suc. fa. Aug. 1617 (a minor) as 4th (CP 5th) Bar. WILLOUGHBY OF PARHAM
First sat 13 Apr. 1660; first sat after 1660, 2 May 1660; last sat 19 June 1663
bap. 8 Sept. 1612, 1st s. of William Willoughby†, 3rd Bar. Willoughby of Parham (1584–1617), and Frances (1588–1643), da. of John Manners†, 4th earl of Rutland; bro. of William Willoughby, 5th (CP 6th) Bar. Willoughby of Parham. educ. Eton, 1623–4; m. c.1629, Elizabeth (d. March 1661), da. of Edward Cecil†, Visct. Wimbledon, 2s. d.v.p. 3da. (1 d.v.p.). d. c. 23 July 1666; will 17 July 1666, pr. 10 May 1678.1
Commr. excise 1645, relief of Ireland 1645, rents of Westminster 1645, Scottish army in England 1645, scandalous offences 1646, bishops’ lands 1646, compounding 1647, visitation of Oxford 1647, indemnity 1647,2 trade 1660, plantations 1660.
Ld. lt. (parl.) Lincs. 1642–3?;3 dep. lt. Lincs. 1660–3?;4 col. militia tp. of horse, Lincs. 1660–3?5
Col. (parl.) regt. of horse by 23 Oct. 1642–9 Jan. 1643;6 c.-in-c. (parl.) Lincs. forces, 9 Jan.–20 Sept. 1643; v.-adm. (roy.) 13 June–by 7 Nov. 1648;7 gov. Barbados and Carribee Islands, 1650-2, 1663-d.
Asst. Royal Fishing Co. 1664.8
Associated with: Knaith Hall, Knaith, Lincs.; Charterhouse Yard, London.9
Likenesses: line engraving by R. Sawyer, 1647, NPG D27158; line engraving, unknown, mid-17th century, NPG D27155.
Francis Willoughby came from a distinguished and ancient Lincolnshire family, one of whose members had first been summoned by writ to the House of Lords in 1313. The main title had passed through an heiress to the Berties, but Francis’s great-great-grandfather was created Baron Willoughby of Parham in 1547, the suffix ‘of Parham’ being added to distinguish this new barony from the more established, and related, title of Willoughby of Eresby, held by the Berties. The family’s residence was located near the village of Knaith on the River Trent in the north-western region of Lincolnshire near the Nottinghamshire border, some three miles from Gainsborough.10 The idea that the 3rd Baron Willoughby of Parham was succeeded by an elder son Henry, rather than Francis, has resulted in Francis being identified as the 5th, rather than the 4th, Baron Willoughby; this however is based on an eighteenth century transcription error which is described in an appendix to volume 1 of this work.
Appointed lord lieutenant of Lincolnshire under the Militia Ordinance, Willoughby led the Parliamentary forces in that county during the royalist invasion of the summer of 1643. Lincolnshire was joined to the Eastern Association in September 1643, and was thus under the command of Edward Montagu, 2nd earl of Manchester. Although both Manchester and Willoughby were formally thanked by the House on 20 Jan. 1644 for their role in the re-conquest of the county, Willoughby’s demotion from overall military command may have helped turn him against the parliamentarian leaders, and especially the aggressive war party.11 From at least March 1646 he allied himself with Robert Devereux†, 3rd earl of Essex, and the presbyterian party in the House. He even became the presbyterian leader after the death of Essex in 1646 and was impeached in 1647 for his support for the City’s rising against the army that summer.12
Early the following year he fled to join the royalists and, despite his lack of naval experience, was quickly appointed vice-admiral of the fleet which ineffectually hovered off Yarmouth during the spring.13 After the failure of these military efforts, Willoughby took possession of his property of Barbados, which he had leased in 1647 from its proprietor, James Hay, 2nd earl of Carlisle, for 21 years. He remained in effective control of the island, while also establishing his own plantation at Surinam on the Guyana coast, from the time of his arrival in May 1650 until he was compelled to capitulate to Commonwealth forces in January 1652.14
Under the terms of the surrender, Willoughby was allowed to return to England, where he was frequently in and out of confinement for his royalist plotting throughout the 1650s.15 In June 1659 the king added him to the commission originally established in March of royalists entrusted to treat with disaffected presbyterians about projects for a restoration.16 Later Willoughby and Sir Horatio Townshend (later Viscount Townshend) were enlisted, through the efforts of John Mordaunt, Viscount Mordaunt, to assist the rising planned for the summer of 1659. However, they were apprehended the day before the operation and, apparently, imprisoned.17 Throughout early 1660 Willoughby was in close contact with Mordaunt in England and conducted a correspondence with Edward Hyde, later earl of Clarendon, abroad, keeping him informed of the rapidly changing political events.18
