The Bellaport Grosvenors – a cadet branch of the Cheshire family that is now represented by the Duke of Westminster of Eaton Hall – seem to have been established by Thomas Grosvenor, third son of Sir Thomas Gosvenor and his wife Joan Phesant, or Fesant. He married Isabella, eldest daughter and co-heir of Sir Richard Peshale of Chetwynd (q.v.) and Bellaport. Whilst the Chetwynd property passed to Isabella’s sister, Jocosa and her husband William Piggott, Isabella and Thomas succeeded to Bellaport and their successors remained there for five generations.

In about 1600, Bellaport passed to the Mainwarings of Ightfield. William Grosvenor, the great-great-great grandson of Thomas and Isabella, had married Cicely, daughter of Sir Richard Mainwaring of Ightfield and it was evidently from this connection that they became owners of the estate.

Just three years later, in 1603, the property was seemingly sold by Sir George Mainwaring to William Cotton, a London draper. Cotton was of the family from Coton and Alkington, and was a Mainwaring cousin, since John Cotton (1464–1558) had married an earlier Cicely, or Cecily, Mainwaring of Ightfield.

Cotton’s son, Rowland, was tutored by the Rabbinical Scholar, Hugh Broughton, and was well versed in Biblical Hebrew. Sheriff of Shropshire in 1617, away from the county, he was attached to the Court of Henry, Prince of Wales, and had evidently encountered the architect and designer Inigo Jones, who served as Surveyor to the Prince in 1610–11. As a result, he commissioned a design from Jones for a monument to his wife Frances, daughter of Sir Robert Needham of Shavington (q.v.), who had died in childbirth in 1606. The resultant work, which stands prominently in the Parish Church of St Chad at Norton-in-Hales, also commemorates Sir Rowland and is flanked by pillars representing Jachin and Boaz, which stood in the porch of the Temple of Solomon. Of alabaster that was almost certainly carved at Burton-on-Trent, it lost – in execution – the Italianate inspiration of Jones’s drawing and yet still shows a masterly brilliance of presence. In view of this sculptural talisman, it would be intriguing to know what Sir Rowland’s Bellaport was like, yet the only known indication of the house lost in the early nineteenth century is a view, probably of the early eighteenth century, that was redrawn by Mrs Stackhouse Acton in advance of her 1868 publication.