Chapter VI (2)

In the succeeding year Richard had again occasion for the services of his trusty Cheshire Archers. To avenge the death of Roger Mortimer, Earl of March, the presumptive heir to his crown, he determined on bringing the kingdom of Ireland to a more perfect subjection. With this view, and for the purpose of increasing the strength of his Cheshire guard, he had a levy made of the archers within the several hundreds of the palatinate qualified to serve, and with these he set sail from Milford Haven on the 4th June, 1399. While he was leading his forces into the Irish bogs and thickets to chastise the presumption of the native chiefs, Henry Bolingbroke, the son of the old Lancastrian duke, John o' Gaunt, who had been banished the kingdom, landed with a force at Ravenspur, in Yorkshire, and marched southwards; castles and towns surrendered to him, and in an incredibly short space of time he had made himself master of half the kingdom. Rebellion had stalked unchecked through the land for weeks before the absent monarch could receive intelligence of Bolingbroke's designs, and ere he could reach the English coast on his return the revolution was accomplished. On the 9th August, little more than a couple of months from the time of his departure, he landed in Wales; a number of his faithful Cheshire men met him on his arrival, though Piers Legh was not of the number, being at the time in command at Chester, and this may have been the occasion when, as the old chronicler says, the Cheshire men exclaimed--"Dycon, slep secury quile we wake, and drede nought quile we lyve sefton; for giff thou hadst wedded Perkyn, daughter of Lye, thou may well holde alone day with any man in Cheshire schire, i' faith." Piers Legh's daughter Margaret was then only in her infancy, but that must have been a matter of small consequence in the days when children were accounted as of marriageable age. The unhappy monarch, with a few followers, wandered from castle to castle, and at length found a resting-place at Conway. Meanwhile the victorious Henry was advancing by rapid marches through Gloucester and Herefordshire towards Shrewsbury, with the intention of occupying Chester, crying, "Havoc and destruction on Cheshire and the Cheshire men." On the 9th August, the day that Richard landed from Ireland, he entered the city and promised peace to the people, a promise, however, that was to be quickly violated, for on the next day he gave orders for the seizure of the King's loving and loyal subject, Sir Piers Legh, who must have been actively defending the interests of his master. Probably he had the command of the castle, though he is said to have been at the time Chief Justice of Chester.[53] Whatever his office his motto was _loyal à la mort_, and, like Old Adam in "As You Like It," he might have exclaimed--

Master, go on, and I will follow thee
To the last gasp with love and loyalty.

To remove an obstacle to the accomplishment of his ambitious designs Bolingbroke hurried him away to execution. His policy, so our greatest dramatist tells us, was to--

Cut off the heads
Of all the favourites that the absent King
In deputation left behind him,
When he was personal in the Irish wars.

And the "absent King" had no greater favourite or more faithful follower than Piers Legh.

The Rev. John Wall, the translator of the French Metrical History of the Deposition of Richard II.[54] in referring to his tragic end, says the King was at the time at Conway; and Daniel, in his "Civil Wars between York and Lancaster," thus alludes to the event:--

Nor thou, magnanimous Legh, must not be left
In darkness; for thy rare fidelity
To save thy faith content to lose thy head,
That reverent head, of good men honoured.

By the order of Bolingbroke, the head of Sir Piers was placed on the highest gate of the city, and there it remained for a time, when it was removed by the Carmelite Monks and buried with his body within their own church. Afterwards it was conveyed to Macclesfield, where, on the south side of the Lyme chancel of the old church, the following epitaph, once cut in stone, but now graven in brass, may still be seen:--

Here lyeth the bodie of Perkyn a Legh
That for King Richard the death did die
Betrayed for rightevsnes
And the bones of Sir Peers his Sonne
That with King Henry the fift did wonne
In Paris.

To which, as we have previously stated, after old Flower's grant of an heraldic augmentation, Sir Peter Legh in Elizabeth's reign added the apocryphal inscription regarding his doings at Crescy.

For loyally serving his fallen master and King, and while yet a young man, for he was only thirty-eight years of age, thus perished the first of the Lords of Lyme.

The distance between the throne and the grave of a deposed monarch is but short. Bolingbroke, finding himself everywhere enthusiastically received, resolved upon wresting the sceptre from the feeble grasp of his vacillating cousin, and within a few short months of the decapitation of Piers Legh, Richard of Bordeaux had lost both his crown and his life. When the revolution had seated the house of Lancaster upon the throne, Richard, on relinquishing his sovereignty, expressed the hope that his cousin would be "good lord to him," but the hope was delusive. He was deposed in September, and ere the snows of winter had melted his end had been accomplished, either by the pole-axe of the assassin, or the more protracted misery of famine.

Of a verity, those were stirring times, and whatever tenure men might have of their lands they had but little of their heads. Henry gained the throne almost without a struggle, but his daring act of usurpation was but the sowing of the seed which ripened and bore fruit in that "purple testimony of bleeding war," the fierce struggle of the Red and White Roses--a contest which, after having for well nigh half a century filled the country with commotion and drenched it in civil slaughter, left it in a state of exhaustion, with the flower of its nobility destroyed.

Piers Legh had not completed more than ten years of his married life when the unrelenting Bolingbroke caused his head to be placed on the highest pinnacle of the east gate of Chester. His widow, Margaret D'Anyers, survived him nearly thirty years, her death occurring June 24, 1428. The issue of the marriage was, in addition to a daughter, Margaret, who became the wife of Sir John de Ashton, two sons--Peter, who succeeded as heir, and John, who married Alice, daughter and heiress of John Alcock, of Ridge, an estate in the township of Sutton, near Macclesfield, and from them sprang the Leghs of Ridge, Rushall, Stoneleigh, and Stockwell; the last representative of the parent line, Edward Legh, up to the time of his death, which occurred only a few years ago, residing at the Limes, Lewisham, near London.

