Sir John Stanley was a natural son of James Stanley, warden of Manchester, and afterwards Bishop of Ely, a younger son of that Thomas, Lord Stanley, who placed the crown of the vanquished Richard upon the head of the victorious Richmond on the field of Bosworth. He commanded his father’s retainers at the battle of Flodden Field, in 1513, when his uncle, Sir Edward Stanley, afterwards created Lord Monteagle, led the forces of Lancashire and Cheshire, and Sir Edmund Savage, mayor of Macclesfield, and so many of the burgesses of that town were slain; and on that occasion by his valour in the field won his golden spurs. He married Margaret, the only daughter and heir of William Honford, of Honford, by his wife Margaret, daughter of Sir John Savage, and was consequently closely allied to the Leghs of Adlington. In 1528 he and his wife prayed for a divorce in order that they might severally devote themselves to a religious life, and be quit of the world for ever. The divorce was granted, and he became a monk of Westminster, where he died; his wife also entered a religious house, but must have abandoned her intention of becoming a recluse, for she afterwards married Sir Urian Brereton, by whom she had a family, who through her inherited the Honford estates. Though Sir John assumed the cowl and tonsure of a monk, it is hardly credible, even supposing the story of Wolsey’s arbitrary exercise of power to have been true, that he forsook the society of his wife, retreated from the world, and disappeared in the shadow of the cloister “from displeasure taken in his heart” upon a matter of such comparatively little moment, and occurring four or five years previously.
A recent writer, in an account of Adlington, says that Sir John Stanley “was himself an ecclesiastic and warden of Manchester;” that his claim “was espoused by the Bishop of Ely, his father;” and that “the battle seems in reality to have been fought between the powerful Bishop of Ely on the one hand, and the yet more powerful Cardinal on the other.” These statements are entirely erroneous. Sir John, in early life, had embraced the profession of arms; as a soldier he had earned his knighthood by bravery on the field; and, being married, he would by the canons of the Church be disqualified from holding an ecclesiastical preferment, while, as a fact, his father, the Bishop of Ely, had been in his grave eight or nine years when the dispute respecting the Prestbury tithes arose.
George Legh died on the 12th June, 1529, at the early age of thirty-two. His will was only made on the day preceding his decease, and the broad lands of Adlington were transmitted to his only son, Thomas Legh, then an infant two years of age. His wife survived him, and was remarried to George Paulet, brother of the Marquis of Winchester, and she with her second husband appear to have resided at Adlington during the minority of the heir, for in a return of the clergy serving at the various chapels of ease within the parish of Prestbury there occurs the name of Sir James Hurst, a stipendiary priest, paid by George Pollet (Paulet), and apparently serving in the chapel at Adlington. By an unaccountable error Thomas Legh, of Adlington, has been confounded with another personage of the same name, who, as one of the commissioners under Sir Thomas Cromwell, took an active part in the suppression of the religious houses. The mistake will be apparent when it is remembered that at the time (1536) that worthy was denouncing monachism and despoiling the monks of their lands and houses Thomas Legh, of Adlington, was only in his ninth year, and before he had attained to manhood the great and lesser monasteries had been swept away.
Whilst he was in his minority he had been united in marriage with one of the younger daughters of the great house of Grosvenor—Mary, the daughter of Robert Grosvenor, of Eaton, the direct ancestor of the present Duke of Westminster. It is not known with certainty how the match was brought about, but in those days the lord of the fee was entitled to the wardship of the heir, with the right to put up his or her hand to sale in marriage; and if Richard Grosvenor, as is not unlikely, had the wardship of the Adlington estates, he may have thought the alliance a desirable one for a younger member of his numerous family. It was to avoid the evil arising from this feudal practice that so many early marriages were in former times resorted to, parents being oftentimes prompted to seek an eligible match for their heirs while under age to free them from the exactions and other consequences of wardship—a circumstance that could have been little understood by the President Montesquieu, when he cast the sneer upon our country in saying there was a law in England which permitted girls of seven years of age to choose their own husbands, and which, he added, was shocking in two ways, since it had no regard to the time when nature gives maturity to the understanding, nor to the time when she gives maturity to the body. Mary Grosvenor survived her husband and remarried Sir Richard Egerton, of Ridley, Knight, with whom she appears to have resided at Adlington during the minority of the son by her first husband. She had the manor and tithes of Prestbury settled upon her as dower; and in 1558 her second husband is found attending a meeting in the church at Prestbury, and acting there in the capacity of warden—an office then held in much higher esteem than at the present day. The lady deserves to be held in special remembrance by the men of Cheshire, from the circumstance that she is generally believed to have superintended the education and taken a kindly interest in the well-being of a notable Cheshire worthy, who attained the highest honours of the peerage, Richard Egerton’s base-born son by Alice Starke, of Bickerton—Thomas Egerton, Viscount Brackley, Lord Keeper and Chancellor of England, ancestor of the great Duke of Bridgewater, as well as of the present Earl of Ellesmere—a worthy who, if precluded by the circumstances of his birth from deriving honour from an illustrious ancestry, reflected on them, his descendants, and his county the lustre of a name brighter than any other its annals can boast. It is pleasant to think that some of the earlier years of the great Chancellor were spent within the old house at Adlington, and that the generous-hearted lady to whom he owed so much was not forgotten when he had attained to distinction, and she in her old age had become the victim of religious persecution.[32] She died in 1599, having survived her first husband for the long period of fifty-one years. In her will, dated 18th October, 1597, she appoints the Lord Keeper Egerton, whom she designates her “wellbeloved sonne,” one of her executors, and bequeaths to him “one ringe of Goulde having thereon a Dyamond.” She is buried at Astbury, where her altar-tomb, with a recumbent effigy upon the top, may still be seen.
