrown in. On the 11th April, 1606, they shifted back to the Wakeman Letter; and by its potency Hamilton received a Patent of the Customs of Down and Antrim. None of the Patents contains any recital showing how the property so granted was supposed to have come to the Crown. No right existed to confiscate lands without attainder (save those of the monasteries, which vested in the King by Statute). No great Ulster proprietor had then been attainted. To overleap this obstacle, the Deputy’s plan was first to declare the estates to be Hamilton’s by Patent, next to obtain an assignment to himself, and lastly to discover a pretext for hunting the native owners out of the country or out of the world. On the 3rd April, 1606, a tragic event thrilled England and smote Ireland. It came as a portent athwart a troubled sky to both conquerors and conquered. On that day the Earl of Devonshire died; and his unlooked-for taking-off changed the course of history. The influence of the victor of Kinsale over a prostrate country was not without benignity. He restrained mere vengefulness after O’Neill’s surrender in 1603, and bent towardly on the defeated nobles. The new Court in London he despised, and, doubtless, ranked his long-descended antagonists in Ulster high above the rabble who infested Whitehall or “Tibbald’s” to importune scullions for writs to plunder.