Peter, the eldest son of Piers Legh, could only have been a youth of some eight summers when his father met his untimely end. If--

Left by his sire, too young such loss to know,

it was well for him that he had a prudent counsellor in the person of his widowed mother. In 1403 she gave him her moiety of Gropenhall, which had been acquired by one of the D'Anyers in marriage with the heiress of Boydell, of Gropenhall and had come to her through failure of male issue in her father's family; and he, thereupon, quartered the arms of Boydell with his paternal coat, an augmentation that has ever since been retained. About the same time he added largely to his possessions by his marriage with Joanna, the daughter and heiress of Sir Gilbert de Haydock, of Haydock, near Newton-le-Willows, a wealthy Lancashire Knight; by this alliance he ultimately acquired the extensive estates of the Haydocks, viz.: Haydock, Bradley, Burtonwood, Warrington, Overford, Sonkey, Bold, Newton, Lowton, Golborne, and Walton-le-Dale, an acquisition that explains the close connection of the Leghs of Lyme with Lancashire. His mother was yet in possession of Lyme, and he therefore fixed his abode at Bradley, in Burtonwood, which became the principal residence of the family and so continued until about the year 1569, when the erection of the present mansion of Lyme was begun. Leyland, the antiquary, writing in the time of Henry VIII., says:--"Syr Perse de Lee hath his place at Bradley in a park two miles from Newton." The old house has long since disappeared, but the picturesque ruins of the arched and buttressed gate tower, which formed the principal approach, with a portion of the bastille above for the detention of offenders and doubtful visitors, still remain, a memorial of its ancient stateliness. The manor continued in possession of the family until after the death of Thomas Peter Legh, of Lyme, when it passed by settlement to his son, the Rev. Peter Legh, incumbent of St. Peter's, Newton, who sold it to the late Samuel Brooks, Esq., of Manchester.

Though Peter Legh was old enough to take to himself a wife it was fortunate for him that he was as yet too young to take part in the stirring scenes that marked the opening years of the usurper's reign, when

The blood of Richard, shed on Pomfret stones,

called for retribution, and the realm was filled with turbulence and disquiet, else he might have shared the fate which befel so many other Cheshire men, who, unable to forget the misfortunes of their former master, met at Sandiway, in Delamere Forest, and joined the valiant Hotspur, renowned in song and story,

Who was sweet Fortune's minion and her pride,

and Glendower, the Welsh chieftain, in their insurrection, when at the market cross of Shrewsbury, after the bloody strife on Hately field, where Falstaff "fought a long hour by Shrewsbury clock," and his ragamuffins got well peppered, the Baron of Kinderton and Sir Richard Vernon, the Baron of Shipbrooke, with the Earl of Worcester, paid the penalty of their revolt with the same horrible barbarities that a hundred years before had been inflicted upon David, Prince of Wales, the brother of Llewellynn.

Henry, Prince of Wales, the whilom roysterer and tavern brawler--Hotspur's "nimble-footed, madcap Harry"--was also Earl of Chester, and passed much of his time within his palatinate. Anxious, as it would seem, to make some amends for the wrongs his

Father made in compassing the crown,

he took the youthful Peter Legh into his favour. By a deed, dated 26 July, 12 Henry IV. (1411), he granted him certain lands in Macclesfield Forest, near to his domain of Lyme, called Heghlegh, together with the office of forester, which had been held by the Hegleghs and Savages successively, designing his gift apparently as a peace-offering and a token of his royal favour, and with a view probably to services that might be rendered him in the future.

On the 20th of March, 1413, the troubled reign of Henry the Fourth drew to a close. The throne of the usurper had proved but a bed of thorns, for no sovereign ever was more harassed by plots and insurrections. The violent animosities and contentions that prevailed during his reign reduced his frame to premature decay, and at the early age of forty-six he breathed his last in the abbot's lodgings at Westminster.

His son and successor, Henry the Fifth, was not slow in observing the dying injunctions of his royal father not to allow the kingdom to remain long at peace lest it should breed intestine commotion. Wise in his generation, he believed that a foreign war might divert the attention of his subjects from a too close examination of the justness of his own pretensions to the crown, and the excuse for such an enterprise was not far to seek. France was at the time in a state of deplorable disorder; and as the victories of Crescy and Poictiers were yet fresh in the memories of the English people and the favourite theme of song and story, France seemed to furnish the opportunity which the new King so greatly desired. Anxious to quarter its lilies with the lions of England, Henry, shortly after his coronation, resolved upon asserting the claim to the crown of that kingdom which his great grandfather, Edward the Third, had urged with so much confidence and success--a crown to which, it must be admitted, he had about as much right as Rob Roy had to the cattle he "lifted," or to the spoils of the raids and forays he engaged in. Parliament made him a liberal grant in aid of the expedition; free gifts were received from the clergy; he borrowed from all who could be prevailed upon to lend, and to procure money pawned his plate, jewels, and even his crown. With much diligence he collected men, arms, provisions, ships, and, in short, everything necessary to enforce his demands and aggrandise himself at the expense of his distracted neighbours.

