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