Though careful to record the descent as well as the “good qualities” and “delicately fine principles” of the amiable Peregrin, her grace, whose grammar, by the way, is somewhat obscure, has curiously enough, while perpetuating the fact of her previous marriage, omitted all mention of her relationship to the dear departed, and has thus inadvertently done an injustice to his memory as well as to her own, for ill-natured people have wickedly suggested that their union never had the sanction of a priest, and that, as the old sexton assured William Howitt when he visited Mitton nearly half a century ago, the “accomplished fine gentleman” was only a “tally husband,” a belief that still prevails in many a cottage home in the district. The “Preston affair,” so delicately alluded to, was the occasion when the old Pretender, the Chevalier de St. George, made the rash and abortive attempt to recover the Crown of England by an appeal to civil war, and a portion of the rebel army, headed by the ill-fated Lord Derwentwater and General Foster, penetrated as far south as Preston, where it was met by the King’s forces, under Generals Wills and Carpenter, and compelled to surrender; when no fewer than seven lords and 1,500 men, including officers, were made prisoners, among them being the Hon. Peregrin Widderington and his father, William, Lord Widderington, the latter of whom was impeached before the House of Lords for high treason, but afterwards reprieved and pardoned. The Widderingtons, like the Sherburns, had for successive generations been devotedly attached to the Stuart cause, the Lord Widderington of a former day having lost his life at Wigan Lane on the 25th August, 1651, while bravely fighting by the side of Lord Derby and the gallant Sir Thomas Tyldesley. As previously stated, Sir Nicholas Sherburn was the last of the name who resided at Stonyhurst. In his time considerable additions were made to the mansion. He rebuilt the principal front, placed the two eagle-crowned cupolas on the summits of the old battlemented towers, dug out the ponds in front of the hall, and laid out the gardens in the stiff fantastic Dutch style then fashionable; but before he had completed the work he had the misfortune to lose his only son, Richard Francis, a youth of nine years, who, as tradition affirms, was poisoned with eating yew berries gathered in the dark avenue at Stonyhurst—the fruit of Some dark, lonely, evil-natured yew, Whose poisonous fruit—so fabling poets speak— Beneath the moon’s pale gleam the midnight hag doth seek.