Thomas Legh, the first husband of Mary Grosvenor, did not long enjoy possession of the ancestral domains, his death occurring at Eaton, May 17, 1548, the year in which he attained his majority. The only issue by his marriage was a son, Thomas, aged one year at the time of his death, so that the broad lands of Adlington were once more held in ward through the infancy of the heir.
On the 21st April, 1548, three weeks before his death, Thomas Legh granted to his wife’s eldest brother, Thomas Grosvenor, of Eaton, all the lands which his family had held in Belgrave from the time of the marriage of Sir Robert Legh with the heiress of Sir Thomas Belgrave, circa 1385; and four days later he settled the remainder of his estates, including “the Hall of Adlington,” in trust for the benefit of himself and his wife and his heirs in tail male.
Sir Urian Brereton, who married the widow of Sir John Stanley, the quondam recluse, seems to have acquired, with the lady, Sir John’s craving for the Prestbury tithes, for in 1538, during the minority of Thomas Legh the elder, he obtained from the Abbot of St. Werburg’s, in the names of himself and John Broughton, the reversion of the lease of the manor and advowson, to commence on the expiry of the one for 40 years renewed to George Legh in 1524; and this reversion was afterwards purchased by Richard and John Grosvenor, the brothers of Mary, the wife of Thomas Legh, in trust, and to prevent their alienation from the other Adlington properties. But a great revolution in religious thought and action was then gradually gaining strength and power, and the day was near at hand when the monks and their system were to be overthrown. On the dissolution of St. Werburg’s Abbey the manor and advowson of the church of Prestbury were granted to the Dean and Chapter of the newly-founded Cathedral of Chester. They did not, however, long enjoy possession; William Clyve, the third dean, and two of the prebendaries, were confined in the Fleet by procurement of Sir Richard Cotton, of Werblington, comptroller of the King’s household, a Hampshire knight, who appears to have shared the acquisitive properties of his elder brother, Sir George Cotton, another courtier and favourite of the King, who had had conferred upon himself the dissolved abbey and the greater part of the demesne of Combermere, in Cheshire, and who, in other ways, had increased his worldly possessions out of the spoils of the religious houses. While in the Fleet, under intimidation, as was alleged, the dean and canons granted to Sir Richard (20th March, 1553), for ever, most of their lands on the payment of a yearly rental; he in turn, on the 28th July, 1555, re-conveyed the manor and advowson of Prestbury to Richard and John Grosvenor, who, in 1559, are found presenting to the vicarage. The validity of the grant to Cotton was subsequently disputed, and on the Cheshire Recognisance Rolls, under date January 13th, 5 and 6 Elizabeth (1563–4), there is the enrolment of a complaint exhibited by Richard and John Grosvenor. Eventually the feoffees surrendered to the Crown; on the 19th December, 1579, the whole of the lands formerly held by the abbey were granted by Elizabeth to Sir George Calveley, Knight, George Cotton, Hugh Cholmondeley, Thomas Legh, Henry Mainwaring, John Nuthall, and Richard Hurleston, Esquires, and their heirs for ever; and, by another indenture, dated 6th August, 1580, the counterpart of which is preserved among the Adlington charters, these fee farmers, after reciting the grant of Elizabeth, for divers good causes and considerations them specially moving, demised and quit-claimed to Thomas Legh and his heirs the rectory, church, and manor of Prestbury, with the appurtenances, excepting the certain messuages, tenements, and hereditaments, with the appurtenances and the tithes, oblations, and obventions, of Chelford and Asthull (Astle). They have since continued in the possession of the Leghs, and have descended with their other estates.
Thomas Legh had a long minority, and it was a fortunate thing for him that in those early years of his life he had a good mother, who, with the aid of her powerful kinsmen, was able to guard his estates and protect him from undue taxation. On the 16th March, 1567–8, he obtained livery of his father’s lands, he being then of full age. He had, five years previously (29th June, 1563), being then in his sixteenth year, married, at Cheadle, Sybil, the youngest daughter of Sir Urian Brereton, of Honford, by his first wife, Margaret, daughter and heir of William Honford, and widow of Sir John Stanley, a marriage that it may be fairly assumed happily terminated the long-standing disputes between the two houses respecting the tithes of Prestbury.
Following the example of his father-in-law, who rebuilt the hall of Handforth, Thomas Legh, in 1581, rebuilt, or at all events, greatly enlarged, the house at Adlington, as the following inscription, in black-letter characters, over the entrance porch leading from the court-yard testifies:—
