This could only mean that Buckingham was to get the secret procedure (which the King had ordained) quashed; and allow St. John to hold any future inquiry in public before the Privy Council, where Chichester’s creatures held the majority. Blundell’s “arguments” were so powerful that Buckingham prevailed on the King to drop the proceedings, and Balfour’s mission ended in smoke. The “articles exhibited” by him, and the correspondence between the English and Irish Executives, are not given a place in the State Papers. Only for disjointed entries and letters in the family archives of Hamilton and Chichester, posterity would never have heard of the perils they ran or the struggles of St. John to rescue them. The official records must have been made away with. Balfour before long was consoled for the abandonment of the investigation. To keep his mouth shut he was presented with lands in Ulster after his return to England, and therewith rested content. Amongst his papers printed in 1837 by the Abbotsford Club (Edinburgh) were copies of Hamilton’s “Thomas Irelande” Letter of the 6th December, 1604, and that of the 16th April, 1605, granting Sir Con O’Neill’s estate. These evidently formed part of his “brief” for the Discovery. Even if Balfour’s inquiry had been pressed home, the resourceful Chichester would not have been taken unawares. He had skilfully tampered with the State ledgers to prepare a bulwark of defence if challenged as to his part in the seizure of the fisheries. On becoming Lord High Treasurer, the rent-rolls of the Exchequer lay under his hand, and these were manipulated with clerkly art. An insertion in them in 1618 correlates with the period of Balfour’s inquiry. It casually records that Lord Chichester is owner of the Bann and Lough Neagh, although everyone knew that the river had been granted to the Londoners in 1610—apart from the “surrender” by the ex-Deputy in 1611. The entry seemed quite business-like, and reads:—“Arthur, Lord Chichester, assignee of James Hamilton, knight, holds the entire fishery of the lake called Lough Neagh, and the river Bann—per annum 12s. 6d.” A casual scribe might have ledgered it; yet the words amounted to a royal recognition of his title. No earlier Crown rent-roll contains such a record, and it was made seven years after the Bann had been awarded to the Londoners, by Charter, rent free.