To whose high will we bound our calm contents;
To Bolingbroke are we sworn subjects now,
Whose state and honour I for aye allow.
Ere many moons had waxed and waned the humbled and wretched king, who had resigned his crown to the usurper, fell beneath the murderous battle-axe of Piers Exton, “within the guilty closure of the walls” of Pontefract, that—
Bloody prison,
Fatal and ominous to noble peers;
and very near the spot where, less than sixty years before, Sir Robert Holland’s patron, the “good Earl of Lancaster,” had yielded up his life.
In the fierce struggle between the Red and White Roses—that “convulsive and bleeding agony of the feudal power” which destroyed the flower of the English nobility, and well-nigh exhausted the nation—we hear little of Beeston, though the victorious Bolingbroke’s son, the “nimble-footed madcap Harry, Prince of Wales,” lived much of his time within the palatinate, and the Cheshire men figured prominently in the stirring events of those stirring times.
In 1460, when the compromise was made by which the “meek usurper” was to retain the crown for the remainder of his life, and Richard of York become heir at his death, we find an entry on the Patent Rolls granting to him the Principality of Wales and the Earldom of Chester, in which Beeston is included in the recital of the manors and castles considered as appendages to the earldom. The honours and possessions thus acquired were not, however, to be long enjoyed, for before the close of the year Henry’s Queen—Margaret of Anjou—refusing to acquiesce in an arrangement that set aside the claims of her son, took up arms on his behalf, and, aided by some of the most devoted supporters of the Lancastrian cause, marched northwards. The opposing forces met on Wakefield Green on the 31st December, 1460. The army of the White Rose was completely routed, and Beeston’s lately designated lord, the Duke of York, and his son, the Earl of Rutland, fell together—butchered, it is said, in cold blood upon the field by the black-faced Clifford.
The grant of 1460 is the last occasion on which mention is made of Beeston as an ordinary fortified stronghold. When Henry of Richmond came out of the field of Bosworth, a victor, he planted the heel of the sovereign upon the necks of the nobles, and destroyed their power by putting down their retainers. He freed their lands from the burden of supporting an army of the State; but, while doing so, he succeeded in breaking up the feudal system. From that time the decay of Beeston may be said to date, and the old fortress must have soon begun to show signs of dilapidation, for Leland, in his Genethliacon Eadverdi Principis written in 1548, describes it as being then in a shattered and ruinous condition. In the reign of Elizabeth the site was alienated from the Earldom of Chester, and given by the Queen to her dancing Chancellor, “the grave Lord Keeper,” Sir Christopher Hatton, who subsequently conveyed it to the manorial lords of Beeston; and so it again became attached to the manor from which it had originally been severed. In this way it became part of the possessions of that famous Cheshire hero, Sir George Beeston—a veteran soldier who had borne himself bravely and well in the siege of Boulogne and the fight at Musselburg, and whose warlike spirit was not even subdued by age, for it is recorded that in the glorious victory over the Spaniards at the time of the Armada, when he was nearly ninety years old, he displayed such gallantry that Elizabeth knighted him for his achievements. The brave old knight closed a life of honour in 1601, being then 102 years of age, and was buried at Bunbury, where his recumbent effigy upon an altar-tomb beneath a pointed arch may be seen, with a long Latin inscription above it in which his services to his country are recorded. The granddaughter of Sir George Beeston conveyed the manor and castle in marriage to William Whitmore, of Leighton, Esquire, from whom it descended through the Savages to Sir Thomas Mostyn, who died in 1831, when the property passed by sale to the present Lord Tollemache.