arrived in the Seine, and landed near the fortified town of Harfleur, which surrendered on the 22nd September. Henry’s army had, however, to contend with a more powerful foe than the French. Disease made frightful ravages in his camp, the poisonous miasma of the marshes of Harfleur carrying off in those few weeks fully five thousand of the besiegers. On the 7th October the remnant of the army advanced, and on the 25th the splendid victory of Agincourt was achieved. Robert Legh, however, was not permitted to share in the glories of that memorable day, he having died of the pestilence five days after the surrender of Harfleur, and an inquisition by virtue of a writ of diem clausit extremum, dated 16th October, 1415, was taken.
He was succeeded by his only son, also named Robert, who, though then only five years of age, boasted the possession of a wife, he having, in accordance with the fashion of the time, and well nigh before he could quit his cradle, been wedded to Isabel, one of the daughters of Sir John Savage, of Clifton, Knight, who was entrusted with the custody of his lands during his minority. On the 16th October, 3 and 4 Henry V. (1416), Robert Legh’s young widow petitioned for and had livery of dower, and shortly after she became the wife of William Honford, of Chorley, a younger brother of Sir John de Honford, of Handforth.
On the 4th May, 1431, Robert Legh made proof of age, when his mother’s second husband, William Honford, “aged 60 and upwards,” was one of the witnesses, and testified “that the said Robert was born at Adlynton, and baptized in the church at Prestbury, the Tuesday on the feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary (March 25, 1410), and was aged 21 on the feast of the Invention of the Holy Cross (May 3) then last past; and that he, William, was present at Prestbury the day when Robert Hyde, his godfather, came to the church at Prestbury with the said Robert.” (Earwaker.)
The name of Robert Legh appears among those who on the 3rd March, 1435–6, were summoned to attend the Council of the boy King Henry VI. at Chester, when he and the others then assembled, in the name of the whole community of the county of Chester, granted to the King a subsidy of 1,000 marks (£666 13s. 4d.); and on the 28th May, in the same year, he with Robert de Honford, Knight, Robert Massy of Godley, and John Pygot were appointed collectors of the subsidy within the hundred of Macclesfield. In March, 1441–2, a further subsidy of 3,000 marks (£2,000) having been granted by the county, Robert Legh was again deputed, with the others named, to collect the same within the hundred.
In the MS. account of the Legh family, preserved at Adlington, and to which reference has already been made, it is said that, in 1447, Robert de Legh obtained a licence from the Bishop of Coventry “to keep a chaplain to perform mass and other divine offices in any of his manor houses within the diocese for the term of thirty years, without prejudice to the curate of the place, on which licence a domestic chapel was built at Adlington.” The chapel thus erected stood in the park, within a few hundred yards of the front of the present mansion, and on the site known at the present day by the name of the Chapel Field.
The first connection of the Leghs with the manor of Prestbury dates from 1448, when the manor with the great and small tithes, which had previously been leased to the Pigots, of Butley, were demised by the Abbot of St Werburgh’s, Chester, to Robert Legh for thirty-nine years, together with the Heybirches and Ewood, and also the advowson of the church of Prestbury, and all other rights and appurtenances belonging to it and the manor, the vicar’s endowment excepted—one of the conditions being that the lessee should provide a fit and proper chaplain to celebrate divine service in the chapel of Poynton, within the parish of Prestbury, during the continuance of the lease, a condition, however, that was not always observed, for in 1500 the tithes of Poynton were sequestrated in consequence of the omission or neglect to fulfil the condition named. Some dispute having subsequently arisen, a new lease was granted in 1461, which was renewed in 1493. This last expired in 1524, and in the year following another lease was granted for forty years. On the 9th March, 1462 (2 Edward IV.), the King, as Earl of Chester, granted to Robert Legh a licence to enclose and impark a certain wood called Whiteley Hay and Adlington Wood, and also a place called Whiteley Green, with liberty to hold the park so enclosed and imparked to him and his heirs for ever. The place remained enclosed until the early part of the last century, when it was disparked, and a tract of land more conveniently near the hall applied to the purpose. In 1478 his mother, Matilda, who had survived her first husband sixty-three years, and had also outlived her second husband, William de Honford, died. She must have been very old, for in the inquisition taken after her death her son Robert was said to be sixty-eight years of age. He had livery of the lands held by her in dower, but did not long enjoy possession of them, for his death occurred on the 21st January following. As already stated, he had been married in his infancy to Isabella, daughter of Sir John Savage, of Clifton. This lady predeceased him, and he afterwards married Isabella, a daughter of Sir William Stanley, of Stanley, Stourton, and Hooton, who, according to the Adlington MS., was within the prohibited degrees, being of the blood of his first wife, and, consequently, it was thought prudent, if not indeed necessary, to make the marriage valid, to obtain a dispensation from the Pope.
