The 5th Lord Leigh of Stoneleigh (1742-1786) died leaving a vast estate of land and wealth to his sister Mary for the duration of her life, and thereafter to his nearest male relative, whoever that might be. Not surprisingly, there were several claims to the title and estates by the time Mary died in 1806, the successful favourite for the estates being Rev Thomas Leigh of Adlestrop. Jane Austen was visiting this Leigh cousin with her mother when news reached the family of Mary’s death and they all travelled up to Stoneleigh Abbey to view their inheritance.
My cousin George Leigh of Blackrod (b1759) also claimed the title and estates, believing that our ancestor Roger Leigh of Haigh (d1702) was the grandson of the 1st Lord Leigh by his son Christopher, and therefore had a prior claim to being the nearest male relative. As the story handed down my family told me, George took his claim to the House of Lords in 1813 but was unsuccessful after lengthy hearings because of lack of evidence, and was forced to withdraw it. In the absence of parish records this claim depended on the alleged existence of a monument in Stoneleigh parish church detailing Christopher’s marriage and the birth of Roger. It was alleged that the monument had been removed from the church by the family of the incumbent Chandos Leigh, who eventually became the re-created 1st Lord Leigh in 1839.
George Leigh signed over any claim to a second line of my cousins who had settled in Preston (I descend from a third line who also later settled in Preston in the 1860s). The eldest claimant was Robert Leigh (1799-1869) but in 1844 his youngest brother James (1814-1878) led an invasion of Stoneleigh Abbey in search of the monument, which they believed to have been hidden in the basement. This was unsuccessful, James and two supporters being imprisoned for assault. Undeterred, James brought murder charges against Lord Leigh on his release alleging the monument was buried under a new bridge on the estate along with the bodies of the workmen who had buried it. In my view, this was simply a pretext to gain a search warrant to look for the monument based on new intelligence. The charges were dismissed and no warrant was issued. James, a butcher, went on to run the Stanley Arms in Preston. Robert Leigh’s wife was notable for dying shortly after the birth of her 27th child in 1850 a the age of 48.
This long running saga was documented in a book published in 2016 by an Australian academic and Jane Austen Society member Judy Stove, entitled The Missing Monument Murders. One suggestion in the book was that there was indeed a monument, but that it may have been forged and placed in the church by an earlier ancestor of George Leigh who was in financial trouble and sought to secure funding by pretending an association with a wealthy family. I think it unlikely that Roger Leigh was a grandson of Lord Leigh, but this leaves the question of his correct ancestry unanswered. Perhaps my Y-DNA test will eventually throw some light on this, but it will not be straightforward, because most of the known Leigh ancestries, including the Stoneleigh line, go back through the same male line of William de Venables, who was the 3rd husband of Agnes de Legh in the 13th century. The dating of the common ancestor of Y-DNA matches is very imprecise at the moment.
Chronicles 