By the 1830s, the house and estate was in the ownership of Edmund's descendant Peter Hesketh, High Sheriff of the County of Lancashire and MP for Preston, who later changed his name to (Sir) Peter Hesketh-Fleetwood. By 1844, Hesketh had run into serious financial difficulties. He had engaged Frederick Kemp as his agent and the two had considerable financial differences of opinion. Kemp borrowed against the estate revenues to finance the expansion of Fleetwood, and Hesketh became over-leveraged. He was obliged to sell much of the estate, together with Rossall Hall itself. The Hall was taken over by Rev. St. Vincent Beechey and converted into a Church of England boarding school, designed as a Northern equivalent of Beechey's Marlborough College and later to become Rossall School.