In 1587 Thomas Legh had the shrievalty of Cheshire conferred upon him. The time was one of considerable excitement and no little anxiety, for scarcely had he entered upon the duties of his office than news came that the “Invincible Armada,” so long threatened and so long deferred, had unfurled its sails, and was then actually advancing towards the English coast. The spirit of patriotism was aroused; Roman Catholic and Protestant united as one man to repel the haughty Spaniard, and the Queen issued a proclamation to her sheriffs and others, urging them by every consideration of social and domestic security to call forth the united energies of their respective counties, in common with the country in general, to resist the meditated attack. Thomas Legh, who was then in the prime of manhood, was not likely to be idle on such an occasion, and doubtless he acted with much the same spirit that Macaulay’s sheriff did when the signal fires announcing the approach of the enemy flashed along the southern coasts,—
With his white hair unbonneted, the stout old sheriff comes,
Behind him come the halberdiers, before him sound the drums;
His yeomen round the market cross make clear an ample space,
For there behoves him to set up the standard of Her Grace.
And haughtily the trumpets peal, and gaily dance the bells,
As slow upon the labouring wind the royal blazon swells.
In the later years of his life Thomas Legh added considerably to the patrimonial lands. Towards the close of the century, when the Butley estates, which had been held for so many generations by the Pigots, were partitioned among three co-heiresses, he acquired by purchase the manor and a moiety of the lands, which descended with the Adlington property until the present century. On the 20th April, 1596, an enrolment was made, as appears by the Cheshire Records, at the instance of Dame Mary Egerton, his mother, then a widow, of a covenant by which he undertook to convey the mansion house of Adlington, with other properties, to her use for life, and afterwards to himself with successive remainders in fee tail to his sons Urian, Thomas, and Edward, and his daughter, Maria Legh, and his right heirs for ever. In the same year his eldest son, Urian Legh, brought distinction to the family by his gallant bearing at Cadiz, where he earned for himself the honour of knighthood, an event respecting which we shall have more to say anon. Proud as the father must have felt at his son’s conspicuous bravery, the pleasure must have had its alloy when, in the following year, he had the misfortune to lose his younger son, Ralph, who was slain by the insurgents in an attack upon Newry, in Ireland; and, to add to his sorrow, in the next year, 1598, he lost another son, Thomas Legh, who, with his commander, Sir Henry Bagnall, was killed in the disastrous attempt to relieve the fortress of Blackwater,—the most signal defeat ever experienced by an English force in Ireland,—when Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, who had been for some time in insurrection against the English rule, was besieging it, and who had, at the same time, burned down the castle of Kilcoleman, where
Amongst the coolly shade
Of the green aldars, by the Mulla’s shore,