Again Felim resorted to London, and again a fresh Commission was issued to do him right. The new Commissioners, on the 17th December, 1617, confirmed O’Byrne’s title, but with dogged tenacity Graham got St. John to appoint judges to re-hear the dispute. The struggle seemed unending, and although evidence was taken afresh by the judges they dared not announce a conclusion either way. On the 23rd January, 1618, St. John transmitted their notes to London and asked for directions. Delay and expense provoked a compromise, and Felim by a new order was restored to three-fourths of his lands, but Graham’s piety in purveying a brace of churches for Cosha was rewarded by one-fourth. To leave O’Byrne insecure, no fresh Patent was issued to him; and soon afterwards Lord Falkland became Deputy. Parsons was now promoted head of the Court of Wards and Receiver-General, but he remained as of yore a-swoop for prey. The plot against the O’Byrnes was revived. Felim, being the only Chief left in Erin, was treated as a blot on the landscape, and in 1622 Falkland reported him to the Privy Council as an ill-disposed person. He owned too big a property to be allowed to remain in his mountains undisturbed. The reply to the Deputy from England, however, discouraged attack. The “Spanish marriage” was at that moment being negotiated by Buckingham, and Falkland learnt that, if the heir to the throne were to wed a Catholic, a fresh persecution of his bride’s co-religionists might appear untimely. When the match with Spain was broken off in 1623 he took a freer hand. On the 27th August, 1624, he authorised Parsons to hold a Commission to examine O’Byrne’s title, as if it were a new problem troubling the sages of the law. The Surveyor-General held “office,” and returned a finding that Felim’s estate had been forfeited by his father’s rebellion and death—ignoring both grants and pardons from King James and Queen Elizabeth. Falkland, ablaze for law and order, wrote to the Privy Council on the 25th March, 1625, asking them to consider “how vain a thing it is to suppose to content Felim and his sons by indulgently suspending the taking of the lands in his country.” The English authorities gave this presentation of the equities no countenance, and King James, in one of the last dispatches before his death (March, 1625), begged Falkland “to maintain inviolable the credit of his great office.” Yet Charles I. was not a year on the Throne when the Deputy engaged himself in a still more cruel plot to uproot the O’Byrnes.