This masterly composition was mere make-believe. Smoothly smacking in law-prate, it rose to the highest level of legal fiction. His Majesty never heard of the surrender. Jones set his own seal to it without James I. being the wiser. In all material respects the “preamble” festers with falsehood. Chichester, it is true, got a “custodium” of the Castle of Culmore on the 24th October, 1609, with provision for the payment of gunners and warders. Three parchments issued in the following year changed this arrangement, and Culmore Castle, its fishings, and 300 acres were reserved to the Crown on the 22nd February, 21st June, and 16th July, 1610. The new bargain was made “for the furtherance of the intended Plantation by the Londoners,” to whom they were given. Other benefits were conferred on Chichester in exchange. The pretence that he received only £550 out of the £4,500 is in keeping with the rest of his romantic prose. If Hamilton took the lion’s share it is strange that the surrender should show that his interest was confined to three-fourths of the tidal Bann, while the rest of the stolen property stood in the Deputy’s name. To suppose that the captain of the brigands netted only an eighth of the profits does injustice to his voracity. If the surrender had been a reality, James I. would have learnt the disagreeable news that, when he presented the Bann and Lough Foyle to the Londoners fifteen months previously, he had had no title to make the grant. Yet so formally was the surrender framed that Chichester joined his wife, “Dame Lettice,” in the deed—in accordance with the law governing feudal tenures. This told of the nicety of the expert who (to facilitate confiscation from the natives) abolished the ancient right of Irishwomen under the Brehon Law “to have sole property in a certain portion of their husbands’ goods during coverture”! Chichester was then in straits. It appeared later that he had embezzled £10,000 from the Crown out of the rents of the forfeited Ulster estates, though he suffered from no lack of income. His salary and allowances were enormous, without reckoning what came in from confiscated lands. He even feigned poverty to cloak his defalcations, but after his death his heir was called upon by Charles I. to make them good. The part played by his spiritual confederate in this legal pantomime was worthy of “that rascal Jones.” His Grace wielded the Great Seal on Chichester’s behalf like a burglar’s “jemmy.” Whether the signet he affixed to the “surrender” was great or small it boots not to enquire. Large as was the gain made by the Archbishop out of the Church Establishment, he supplemented it by grants from the Deputy which lacked the King’s sanction.