Between 1603 and 1606 the absentee Lord Lieutenant advised the Privy Council on Irish affairs; and, by correspondence with his subordinates, loosely governed Ireland. He befriended Hugh O’Neill, and his death left the Earl without a protector at Court, where Chichester sought to instil poison against the Ulster lords, in order to forfeit their territories for his own benefit. Devonshire had, a few months before his death, gone through a form of marriage with Lady Rich, greatly to the King’s displeasure. The ceremony was performed by his chaplain, Laud—who afterwards perished on the scaffold under Charles I. as Archbishop. Devonshire’s will (signed the day before he died) shows plainly that he was party to the unmiraculous multiplication of loaves and fishes by the Patent-mongers. The frame of the will (a long Latin document) makes it evident that he was ignorant of the giving of the power-of-attorney by Wakeman to Auditor Ware to enable Hamilton to annex the tidal Bann. One of the executors, Sir William Godolphin, was the lessee of that fishery from the Crown under a demise made during the rebellion in 1600; and he would hardly have kept silent had he learnt of the making of a grant which might affect his lease. The will appointed John Wakeman and John King “trustees” to enable Lady Rich to receive “the residue” of grants to which they were entitled under the King’s Letter, though that was already long exhausted. This was an ugly disclosure to appear in the hurried will of a dying Statesman, for it made plain that the intent of the King’s Letter to recoup “money paid to an ancient and well-deserving servant in Scotland” was a mere device to benefit the Lord Lieutenant. The appointment of Cecil as one of the executors revealed the fact that the Secretary of State was also in the secret. Other Court nobles, including Lord Southampton, the patron of Shakespeare, were named executors, and were thus saddled with notice that the Royal revenues had been made away with, and were to be further embezzled for a misliked woman. Yet they made no protest and asked no questions. This put them all in Chichester’s power, and emboldened him in depredation. On the 25th April, 1606, he wrote to Cecil praying that his letters to the late Lord Lieutenant should not be allowed to fall into the hands of any other member of the Privy Council; and that “all my papers” in the dead man’s drawers should be taken up by Cecil. This was treating the Secretary of State on the footing of an accomplice, and Devonshire as a fellow-culprit.