The armies of the Kings of England in those days were made up of contingents, brought into the field by adventurous spirits, who entered into indenture with the Sovereign to serve in person with a certain number of followers for a fixed period, and on such terms as were agreed upon--men of strong limbs and daring spirit, who were influenced less by the abstract justice of the cause for which they were to fight than the consciousness that they would receive their due share of the _gaines de guerre_. Copies of many such indentures or contracts between the King and the persons who undertook to provide a stated number of men at arms and archers, as well as with those who agreed to procure carpenters, masons, waggons, bows, arrows, &c., are printed in Rymer's _Foedera_, and these documents furnish much interesting information on the military arrangements of the age. Among the persons who entered into such a covenant was Peter Legh, of Bradley and Lyme, and in the muster roll printed in Sir N. Harris Nicolas's "Battle of Agincourt" we find him thus entered:--

Monsr. Piers de Legh, ov sa retenu,
Robert Orell
Hugh de Orell
Thomas Sutton
John Pygott
George de Asheley.

Those who formed his retinue, were probably archers; the two first named men, apparently Lancashire men, hailing from Orell, near Wigan, and the others, judging by their patronymic, were Cheshire men. Indeed, from the liberal contingents sent up, the two counties seem to have furnished a very large proportion of the eight thousand fighting men who mustered at Southampton. As the rhyming chronicler has it--

They recruited Cheshire and Lancashire,
And Derby hills that were so free;
Tho' no married man, nor no widow's son,
They recruited three thousand men and three.

Great was the bustle and preparation, and exciting were the scenes then witnessed. Michael Drayton, writing three centuries ago, thus describes the separation between those comprising the invading force and their relatives and friends:--

There might a man have seen in ev'ry street,
The father bidding farewell to his son;
Small children kneeling at their father's feet;
The wife with her dear husband ne'er had done:
Brother, his brother, with adieu to greet;
One friend to take leave of another run;
The maiden with her best belov'd to part,
Gave him her hand, who took away her heart.

The nobler youth, the common rank above,
On their curvetting coursers mounted fair;
One wore his mistress' garter, one her glove;
And he a lock of his dear lady's hair;
And he her colours, whom he most did love;
There was not one but did some favour wear:
And each one took it, on his happy speed,
To make it famous for some knightly deed.

Many of those engaged in the expedition entered into arrangements for their wives and families that they might have some safe retreat during their absence; in the case of Peter Legh's wife, however, the probabilities are that she would take up her abode with her widowed mother-in-law, Dame Margaret Legh. On the 7th of August (1415) the Royal standard was unfurled, the trumpets flared, and with all the pomp and circumstance of war, the King and his suite embarked on board the Trinity Royal. The ships cast off their moorings, and Peter Legh, with Fluellen and Williams, and Nym--who was hanged for stealing a "pyx"--a very motley force indeed, drifted slowly down Southampton Water upon their venturous quest. Fifteen hundred vessels were comprised in the fleet, and fifteen hundred sails were set; but more than a week elapsed before the voyage, which can now be made in a few hours, was accomplished, and the vessels had cast anchor in the Seine off Kidecaws (_i.e._, Chef de Caux), about three miles from Harfleur, a place not unknown in Cheshire annals, for it was a knight of that country who bestowed honours upon the Du Guesclin, when he succeeded in capturing the great Cheshire hero, Sir Hugh Calveley.

After a siege of thirty-six days, Harfleur surrendered to the English King, whose triumph the poet sings:--

He sette a sege, the sothe for to say,
To Harflue toune with ryal array;
That toune he wan, and made a fray,
That Fraunce will rywe 'tyl domesday.
Deo gratias Anglia
Redde pro victoria.

The victory, however, was dearly bought, for while the siege was proceeding, dysentery broke out in the English camp from the overflowing marshes, and raged with such severity that about five thousand fell victims, among them being Peter Legh's kinsman, Sir Robert de Legh, of Adlington, who died five days after the city surrendered. On the 22nd September, the governor of Harfleur, having failed to obtain succours, opened the gates, exclaiming--

Our expedition hath this day an end.
The Dauphin, whom of succours we entreated,
Returns us that his powers are not yet ready
To raise so great a siege. Therefore, great King,
We yield our lives and town to thy soft mercy.
Enter our gates, dispose of us and ours,
For we are no longer defensible.

The Earl of Dorset was put in possession of the town and garrison, and, after a short rest, Henry moved forward with the remnant of his army towards Calais, intending to ford the Somme at Blanchetaque, where Edward III. had crossed before the battle of Crescy, but on arriving at Maisoncelle, on the evening of the 24th of October, he found an army of fifty thousand men prepared to dispute his further progress, their position being between the woods of Agincourt and Tramecourt. When the day dawned on the morrow, St. Crispin's Day, the two armies were face to face, but for some hours neither made any movement, when at last old Sir Thomas Erpingham, an English knight, grown grey with age and honour, flung his truncheon into the air, and called "Nestrocque" (now strike), and dismounted, and every man advanced shouting the national "Hurrah." The first discharge of the cloth-yard shafts by the Lancashire and Cheshire bowmen threw the enemy's men-at-arms into confusion, their horses became unmanageable, and the fight raged with uncommon fury; the English archers when they had discharged all their arrows, threw away their bows and fought with their swords and bills; the contest becoming more a slaughter than a battle. In three hours the struggle was ended, and more than ten thousand Frenchmen had been made to bite the dust.

Our great dramatist represents Henry as exclaiming just before he entered upon the fight:--

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers:
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition!

