The story, it must be confessed, has much improbability about it; and may, as has been suggested, have been prompted by feelings of malice against the fallen ecclesiastic. Certain it is, the charge was not pressed to a direct issue. Whatever may have been the relations existing between Wolsey and the wife of Thomas Legh, there is no doubt that in the short interval between the expiry of the lease of the Prestbury tithes, in 1523-4, and the granting of a new one by the Abbot of St Werburg, in the following year, a dispute had arisen between George Legh and Sir John Stanley respecting them. It is not improbable that the latter had endeavoured to steal a march upon his neighbour by securing a lease of a portion of them to the disadvantage of the Leghs, who, as we have seen, had been farmers of the impropriate rectory for a lengthened period, and that the Cardinal, who is known to have been a patron of the Larkes, was then appealed to with a view of inducing the monks of Chester to grant George Legh a renewal of the privileges his family had so long enjoyed. If so, the appeal was unsuccessful, for in 1524-5 a new lease for forty years was granted, which was subsequently renewed. Sir John Stanley was a natural son of James Stanley, warden of Manchester, and afterwards Bishop of Ely, a younger son of that Thomas, Lord Stanley, who placed the crown of the vanquished Richard upon the head of the victorious Richmond on the field of Bosworth. He commanded his father’s retainers at the battle of Flodden Field, in 1513, when his uncle, Sir Edward Stanley, afterwards created Lord Monteagle, led the forces of Lancashire and Cheshire, and Sir Edmund Savage, mayor of Macclesfield, and so many of the burgesses of that town were slain; and on that occasion by his valour in the field won his golden spurs. He married Margaret, the only daughter and heir of William Honford, of Honford, by his wife Margaret, daughter of Sir John Savage, and was consequently closely allied to the Leghs of Adlington. In 1528 he and his wife prayed for a divorce in order that they might severally devote themselves to a religious life, and be quit of the world for ever. The divorce was granted, and he became a monk of Westminster, where he died; his wife also entered a religious house, but must have abandoned her intention of becoming a recluse, for she afterwards married Sir Urian Brereton, by whom she had a family, who through her inherited the Honford estates. Though Sir John assumed the cowl and tonsure of a monk, it is hardly credible, even supposing the story of Wolsey’s arbitrary exercise of power to have been true, that he forsook the society of his wife, retreated from the world, and disappeared in the shadow of the cloister “from displeasure taken in his heart” upon a matter of such comparatively little moment, and occurring four or five years previously.