Also from this branch came the famous Vice-Admiral of England in Queen Elizabeth’s days. This gallant sea-dog, whose romance with the “Spanish Lady” has been retold by the present writer in his “Staffordshire Stories” (pp. 22–35), took part in that daring attack upon Cadiz which has been sung by Henry John Newbolt in his “Admirals All”— Essex was fretting in Cadiz Bay With the galleons fair in sight; Howard at last must give him his way, And the word was passed to fight. Never was schoolboy gayer than he, Since holidays first began: He tossed his bonnet to wind and sea, And under the guns he ran. Admiral Leveson’s effigy in Wolverhampton Church stamps him as one of the heroes of old romance—his career was indeed remarkable, as may be read in the work alluded to. The present-day representatives of the family are the Leveson-Gowers, the head of whom is the Duke of Sutherland. The Gowers were an Anglo-Saxon family seated in Yorkshire, and the union of the two occurred about the time of Charles I., when Sir Thomas Gower, then Sheriff of Yorkshire, married Frances, daughter and co-heir of Sir John Leveson, of Haling and Lilleshall. At the time Richard Leveson was sailing the seas with Essex and Drake, there was a John Leveson living in Willenhall as lord of the manor, the site of his residence being still marked by the position of Levison Street and Moat Street. In Wolverhampton “Turton’s Old Hall” was originally known as Leveson’s Hall; this massive old mansion, surrounded by its once deep and wide moat, is believed to have been erected by John Leveson, a wool merchant, who was High Sheriff of Staffordshire in 1561. Truly the local record of the Levesons is a long and notable one; and it is interesting to note that John Leveson, son of Thomas, who had been Sheriff of the county, and died in 1595, is the last in Shaw’s pedigree to be described as “of Willenhale,” although in a succeeding chapter we shall find members of this family still seated on their native soil, Willenhall, as late as the years of the Jacobite Rebellions, 1715 and 1745. X.—Willenhall Endowments at the Reformation. Now to resume the ecclesiastical history of the place. Willenhall was affected by the Reformation from two directions; first, through the mother church of Wolverhampton, of which collegiate establishment it formed a portion; secondly, through its own chapel and the endowed chantry established therein. The great ecclesiastical upheaval of the sixteenth century had its precursor in the Dissolution of the Monasteries by Henry VIII. The rumble of the coming storm warned the secular or non-monastic foundations that it would be prudent to set their houses in order if they were to safeguard their revenues; for every one of the smaller monasteries, with an income of less than £200 per annum, had been forfeited to the Crown (1529).