From Warden Herle the Traffords received, about 1574, some ambiguous leases of the tithes of Stretford, Trafford, and half of Chorlton, which were ultimately decided to mean possession for ninety-nine years after twenty-one years. This transaction is probably the origin of the right of the family to nominate one churchwarden and two sidesmen, and to appoint the parish clerk of Manchester. When Peploe was warden these leases were the occasion of much trouble, and it was with great difficulty that the Fellows obtained their surrender. The fifth Sir Edmund was thrice High Sheriff of Lancashire. In 1603, when James made his progress into England, he was received at York with great pomp and state by the Lord Mayor and burgesses. A seminary priest was sent to prison for presenting a petition, and a number of gentlemen were “graced with the honour of knighthood.” Amongst these was Edmund Trafford, who, like his father, was a hater of Roman Catholics, and employed a spy named Christopher Bayley to ferret them out. Sir Edmund died in 1620. His first wife was a Booth, of Barton. In a second marriage he espoused Lady Mildred Cecil, the second daughter of the Earl of Exeter. A daughter received the name of Cecilia, and a son the name of Cecil, in honour of the mother’s family. In 1584, there was a levy of 200 men for the service of the Queen in her Irish wars, and that the Lancashire lads might not be committed to strange captains who “for the most part” had not used their soldiers “with the love and care that appertained,” one of their own shire, Edmund Trafford, eldest son of Sir Edmund Trafford, Knight, was appointed their commander. Two years later an entry in the Court Leet book shows that the town paid £16 to Mr. Trafford and Mr. Edmund Assheton for the “makeing of soldiers into Ireland.”
Sir Cecil Trafford, who was born in 1599, and knighted by King James at Houghton Tower in 1617, succeeded his father in 1620. Leonard Smethley writes from Manchester, 10th May, 1620, that Sir Edmund Trafford was buried on the 8th at Manchester Church by torchlight, and had a funeral sermon by candle-light, leaving a will so ambiguous that the heir who should inherit could not be known. Sir Urian Legh, of Adlington, and Sir Peter Legh, of Lyme, were expected to meet for the ordering and establishing of quietness amongst the four brethren. Smethley, with a keen eye to business, wanted to secure Sir Edmund’s “hearse-cloth” as a perquisite of the College of Arms, whose minion he was. From the Reformation the Traffords had been staunch Protestants, and Sir Edmund in particular was a vigorous hunter of recusants. In his earlier years Sir Cecil was thought to be tainted with Puritanism, and in an excess of religious ardour engaged in an attempt to bring back a convert, Mr. Francis Downes, who had gone over to Rome. This entry into the thorny fields of controversy had an unexpected result. Sir Cecil found himself converted by the very arguments he had sought out only to confute. Sir Cecil married a daughter of Sir Humphrey Davenport, Lord Chief Baron of the Exchequer, and his daughter Penelope, named after her mother, became the wife of John Downes, of Wardley, the brother and heir of the man whose reclamation the Knight of Trafford had attempted with so curious a result. His grandson, Roger Downes, was the young rake whose tragic fate has given rise to the story of the “skullhouse.” The death of the Rector of Ashton-on-Mersey, who was drowned on Good Friday, in 1632, “being, as it is feared, somewhat overcharged with drink,” the suicide of the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge on Easter Day, and the controversy between two Fellows of the College as to the nature of sin, seemed to new converts like Trafford and Downes “signal evidences of God’s anger and wrath, and presages of the ruin of the reformed religion.” It has, however, been claimed that the re-conversion of the Traffords, the Downes, and the Sherburnes was the work of Richard Hudleston, a Lancashire Benedictine monk, who prosecuted the dangerous mission of keeping alive Roman Catholicism in England, and died in 1655, at the age of seventy-five. In 1580, there was at Trafford a priest of this English mission, but no particulars respecting him are known. In religion a Roman Catholic, in politics a Royalist, Sir Cecil played a busy part in the troublous period of the Civil War. Ship-money, perhaps the most momentous impost in its results ever levied, was the subject of a letter from Sir Cecil to Humphrey Chetham, then High Sheriff of Lancashire, which for its quaint formalism may be worth quoting:—