The Republican Attorney-General for Ireland was a person named Basil, who had come over to “plant” in Donegal some years earlier. Basil’s good fame in his own country was scanty; and when the House of Commons nominated him as escheator in Ireland the House of Lords for years withheld their approval to his appointment. His behaviour justified their forebodings. Taking Sir John Davies for his model, Basil played towards Clotworthy the part Davies had acted for Chichester. Untrammelled by supervision, he smuggled into Sir John’s lease of Lough Neagh a grant of the fishery of the Bann, from the Lough to the Salmon Leap at Coleraine. It was an exploit as remarkable in a Republican as any theretofore wrought in the name of a King. Basil knew, of course, that the entire river was pledged to the Londoners, as his predecessor had known it in 1609. But, just as Davies abetted its capture by Chichester, so the Commonwealth Attorney-General in 1656 made State policy subservient to sordid private interest. Indeed the excuse could be invented for Davies, when he betrayed his trust, that the bargain with the Corporation was not then finally settled by the King. Basil, in 1656, knew that it had been perfected by the Lord Protector, and that the Bann was actually in the Londoners’ possession, when he conveyed it to Clotworthy. Moreover, having drafted a fraudulent lease, he certified that it was framed “according to the tenor of his Highness’s Letters of the 13th May, 1656.” Every man of the Dublin Cromwellian Executive—viz., Henry Cromwell, R. Pepys, Miles Corbett, Robert Goodwin, and M. Thomlinson, signed the lease. These were the saints who represented all that was godly in a land “darkened by the mists of Popish superstition.” Of the five, Pepys was Chief Justice, and Corbett Chief Baron. That they subscribed with consenting minds, and not mechanically, sufficiently appears. Oliver’s Letter, in granting Lough Neagh, asked them to decide on the rent which the State was to receive for it. To carry out the cheat as to the Bann they had to fix two separate rents, one for the Lough and the other for the river. The Bann they set down at £35 for the first seven years, and £44 thereafter, and this brought home to them the fact that the river was seven times a more valuable fishery than Lough Neagh. Yet their instructions never mentioned the Bann. To complete the trick the Clerk of the Council, Thomas Herbert, certified that he had “entered and examined” the documents on which the lease was issued. Guilt, therefore, sat on the consciences of all, for not only had they given away Lough Neagh for a song, but they sacrificed without authority what on their own showing was seven times more valuable. The Londoners deemed the Lough worth £100 a year in 1622.