Lord Cheney was one of the peers who sat on the trial of Mary, Queen of Scots. He died without issue in 1587, leaving the whole of his remaining property to his widow. He erected a magnificent seat at Toddington, concerning which Lysons adds,--
"Lord Cheney built a noble mansion at Toddington, about half a mile from the church, of which nothing now remains but the kitchen, which is remarkably spacious, having two fireplaces, each twelve feet in width, and a few rooms fitted up as a farm house. The greater part of the building was pulled down by the Earl of Strafford about the year 1745. It appears by an antient plan of the house (in 1802 on a fire-screen at the farm) that it occupied four sides of a quadrangle, at each corner of which was a turret; the north and south fronts were two hundred and ten feet in length, the chapel was thirty feet by twenty-four, the tennis court was sixty-five feet in length, and a marble gallery, fifty-eight."
Thus this fine edifice shared the fate of its predecessor erected by the Peyvres, from whom, through Broughton who married their heiress, Lord Cheney inherited the manor of Toddington, by marrying the heiress of Broughton.
From the dismantled earthly home of the extinct Cheneys to the final one appointed for all, is but the natural sequence of this world's history of human life. The olden possessors of Toddington, successively Peyvre, Broughton, and Cheney, are all gathered together in death, in the south transept of the church. Of them, and the fate of their memorials, a few words.
The Peyvres were an antient family, holding the manor of Toddington, as early as the reign of Henry III. Paulinus Peyvre, Steward of the Household to Henry III., was, says Lysons,--
"a man of mean origin, and when he went to Court, was not possessed of two carucates of land; but by means lawful and unlawful, (as Matthew Paris observes) acquired such wealth, that he soon became possessed of five hundred carucates; a most insatiable purchaser of lands (says the historian) and a most incomparable builder. Not to speak of those in other places, his house at Toddington was like a palace, with a chapel, chambers, and other buildings, covered with lead, which raised the admiration of all beholders. His workmen are said to have received a hundred shillings, and more than ten marks for their wages."