Peter Legh was one of the "band of brothers;" he was in the thick of the fight, shed his blood, and for services was knighted and made a banneret upon the field. As an old ballad expresses it:

Than for sothe that knyght comely,
In Agincourt feld he faught manly;
Thorow grace of God most mighty,
He had bothe the felde, and the victory.
Deo gratias Anglia
Redde pro victoria!

It is very commonly asserted that he died in Paris of the wounds he had received at Agincourt, but the statement can hardly be correct, for six years after the battle was fought his name occurs as party to a marriage settlement, and his death did not take place until 1422.

The wound he received at Agincourt did not incapacitate him from taking part a few years later in a foray that arose out of some quarrel between Sir Peter Dutton of Dutton, in Cheshire, and Sir William Atherton of Atherton, in Lancashire, knight, the two having made inroads on each other's possessions. The circumstance is related by Sir Peter Leycester, who says that--

Great contention fell between Sir Peter Dutton and Sir William Athurton, of Athurton, in Lancashire, insomuch that they made inroads and invasions one upon the other; and the said Sir Piers Dutton and his adherents, to wit, Sir Rafe Bostock of Bostock, Richard Warburton of Budworth, Thomas Warburton of Halton, John Done of Utkinton, junior, John Manley of Manley, Hugh Dutton of Halton, the elder, William Leycester, of Nether-Tabley, Sir Peter Legh of Clifton,[55] and John Carington of Carington, were all sued by Sir William Athurton, for taking away forty of his oxen and forty cows, out of his closes at Athurton, and for beating of his servants. But the variance was composed between them by the award of John Duke of Bedford, Earl of Richmond and Kendal, constable of England, and regent of the kingdom in the absence of Henry the Fifth, dated 9 Aprilis 7 Hen. V. 1419, restitution being awarded on both sides: the horses and saddles taken by Sir William to be restored to Sir Piers Dutton, and the cattel taken by Sir Piers to be restored to the said Sir William.

Our ancestors, it is to be feared, were of a quarrelsome disposition, and, much as we may boast of "the good old times," it must be confessed that they lose much of their charm when from our modern standpoint we begin to examine closely the lives and habits of those who figured in them. There is no reason to suppose that Sir Peter Legh was more disorderly than his neighbours, similar outrages to those committed on Sir William Atherton's lands being then of common occurrence.

Sir Peter Legh was not the man to find happiness in repose. When, in the summer of 1417, the King embarked on his second expedition to France, he again unsheathed his sword and served under the standard of his Sovereign. He had returned to England in 1421, though his stay could only have been very short, for in the following year he was again with the army of the King, and took part in the protracted siege of Meaux, when Henry lost so many of his soldiers by epidemic sickness. The fortress held out for seven months, the garrison only yielding when starved out. In the attack, Sir Peter would seem to have received a wound which eventually proved fatal, his death occurring in Paris on the 22nd June, 1422, a few days after the festivities with which the public entry into that city was celebrated. His body was brought over to England, and buried in the church of Macclesfield, in the rebuilding of which he had in his lifetime been a liberal contributor, as evidenced by the prominent position assigned to his armorial shield on the west front of the tower. Thus the second of the house of Lyme died from the wounds he had received while fighting under the banner of the son and successor of the Lancastrian usurper who had condemned his father to the block for his loyalty to his lawful sovereign and the house of York.

Sir Peter Legh could have been little more than thirty years of age when he died of the honourable wounds he had received while serving under the standard of his king. Among those who had fought by his side at Agincourt was Sir Richard Molineux, of Sefton, a Lancashire knight of considerable wealth and influence.

Sir Richard was himself a widower at the time, and naturally felt compassion for his comrade's widow in her bereavement. His compassion, however, ripened into a warmer feeling; the feeling was mutual, and when the days of mourning were accomplished Sir Peter Legh's youthful relict bestowed her hand upon him, and thus became ancestress of the Earls of Sefton as well as of the Leghs of Lyme. She survived her second husband several years, her death occurring at Croxteth on the 31st of January, 1439. She was buried at Sefton Church, where a stately stone altar-tomb was erected over her remains, which may still be seen with a long Latin inscription upon it, now in part obliterated, but interesting as showing the extent of the possessions which she, as heiress of the house of Haydock, added to the patrimonial lands of the Leghs.

Hic jacet domina Johanna, quonda uxor
Petri Legh militis, et postea uxor Richardi
Molineux militis, quæ fuit dña de
Bradley, Haydoke, et similiter tertiæ
Partis villar. de Werington, Mikille
Sonke, et Burtonwode ac eciam dña
Diversarû parcellarû terrarû et
Tenement, infra villas de Newton,
Golborn, Lauton, Bold et Walton
Le dale. Quæ obiit in festo S.
Sulpitii Epi. A. Dni mccccxxxix
Cujus animæ ppitietur Deus. Amen.

Sir Peter Legh's only son, who bore his own baptismal appellation, was born at Clifton, near Halton Castle, a seat of the Savages, on the 4th of June, 1415, the eve of the father's departure to engage in the contest at Agincourt, and had therefore just completed his seventh year. When his mother remarried he was removed from Clifton and brought up in the household at Croxteth, where, in addition to his mother's guardianship, he had the advantage of the friendly interest and supervision of the head of the great Lancashire house of Molineux. In 1426 his grandmother, Margaret, D'Anyers, settled a portion of her Cheshire estates upon him, and the remainder, including Lyme, he succeeded to on her death, June 24, 1428. He had then, at the early age of thirteen, become the owner of large territorial estates, and for the better protection of the fair patrimony that had come to him his stepfather in the same year obtained the custody of all his lands in Cheshire until he should be of age, as well as the right of contracting him in marriage, a right he exercised by covenanting to marry him to his own daughter, Margaret, whom he had had by his first wife, Ellen, daughter of Sir William Haryngton, of Hornby. The year 1432 saw the contract carried into effect and the betrothed couple united. Doubtless it was a season of bustle and business, and we may suppose the stately halls of Croxteth to have been crowded with a gay company assembled to witness and do honour to the espousals of the young people.

