Brereton, though professedly a Churchman, was notorious for his aversion to the episcopal form of Church government; anxious that his country should enjoy the blessings of the kirk discipline, he busied himself in the brief intervals he could snatch from his military engagements in the direction of the ecclesiastical affairs of his native county, and the accounts and other memoranda preserved in the parish chest of many a village church in Cheshire bear testimony to the suffering and misery inflicted on many a worthy clergyman by his rough and ready method of effecting reforms. Poor William Seddon was not the only one who felt the weight of his displeasure, for the Cheshire parsons had in many instances the mortification of seeing their churches and rectory houses sacked, their livings sequestered, and themselves driven from their flocks and their homes, and, being non-combatants, left powerless to help themselves or their families. Liberty had been clamoured for, but those who clamoured when they got the power, as Fuller says, "girt their own garment closest about the consciences of others." Presbyterianism was as bigoted as Episcopacy, and Independency, which followed, was as intolerant as either. Brereton lived to see the restoration of monarchy in the person of Charles II., but he did not long survive that event, his death occurring at the palace of Croydon, April 7th, 1661. His remains were brought down into Cheshire for interment in the Honford Chapel attached to Cheadle Church, where many of his progenitors lie, but there is no record of his burial there, though curiously enough in the parish register there is an entry of his death at Croydon. As previously stated, there is no memorial of him in the church, and tradition accounts for the absence by the story that while the body was being conveyed to what was intended to be its last resting place a river that had to be forded had become swollen by a storm during the night, and that, when endeavouring to cross, the coffin, with its ghastly occupant, was carried away by the surging waters and never recovered. Whether the deft and inquiring local antiquary will ever discover any genuine metal by the smelting of the rude ore of this old wife's fable remains to be seen.