About the time of Sir John Stanley's marriage with the heiress of William Honford, his father, the Bishop of Ely, died. While holding the wardenship of Manchester he had built the spacious chapel on the north side of the Collegiate Church, now the Cathedral, known in the present day as the Derby Chapel; this was completed in the year in which Flodden was fought, and at the time of his death, in 1515, he was employed in erecting a smaller chapel adjoining it, in which his tomb is placed. This chapel Sir John, in accordance with his father's directions, completed, and placed over the door the arms of himself and his wife with a supplicatory inscription, prefaced by his favourite motto, _Vanitas Vanitatum et omnia Vanitas_. In 1519 he was appointed with Sir Peter Legh, of Lyme, William Swetenham, of Somerford, and John Holynworth, collector of a subsidy within the Hundred of Macclesfield. Four years afterwards he became involved in a dispute with his neighbour, George Legh, of Adlington, respecting the renewal of the lease of the tithes of Prestbury, a grant of which he had contrived to obtain from the Abbot of St. Werburgh, at Chester, the particulars of which are more fully set forth in the account of Adlington Hall and the Leghs.[32] Sir John, having refused to surrender his lease, was committed to the Fleet at the instance of Cardinal Wolsey, a high-handed procedure that subsequently formed one of the charges in the articles of impeachment exhibited against that ecclesiastic, and it was not until he had undergone a twelve months' imprisonment that he could be induced to yield. The ardent soldier who had displayed such valour in the field at Flodden on attaining maturer years became somewhat of a religious enthusiast, and while yet comparatively a young man, being little more than thirty, retired from the world, and sought the seclusion of the cloister, from, as has been said, "displeasure taken in heart" at the treatment he had received at Wolsey's hands.