If the trick had been discovered before the Patent was ready, Allen would have explained that no wrong to the Londoners was intended; and would rely on the fact that he had previously registered at Derry their title as the real owners. Any repugnancy between the two verdicts, he would protest, was for lawyers to settle, and not for a poor escheator like himself. Others of the Commissioners might have found it less easy to invent a plausible excuse if exposure had befallen them; but in those days honesty had no sentinel, and the ruse was entirely successful. “Our trusty and well-beloved, the right reverend father in God, Theophilus, Lord Bishop of Dromore,” and Sir Francis Annesley, “knight and baronet, one of our principal Secretaries in our Kingdom of Ireland,” were of the party. They endorsed at Carrickfergus the verdict which gainsaid the Londoners’ Charter, and handed over the Bann to the official who not only did not own it, but had been rewarded for giving up a fraudulent claim to it. Both magnates were acquainted with State policy. They knew the wishes of the King, and of the gift of the river to the City. Yet they soiled their hands as readily as if they had served an apprenticeship to the office of Deputy. Nothing was then too dirty for a dignitary. As for the Londoners, being denied notice, they were left in the dark and made no sign. Their title having been affirmed by Allen at Derry on the 26th March, 1621, they could hardly have foreseen that on the 6th April, 1621, he would strive to undermine it at Carrickfergus. Still less were they likely to imagine that the nobleman, in whose Deputyship the Bann was made theirs, could be engaged in a plot with a prelate and a Secretary of State to filch it for himself. So they lost the non-tidal river. When the Carrickfergus “return” reached Dublin Chichester’s joy was made full. A Patent was sealed for him on the 20th November, 1621, in which the Bann, from the Salmon Leap at Coleraine to Lough Neagh, with its bed and soil, were declared his property, in the King’s name. Lough Neagh, too, was included, and the grant conferred a power to spread nets on the banks both of river and lake. Everyone responsible for this knew that justice was outraged, but that mattered not. Lord Chichester could now boast that the fisheries were set in his grasp as firmly as parchment and the Great Seal could assure them. This achievement placed him on the pinnacle of conveyancing greatness. He had successfully brigaded a Bishop and a Secretary of State with an escheator, to flout the King, and got his Deputy to grant a Patent by which the Londoners were robbed. No treachery to Irish chiefs, or slaughter of kern or cleric, could compare with such a triumph.