Four years later he made proof of age, the inquiry being held at Macclesfield, and he was then put in possession of the splendid inheritance which, by their successful marriages, his progenitors had accreted. During his minority his patrimony had been greatly improved under the careful management of his stepfather, and in the critical times in which his earlier life was passed he appears to have acted with much prudence and caution, taking more interest in the development of his estate than in the fierce contests that were then being waged. It was a time when craft and subtlety had gradually superseded the old spirit of chivalry--when strength of arm was of little avail without astuteness of head in shifting from side to side in the changing fortunes of contending parties; and, living in this age of political chaos, the youthful lord of Lyme skilfully contrived to keep neutral between the factions into which the dominant party was split. Though holding no higher rank than that of esquire, his large territorial possessions gave him considerable influence in the two palatine counties; in the Cheshire records his name is of frequent occurrence, and, like many of his ancestors, he had various offices of trust in connection with the hundred and forest of Macclesfield. Though his father had received many marks of favour from, and had died in the service of, the Lancastrian King, he inherited a predilection for the house of York, from the representative of which, Richard II., his grandfather had received many substantial benefits, including the grant of the manor of Lyme. He was too shrewd and cautious, however, to allow his preferences to betray him into any act of open hostility to the reigning sovereign, though his intimate relations with a powerful Lancashire Baron, Henry Holland, Duke of Exeter, who had married the sister of Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, and who, in opposition to the wishes of Henry VI. and his intrepid wife, Margaret of Anjou, had been made regent during the King's sickness, brought him under suspicion and resulted in a letter being addressed by the King to the Sheriff of Lancashire in 1454, commanding him to deliver letters of Privy Seal to "Thomas Pilkington and Piers Legh, squires," a significant warning which had the desired effect in restraining Peter Legh, for a time at all events, from engaging in any perilous enterprise or openly espousing the cause of either party.

A few years before this he had the misfortune to lose his wife, her death occurring at Bradley, May 13, 1450. She was buried at Winwick, in the chantry chapel which Sir Gilbert Haydock, her husband's maternal ancestor, had founded. In October of the following year Peter Legh again entered the marriage state, his second wife being Elizabeth, the widow of Sir John Pilkington, of Pilkington, and one of the daughters of Edmund Trafford, of Trafford, by his wife, Alice, eldest daughter and co-heir of Sir William Venables, of Bolyn.

The great struggle between the Red and White Roses was now in its birth-throes. The Duke of York had been expelled from the regency; thirsting for revenge, he levied an army in the north and marched to St. Albans, where he found the King's forces encamped in the town, which was assaulted with great fury. The battle lasted but one short hour, but it was disastrous to the cause of Henry; five thousand of his troops were left dead upon the field, among the slain being the Dukes of Somerset and Buckingham, the Earls of Northumberland and Stafford, and Lord Clifford, while the King himself, who during the fight had been wounded in the neck by an arrow, was made prisoner.

The blood shed at St Albans on that fatal 22nd of May, 1455, was the first that flowed in the bitter contest which came to an end only when thirty years had come and gone, when thirteen pitched battles had been fought, and the victory on Bosworth Field had been achieved--a strife so deadly that, as Michael Drayton tells us, the ties of blood and kindred were forgotten, and the nearest relations fought on opposite sides--

Then Dutton Dutton kills, a Done doth kill a Done;
A Booth a Booth, and Leigh by Leigh is overthrown;
A Venables against a Venables doth stand;
A Troutbeck fighteth with a Troutbeck hand to hand;
There Molineux doth make a Molineux to die;
And Egerton the strength of Egerton doth try.

Peter Legh doubtless rejoiced in the Yorkist victory at St. Albans, but the warning which Henry VI. addressed to him the year before had deterred him from bearing any part in it, and he appears to have acted with equal prudence four years later, when the reconciliation between the Duke of York and Queen Margaret--the "dissimulated unity and concord," as the city chronicler called it--came to an end and civil war broke out afresh. In that year (1459) the Yorkist forces were once more marshalled against those of the King. The Earl of Salisbury raised the standard of the White Rose, and with an army of 5,000 men marched through Cheshire into Staffordshire, almost within sight of Lyme, and then by way of Congleton and Newcastle-under-Lyme to Drayton. Before he could join the Duke he was overtaken by Lord Audley at the head of a superior force of Lancastrians, and on the 23rd September the battle of Blore-heath, where the head of the house of Stanley amused both sides with promises of support without venturing to strike a blow for either, was fought. The struggle was long and sanguinary, but victory again declared in favour of the Yorkists, Henry's adherents leaving 2,400 dead upon the field, many of whom were from Lancashire and Cheshire, among them being the brother of Peter Legh's first wife, Sir Richard Molineux, who fell fighting in the cause to which Peter Legh was in his heart opposed. At Northampton in July of the following year the fortunes of the Yorkists were again in the ascendant, and we read that Queen Margaret and her son, who had sought safety in flight, had a narrow escape of being captured near Chester by a retainer of the Stanleys.

