Whilst he was in his minority he had been united in marriage with one of the younger daughters of the great house of Grosvenor—Mary, the daughter of Robert Grosvenor, of Eaton, the direct ancestor of the present Duke of Westminster. It is not known with certainty how the match was brought about, but in those days the lord of the fee was entitled to the wardship of the heir, with the right to put up his or her hand to sale in marriage; and if Richard Grosvenor, as is not unlikely, had the wardship of the Adlington estates, he may have thought the alliance a desirable one for a younger member of his numerous family. It was to avoid the evil arising from this feudal practice that so many early marriages were in former times resorted to, parents being oftentimes prompted to seek an eligible match for their heirs while under age to free them from the exactions and other consequences of wardship—a circumstance that could have been little understood by the President Montesquieu, when he cast the sneer upon our country in saying there was a law in England which permitted girls of seven years of age to choose their own husbands, and which, he added, was shocking in two ways, since it had no regard to the time when nature gives maturity to the understanding, nor to the time when she gives maturity to the body. Mary Grosvenor survived her husband and remarried Sir Richard Egerton, of Ridley, Knight, with whom she appears to have resided at Adlington during the minority of the son by her first husband. She had the manor and tithes of Prestbury settled upon her as dower; and in 1558 her second husband is found attending a meeting in the church at Prestbury, and acting there in the capacity of warden—an office then held in much higher esteem than at the present day. The lady deserves to be held in special remembrance by the men of Cheshire, from the circumstance that she is generally believed to have superintended the education and taken a kindly interest in the well-being of a notable Cheshire worthy, who attained the highest honours of the peerage, Richard Egerton’s base-born son by Alice Starke, of Bickerton—Thomas Egerton, Viscount Brackley, Lord Keeper and Chancellor of England, ancestor of the great Duke of Bridgewater, as well as of the present Earl of Ellesmere—a worthy who, if precluded by the circumstances of his birth from deriving honour from an illustrious ancestry, reflected on them, his descendants, and his county the lustre of a name brighter than any other its annals can boast. It is pleasant to think that some of the earlier years of the great Chancellor were spent within the old house at Adlington, and that the generous-hearted lady to whom he owed so much was not forgotten when he had attained to distinction, and she in her old age had become the victim of religious persecution.[32] She died in 1599, having survived her first husband for the long period of fifty-one years. In her will,