no charges were proved against him, Mac Carthaig was set at liberty in January 1591 on condition that he not leave England nor travel more than three miles outside London without permission. The Queen's principal secretary, Lord Burghley, backed him, and he obtained protection against his creditors and permission to recover an old fine of £500 due to the Crown from Lord Barry, a neighbour and rival of his in Munster, whom he blamed for his arrest; Barry was later to accuse him of disloyalty as this suit was prosecuted. Mac Carthaig subsequently obtained permission to return to Ireland. Succession disputes Fínghin mac Donncha returned to Ireland (though he was still technically a prisoner) in November 1593, following his wife and child. In the next year, his uncle Owen (the Mac Carthaig Reagh) died and was succeeded by his nephew, Donal na Pípí. The latter bound himself in the sum of £10,000 not to divert the Mac Carthaig Reagh succession from MacCarthy, who was in turn his tanist. Mac Carthaig appeared before the council at Dublin in June 1594 to reply to the accusations of David de Barry, 5th Viscount Buttevant, a local rival of Mac Carthaig's with whom he had a land dispute, which again implicated him pro-Spanish intrigues with William Stanley. Florence then returned to England by licence and remained there until the spring of 1596 in a vain attempt to prosecute Lord Buttevant. The execution of Patrick O'Collun, a fencing master, for conspiracy to murder the Queen in 1594 did nothing to restore Mac Carthaig's reputation since O'Collun had once been a member of his household. In 1596, Donal Mac Carthaig, Mac Carthaig Mór and Earl of Clancarthy, died without male issue and the matter of the succession became highly complicated. Clancar's estate should by law have reverted to the crown, but Mac Carthaig had a mortgage on the lands and also had right by his wife. Another Donal, the Earl's illegitimate son (not to be confused with Donal na Pipi), also asserted a claim, not to the English Earldom, but to the title of Mac Carthaig Mór. Fínghin mac Donncha Mac Carthaig would in future correspondence refer to Donal as "Donal the bastard". It was most unlikely that the English authorities would acknowledge Mac Carthaig or grant him the derived English title as they wanted to break up the Mac Carthaig lands; so the real dispute