The struggle of the Roses was now at fever heat, and in the short space of a single year no less than three great and bloody battles were fought. Peter Legh's prudence and circumspection failed him; his sympathy with the House of York could no longer be restrained, and, drawing the sword, he openly cast in his lot with the insurgent Yorkists who were then gathering at Sandal Castle in Yorkshire. Margaret of Anjou, repudiating the compromise by which on the death of Henry VI. the Duke of York was to succeed to the crown to the exclusion of her son, collected a numerous army out of Lancashire and Cheshire, and posted herself near Wakefield, whither the Duke of York advanced to meet her, but with a much inferior force. Conceiving that his courage would be compromised if he refused to meet a woman in battle, he, without waiting for his expected reinforcements, risked a contest, hoping by skill and daring to make up for deficiency in numbers. In that bloody fray Peter Legh "fleshed his maiden sword;" he was conspicuous for his valour, and for his daring deeds his princely leader made him a banneret upon the field. But the tide of success had turned; the Yorkists were entirely routed, and the triumph of the Lancastrians was complete. After performing prodigies of valour the Duke of York himself was slain. The Queen, proud of such a trophy, ordered the Duke's head to be struck off and placed upon the gates of York, adorned with a paper crown to indicate the frailty of his claims--

Off with his head, and set it on York gates;
So York may overlook the town of York.

An unfeminine speech that did not cause her much feeling of remorse, for afterwards, when gazing upon the terrible spectacle as she entered the city, she exclaimed to Henry--

Welcome, my Lord, to this brave town of York;
Yonder's the head of that arch enemy;
Does not the object cheer your heart, my lord?

And Lord Clifford--the "Black-faced Clifford," as he has been called--more sanguinary than his Royal mistress, when the battle was over plunged his sword into the breast of the Duke's youngest son, the Earl of Rutland, in revenge, as he alleged, for the death of his father at St. Albans.

If the battle of Wakefield was fatal to the house of York, it proved no less fatal to the victors, for the cruelties perpetrated by the Black Clifford were repaid a few months after with tenfold vengeance at Towton, a contest in which, there is reason to believe, Peter Legh also bore a part. On the 4th of March (1461), the young Duke of York assumed the crown and sceptre, but the ceremonies attendant upon his accession to the throne were few and brief. Queen Margaret was in the field with a powerful army, and on the 12th of March Edward marched out of London northward to give her battle. On the eve of Palm Sunday (March 29th) the opposing forces met on Towton Heath; at four o'clock the battle began; the hours of darkness brought no rest, and through the long night and until the afternoon of the next day, amidst a fall of snow, it raged with unrelenting fury. It was the bloodiest battle in all the wars of the Roses, and when the sun went down thirty-three thousand Englishmen lay dead upon the field. Some of them were buried in the neighbouring church at Saxton, but by far the greater number sleep where they fell, and the red and white roses which bloom on the field of their last strife form their touching and appropriate memorial.

The carnage of this terrible field is appalling. If we are to believe the statements of contemporary writers, for weeks afterwards the blood stood in puddles and stagnated in the gutters.[56] Among the slain was the "Black-faced" Clifford, who slew Rutland at Wakefield, and of those whom the sword spared upon the field not a few fell beneath the headsman's axe. Well might Warwick, dealing out a poetic justice, then say to the victorious Edward--

From off the gates of York fetch down the head--
Your father's head which Clifford placed there;
Instead whereof let this supply the room,
Measure for measure must be answered.

The fate of the Cliffords has been consecrated by the poet. The widow of the "black-faced" lord and her infant boy fled "to the caves and to the brooks;" the child led a solitary life--

On Carrock's side a shepherd boy--

wandering at will through "Mosedale's groves" and in "Blencathra's rugged caves" until the--

Weary time
That brought him up to manhood's prime.

When the victory at Bosworth again placed the Lancastrians upon the throne his estates and honours were restored. Though unable to read or write when called to Parliament, he had, during his shepherd life, learnt purer and wiser lessons than those through which his progenitors had brought destruction on themselves.

The triumph at Towton Field broke the hopes of the Lancastrian party, and left Edward unquestionably King. The services which Peter Legh had rendered at Wakefield and elsewhere did not long remain unrewarded; within six weeks of the fight he was appointed governor and constable of the Castle of Rhuddlan in Flintshire, for life, with a salary of £40 a year, and two years later he was made escheater of Flint during the King's pleasure. It was not long before his services were again called in requisition. In 1462 the unconquerable activity of the resolute Queen Margaret had once more inspired the hopes of the Lancastrian party. Having raised an army of adventurers in France, she landed on the northern coasts in October; Edward was quickly at the head of a great force to meet her, and among those who went out with him, on the feast of St. Andrew the Apostle, as we learn from old Stowe the chronicler, was Peter Legh, of Lyme, who appears on the list as "Sir Peirce A'Leigh," and is included among the knights who engaged in the enterprise, from which it is evident that that honour had been conferred upon him either at Towton or immediately after.[57] There was little occasion for his services. On the advance of Edward, Margaret escaped to her ships, which were scattered by a tempest, and a portion of her forces, being cast on Holy Island, were pursued and destroyed.

For a time the country was comparatively tranquil, and Sir Peter Legh, if he did not turn his sword into a pruning hook, was content to lay it aside and repair to his home at Bradley, where he employed his leisure in adorning his mansion and improving his estate. While so engaged he drew up a minute account of the territorial possessions of the family in Lancashire and Cheshire, which is still preserved among the muniments at Lyme. It is closely written in Latin on vellum, and forms a thick volume of 333 folios. That portion which relates to Warrington has been transcribed and translated for the members of the Chetham Society[58] by Mr. William Beamont, and to the same authority we are indebted for the following description of Lyme, which shows that it had been emparked and that a mansion had been erected there as early as 1466:--

Rental of Lyme, its manor and park, with Over Hanley and Nether Hanley in the Forest of Macclesfield, in the parish of Prestbury and county of Chester, belonging to Sir Peter Legh, Knight, at the feasts of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist and St. Martin in winter, written and described on the 29 March in the year of our Lord 1466 and in the sixth of King Edward IV. after the Conquest.

