His widow took up her abode at the Miln House—the picturesque old black and white gabled structure, now occupied as a farmhouse, standing near the railway midway between Adlington and Prestbury, built in the time of Sir Urian Legh—which she held in jointure. She could hardly have been as uncompromising a Royalist as her husband, for in a petition to the committee for compounding with “delinquents,” praying that she might be allowed to compound for her deceased husband’s estates, she sets forth that “she had long before the death of her husband misliked the course of the enemy (i.e., the Royalists) in the parts where she resided, and had departed thence into the Parliament’s quarters, where she had ever since remained and conformed herself to all the orders of Parliament.” The statement was no doubt made in good faith, for some little time after Thomas Legh’s death she married an ardent Republican, who had been as active in furthering the Parliament’s interest in Lancashire as her first husband had been in defending that of the King in Cheshire—Sir Alexander Rigby, of Middleton-in-Goosnargh, a lawyer, statesman, magistrate, and colonel, and eventually one of the barons of the Exchequer. Rigby, who represented Wigan in the Long Parliament, was head and heart and hand and almost everything else of importance in Lancashire; his activity was unwearied; his energy irrepressible, and his influence unbounded. He was engaged in every important action; he commanded at the siege of Lathom, the fight in Furness, the capture of Thurland Castle, and the defence of Bolton-le-Moors; and he was nominated one of the King’s judges, but declined to act, the only occasion in his life, it is said, in which he hesitated to do his worst against royalty. Dr. Halley, in his “Lancashire Puritanism,” describes him as “rash, impetuous, rude, haughty, severe, implacable; admired by many, esteemed by few, and loved by none,” and the same writer adds, “he is said to have contrived a scheme and bargain by which the Royalist masters of three Cambridge colleges—St. John’s, Queen’s, and Jesus’—were to be sold for slaves to the Algerines.”
SIR ALEXANDER RIGBY.
The “insolent rebell, Rigby,” as Charlotte Tremouille, the heroic Countess of Derby, designated him when he was besieging Lathom House, though possessed of only a small estate, was connected by birth and marriage with many of the best families in Lancashire; he was also closely allied with the Leghs, of Adlington, having married for his first wife Lucy, the daughter of Sir Urian, and sister of Thomas Legh, so that he stood in the relationship of brother-in-law to his second wife.
The marriage of their mother with the “insolent rebell” could hardly have been viewed with much satisfaction by the sons, who were all fighting on the side of the ill-fated Charles, and, therefore, accounted “delinquents,” one of them being specially mentioned as “very active against the Parliament” and continuing “extreamelie malitious,” though, in other respects, it was fortunate, as Rigby’s influence as a member of the House of Commons in the Parliament interest was no doubt used in protecting the estates from the more ruinous exactions to which they would otherwise have been subjected, as well as the illegal challenges which might have wrested them absolutely from their rightful owners.
Sir Alexander Rigby died in 1650, having caught the gaol fever of the prisoners while on circuit at Croydon, and some time after his widow, who appears to have had a penchant for matrimony, again entered the marriage state, her third husband being John Booth, of Woodford, in Over, the uncle of Sir George Booth, of Dunham Massey, the head of the Presbyterian interest in Cheshire. John Booth was also a staunch Puritan; like the knight in “Hudibras,” he had ridden out “a-colonelling” in the interest of the Parliament, and may have been the identical Puritan whom “Drunken Barnaby,” when on his “Four Journeys to the North of England,” saw and thus immortalised:—
I came to Over—O, profane one—
And there I saw a Puritane one,
A-hanging of his cat on Monday