On the death of Robert Legh, his eldest son, who bore the same name, and who was then fifty years of age, and married to Ellen, daughter of Sir Robert Booth, of Dunham Massey, Knight, succeeded to the patrimonial lands. Two years afterwards, a quarrel having arisen between Edward IV. and James III. of Scotland, which resulted in the breaking off of the marriage treaty between the English Princess Cicely and the son of the Scottish King, and the resumption of hostilities between the two countries, a commission was issued (November 18, 1480) to Robert Legh, and other persons therein named, requiring them to array the fencible men of the hundred before the Christmas following, and to command the same to be in readiness in warlike attire to attend upon the Earl of Chester on three days’ notice; and on the 15th January following another commission was issued to the same persons, requiring them to communicate with the gentlemen of the hundred to determine the number of horsemen, with their harness, that could be raised in their households, and to make a return before the Wednesday next before the Feast of the Purification. A third commission was issued to them in May, 1481, to array the fencible men of the hundred between the ages of sixteen and sixty, and to appoint a certain day for the same to depart “pro viagio dicti partes nostri versus partes socie.” Mr. Earwaker cites a deed from which it appears that on the 6th December, 1483, John Legh, a younger brother of Robert, a priest in orders, and then rector of Rostherne, and Douce or Dulcia, his sister, granted to the said Robert all their right and title to the manor and church of Prestbury.
The fierce struggle of the Red and White Roses destroyed the power and weakened the influence of the English nobility and their feudatory chiefs by sweeping away the heads of the principal families. Their sun went down when the stout Earl of Warwick, the renowned “King-maker,” lay weltering in his gore upon the field at Barnet; Tewkesbury extinguished their hopes; and the fight at Bosworth ended a contest which, in the field and on the scaffold, had cost the lives of more than sixty princes of the royal family, above one-half of the nobles and principal gentlemen, and above a hundred thousand of the common people of England. Fortunately for themselves, the lords of Adlington passed harmless through that eventful period. It does not appear that Robert Legh took any very active part in the protracted struggle between the rival houses of York and Lancaster. The Lyme Leghs had plucked the “pale and maiden blossom” and given their verdict “on the White Rose side,” but there is reason to believe that, in the closing years of his life at least, the sympathies of Robert Legh were on the side of the Red Rose of Lancaster. It may be that, like the kinsmen of his father’s second wife, the Stanleys of Lancashire, he believed that to be “the true policy which had the most success,” and, like them, have been a faithful adherent of the party of “good luck.” Certain it is that the great and exhausting quarrel between these rival houses, which brought death and destruction to so many an English home, left his house with unimpaired estates and undiminished power; but he did not long survive the close of that unhappy struggle, his death occurring on the 8th December, 1486, when he must have been sixty-eight years of age. By his wife, whom he predeceased, and who died in 1504, he had Thomas Legh, who succeeded as his heir, four younger sons, and one daughter.
Thomas Legh was thirty-five years of age when he entered upon his inheritance, and he had then been married about seven years, his wife being Katharine, daughter of Sir John Savage, of Clifton, and sister of Thomas Savage, Archbishop of York, the founder of the Savage chantry in Macclesfield church, and of Ellen Savage, who married Sir Piers Legh, of Lyme.
Two years after the victory at Bosworth, which gave the crown of England to Henry of Richmond, a desperate effort was made by the friends of the fallen tyrant, Richard III., to secure the throne for the impostor Lambert Simnel, and when the new King’s crown was in peril at the battle of Stokefield, Thomas Legh’s relative, Piers Legh, of Lyme, drew his sword and fought valiantly to defend it. In November of that year (1487) a subsidy was voted to the King by his loyal subjects in the county of Chester, and the name of Thomas Legh, of Adlington, occurs inter alia among those authorised to collect the portion due from the hundred of Macclesfield.