In the first place the said Peter holds the aforesaid manor of Lyme, in the county of Chester, to him, his heirs and assigns for ever; that is to say, one fair hall with a high chamber, a kitchen, a bakehouse, and a brewhouse, with a granary, stable, and a bailiff's house, and a fair Park, surrounded by palings, and divers fields and hays (hedged enclosures) contained in the same park, with the woods, underwoods, meadows, feedings, and pastures thereunto belonging, which are worth to the said Peter xli (£10) a year.

The other lands belonging to the estate are then described, the total rental being set down at £42 9s., but no mention is made of any deer or of the famous wild cattle.

Occupied in more peaceful pursuits, we do not meet with the name of Sir Peter at Hedgeley Moor, at Hexham, or in any other of the contests that occurred in the subsequent years of Edward's reign. In 1468 a sorrow fell upon his home caused by the death of his only son, Peter Legh, which occurred at Macclesfield on the 2nd of August, and on the 4th April, 1474, his second wife was taken from him. Both were buried by the side of his ancestors at Winwick. Four years later he set about the fulfilment of a project he had long had in contemplation, the endowment of the chantry chapel of the Holy Trinity in Winwick Church, which his mother's kinsman, Sir Gilbert de Haydock, had founded. His charter bears date 16th November, and he must then have felt his end approaching, for he died at Bradley on the 27th of the same month at the age of 63; and a few days later, amid the sorrowing regrets of his dependents and neighbours, he was borne to his last resting place in the family chapel to which he had so recently been a liberal benefactor.

Sir Peter Legh's only son, who had predeceased him, and who bore the same baptismal name, married at a very early age a rich Lancashire heiress--Mabel, the elder of the two daughters and co-heirs of James Croft, of Dalton-in-Lonsdale--Sir James Croft, as Flower, the Herald, erroneously styles him--acquiring in right of his wife, as a note to an ancient Latin pedigree of the Leghs expresses it, "the inheritance of the manor of Dalton and ye presentation of ye parsonage of Claughton _alternis vicibus_," thus greatly enlarging the already extensive possessions of his house. Alison, the sister of Mabel Croft, conveyed her portion in marriage to Geoffrey Middleton, of Middleton in Kirby-Lonsdale. These two ladies were double heiresses, their mother being a heiress of the Butlers, who owned lands in Freckleton, within the parish of Kirkham. The alternate advowson which the Leghs thus acquired remained in their possession until 1807, when it was sold to the Fenwicks, and once more became united with the lordship of the manor.

While Sir Peter Legh was busied in repairing and enlarging the ancestral home at Bradley, his son Peter and his young wife took up their abode at Lowton, an estate inherited from the Haydocks. The times were full of trouble, for though Edward IV. was seated upon the throne, and, as Stowe, the ancient chronicler, solemnly assures us, an angel had come down from heaven and "censed him" when the crown was put upon his head in St Paul's, and the Pontiff had written him a letter of congratulation, the angry billows of civil war were heaving and breaking in different parts of the country and kept the government in continuous alarm. The King's secret marriage with Elizabeth Woodville, the widow of a Lancastrian, led to an estrangement with Warwick which threatened a renewal of internecine strife. The wise caution and far-sighted sagacity which had so often kept Sir Peter Legh from embarking in rash and dangerous enterprises was not exemplified in his son, who, forgetting the traditions of his house, would seem to have fallen under suspicion of favouring the Lancastrians and sympathising with the efforts made by the King-making Warwick to restore the same Henry VI. whom his father had helped to dethrone. Mr. Beamont inclines to the belief that for some imprudent act he had been bound over to keep the peace, and unable to find sureties had been committed to the gaol at Chester. We learn from the Cheshire Records that under date September 8th, 6th Edward IV. (1466), Peter Legh, of Lowton, Esquire, was lodged in the city prison in the custody of Agnes Darby--a fact we commend to the notice of the advocates of women's rights, for women must surely have been exercising their rights when one of them could hold such an important trust. The nature of Peter Legh's offence is not stated, but in an age when knights and gentlemen not unfrequently had recourse to acts of violence in preference to the slow processes of the law, in defence of their fancied rights, it is just possible that it was some such rough-and-ready dispensation of justice and not a political offence that subjected Peter Legh to the ward of Agnes Darby. In any case he must have quickly recovered his liberty and the King's favour as well, for in the following year he was free and had demised to him for a term of six years (18th October, 1467) the King's town of Vaynoll, with the pleas and issues of his court of the town of Rhuddlan, with the tolls of the markets and fairs (excepting the pleas of the Crown), and also the town of Bagilt--then written Baghegre--together with a corn-mill there with its toll and mulcture. His death occurred in the following year at the early age of thirty-five. His widow survived him a few years only, and died at Dalton, in 1474, where she would appear to have been living after his death. Her will, which has been printed by the Chetham Society, bears date 8th July in that year, and in it she names four of her sons, but omits all mention of the fifth, Robert, who is known to have been living in 1527.

