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.