Sir William Brereton, who was lord of Brereton in the reign of Edward III., had by his second wife, Margaret, daughter of Henry Done, of Utkinton, a younger son, Randolph, who received the honour of knighthood, and had to wife Alice, daughter and heir of William de Ipstones, through whom he acquired considerable territorial possessions, and became the founder of the line of Brereton of Shocklach and Malpas, in Cheshire. His great-grandson, also a Sir Randle, was Chamberlain of Chester in the reign of Henry VII., and one of the knights of the body to that King. He is mentioned generally as Chamberlain to Henry VII., and he acted in the same capacity to Henry's son and successor, Henry VIII., holding the same office under both sovereigns for the long period of twenty-six years. At the time that William Brereton, of Honford, and his compatriots were engaged in the death struggle at Flodden, King Henry, as previously stated, was with an army at Terouenne; Sir Randle Brereton was with him, and for his distinguished services there and at Tourney he was made a knight banneret. He built the Brereton chancel in Malpas Church in 1522, and carved upon the oaken screen this supplication:-- Pray good people for the prosperous estate of Sir Rondulph Brereton, of thys werke edificatour, wyth his wyfe dame Helenour, and after thys lyfe transytorie to obtegne eternal felicitie. Amen. Amen. His wife, "Dame Helenour," bore him a family of nine sons and three daughters. Sir Randle, the eldest, continued the Malpas line; Sir Richard founded the line of Brereton of Tatton; Sir William Brereton, the seventh son, succeeded his father as Chamberlain of Chester, and was also made Groom of the Chamber to King Henry VIII., an office that involved him in the ruin that befell the second of that sovereign's wives. He married Elizabeth, widow of Sir John Savage, and the daughter of Charles Somerset, Earl of Worcester; and on the 17th May, 1536, when only twenty-eight years of age, and then recently married, was beheaded along with Lord Rochfort, the Queen's brother; Sir Henry Norris, Groom of the Stole; Francis Weston, a Gentleman of the Bedchamber; and Mark Smeaton, a musician, on the questionable charge of criminal intercourse with Queen Anne Boleyn, the Queen herself submitting to the same unhappy fate on Tower Green two days later; a hideous crime that has found an apologist in a modern historian--Froude--who, in his exuberant admiration of Henry's self-asserting force of character, has sought to prove a "human being sinful whom the world has ruled to be innocent," oblivious of the fact that, while on the one hand there is a total absence of satisfactory proof against Anne, there is undeniable evidence of heartless cruelty, wilfulness, revenge, and shameless lust on the part of her husband. On the morrow of her death the King married Jane Seymour; but getting rid of one wife in order to obtain another was not a solitary act in the life of Henry.