It will thus be seen that Sir Peter Legh outlived both his son and his son's widow. After his death in 1478 an Inquisition was taken in accordance with custom, when it was found that Piers Legh, his grandson, then twenty-three years of age, was his next heir. This Piers or Peter, who was the fifth in direct succession bearing the same name, had succeeded to his mother's estates on her death in 1474. Seven years previously, and when he could only have been about twelve years of age, he had, with the consent of his father, been united in marriage, with Ellen, the daughter of Sir John Savage, of Clifton, an alliance that brought him in close connection with the Stanleys, his wife's mother being Katherine, daughter of Thomas Lord Stanley, of Lathom, and sister of the first Earl of Derby. They were in close kinship, and hence it was necessary, to make the marriage valid, to obtain a Papal dispensation, which was accordingly done.

In mediæval times mercenary considerations entered rather largely into matrimonial arrangements, and marriages were frequently contracted at a very early age, the parties most directly concerned being rarely consulted as to the choice of their respective partners, a practice that the then state of the law almost necessitated. Indeed, a prudent father generally deemed it a parental duty to seek out a suitable match for his heir and marry him in his lifetime, lest, in the event of his dying and leaving him unmarried, he might fall into the hands of some greedy courtier, who under pretence of taking care of his lands, but in reality to enrich himself, might obtain his wardship and dispose of him in marriage to the highest bidder without any regard to inclination or mutual liking. This state of things will sufficiently account for Piers Legh, the heir apparent to so large an estate, being married at such an early age.

The name of this Piers is unpleasantly associated with a tragic act alleged to have been committed at Bewsey Hall, near Warrington, the recollection of which tradition, that delights in passion and revenge, has preserved. Much mystery hangs about this terrible deed, and the versions that have come down to us through succeeding ages are manifestly untrue in many particulars, though the main facts are doubtless correct. In the Dodsworth MSS., in the Bodleian Library, the story is told as follows:--

Sir John Boteler, Knight, was slain in his bed by the Lord Stanley's procurement, Sir Piers Legh and Mister Willm Savage joininge with him in that action, corruptinge his servants, his porter settinge a light in a windowe to give knowledge upon the water (_i.e._ the moat) that was about his house at Bewsaye when the watch that watched about his house at Bewsaye where your way to ... (Bold?) comes, were gone awaye to their own homes and then they came over the moate in lether boates and soe to his chambre where one of his servants called Houlcrofte was slaine, being his chamberlaine, the other brother betrayed his mr. They promised him a great reward and he going with them a way they hanged him at a tree in Bewsaye Park. After this Sir John Boteler's lady pursued those that slewe her husband, and indyted xx men for that sarte (_i.e._, assault), but being marryed to Lord Gray, he made her suites voyd, for which cause she parted from her husband, the Lord Graye, and came into Lancastershyre and sayd if my Lord wyll not helpe me that I may have my wyll of mine enemies, yet my bodye shall be berryed by him, and she caused a tombe of alabaster to be made where she lyeth upon the right hand of her husband, Sir John Boteler.

Another paper in the Dodsworth collection represents the murder as being perpetrated in the reign of Henry VII., and assigns as the cause of the quarrel the refusal of the Botelers to wear the livery of the Stanleys on the occasion of King Henry's visit to his brother-in-law, the Earl of Derby, in the summer of 1496. The Earl is stated to have sent a messenger to Bewsey desiring its lord to wear "his cloath at that tyme," but, in the absence of Sir John, his lady, with becoming regard for her lord's dignity, said, "She scorned that her husband should wayte on her brother, being as well able to entertayne the King as he was." A note in the Shakerley Papers states that "sir Peter (Legh) slewe sir Thomas Butteler of Bewseye knight, and for the same was forced to build Disley church for his penalty at his own cost and charges 1527." The late Mr. Roby, in his "Traditions of Lancashire," has made the tragedy the theme of one of his legendary lyrics, and describes the struggle with much circumstantial detail; and since then a resident of Warrington, Mr. John Fitchett, in a poem of considerable merit, "Bewsey," has told the story, incorporating in it an incident traditionary in the neighbourhood, though not referred to in the Dodsworth papers--that when the assassins broke into the hall they were resisted by a faithful negro, who was killed in the melée:--

Tradition tells, a faithful negro brav'd
Singly their savage rage, and bold oppos'd
Their passage to the room where thoughtless slept
His dearly honour'd master, till at last,
O'erpower'd by numbers, and o'erwhelm'd with wounds,
Alas! he nobly fell. Their reeking hands
Unsated yet, had still to execute
Deeds of black import, and dire schemes of blood:
For ah! unarm'd, and in his bed surpris'd,
Vilely they butchered the devoted Lord!
Meanwhile a servant maid, with pious guile,
Bore in her apron, artfully conceal'd,
The infant heir; and many a danger brav'd,
Saved him uninjured from the ruffian's sword,
The Negro's valour fav'ring his escape.

The interest in the story has been rather increased than lessened by the recovery of the ancient ballad of "Sir John Butler," printed by the Early English Text Society from Bishop Percy's folio MS. (v. iii. p. 210). In the following ballad the story as related in the Dodsworth MSS. is adhered to with tolerable accuracy:--

Listen, lords and ladies fair
And gentles, to my roundelay.
List, youths and maidens debonnaire,
To this most doleful tragedy.

Of Pincerna, the noble race,
That Botiller was yclept, I say;
And Bewsey Hall, that goodly place,
Where traitors did the Butler slay.

Fatal the feud 'tween him and one
Whose sister was his wedded wife;
The proud Earl Derby, whose false son
Did plot to take the Butler's life.