Not surprisingly, then, when Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton, was drawing up his list of the potential membership of the Convention House of Lords in early April 1660, he listed Willoughby as one of those lords ‘with the king’. Mordaunt hoped, seemingly against the odds, that the newly convened House would admit Willoughby.19 Willoughby himself was also reluctant to sit in the Convention without receiving express orders from the king to do so. From about the third day of the Convention, however, it was expected that ‘Willoughby of Parham will be invited to sit if he do not offer himself’ first and he was quickly ‘importuned’ to attend by a number of peers and others, among whom he singled out George Monck, later duke of Albemarle, ‘by whose direction and advice’, Willoughby later informed the king, ‘I have gone in and sit there’. On 1 May the House, upon hearing that Willoughby was now ready to attend, ordered that he be formally requested ‘to give his attendance on this House as a peer’ and Willoughby duly first appeared in the Convention on the following day. By the middle of that month he was able to report to the king that ‘I find my lords in very good temper and the House very much disposed to uphold your Majesty’s just rights and prerogative so as I hope all things will succeed to your Majesty’s great satisfaction.’20
Willoughby himself was active for the king in the Convention, three-quarters of whose sittings he attended. Throughout May he was named to committees involved in making preparations for the return of the king: to draft an ordinance for a committee of safety (5 May); ‘to consider of all things for his Majesty’s reception’ (8 May); to arrange the stationing of soldiers in Whitehall to protect the king (26 May) and to prepare a proclamation, to be issued in the king’s name, to suppress the ‘troubles in Ireland’ (26 May). With the king safely returned, Willoughby joined John Robartes, 2nd Baron Robartes (later earl of Radnor), on 14 June 1660 as the only two protesters against the decision to lay aside discussion of the proper action to be taken towards those lords who had sworn the oath of abjuration against their monarch, although for some reason only Willoughby’s signature appears in the Journal for this protest. In that month he also argued successfully against the proposal to exclude his old friend and brother-in-law, Bulstrode Whitelocke‡, from the general pardon, pointing out that Whitelocke had helped him and other royalists during the Interregnum.21
In the following month, on 2 July, he was assigned to consider the petitions of the impoverished royalist Thomas Wentworth, earl of Cleveland. On 16 Aug. he protested against the decision to accept the petition of Warwick Mohun, 2nd Baron Mohun, which sought to claim payment of damages for the breach of privilege he had suffered through his trial by common process in 1651. Mohun returned the compliment two weeks later when he was the only dissenter from the House’s order to pay Willoughby £2150 15s. 10d. still owing to him by an ordinance of 1646. On 11 Sept. Willoughby was also placed on the committee for the bill to annex Dunkirk, Mardijk and Jamaica to the crown. He came to all but eight of the meetings when the Convention resumed in November and on 13 Dec. he protested against the bill to vacate the fines of Sir Edward Powell, arguing with the other protesters that ‘fines are the foundations of the assurances of the realm’. He was busy until the very end, and on the penultimate day of the Convention was named one of six members of the House assigned to consider the Commons’ objections to the House’s proviso to the poll tax bill and to draw up a response to them.
With eight years left to run on his lease on the Carlisle proprietorship of Barbados, Willoughby had a sufficiently valid claim on the island for Charles II to entrust him, on 9 July 1660, with the government of it and the Caribbee Islands, as well as to issue a warrant to grant him the plantation in Surinam which he himself had established. However, a number of competitors in Barbados and England contested his ownership of the islands, and Willoughby’s additional claim to Surinam was strongly opposed by members of the Privy Council’s committee of foreign plantations, who were concerned to avoid giving one man such extensive powers over a large swathe of the West Indies.22 Anthony Ashley Cooper, Baron Ashley (later earl of Shaftesbury), in particular opposed Willoughby’s wish to govern both Barbados and Surinam and helped to successfully block his commission for several years.23
During the many months of petitioning for his commission, Willoughby spent little time in the House or in Lincolnshire politics. He held some local commissions but was only a deputy lieutenant in the militia, the lord lieutenancy having been granted to Montagu Bertie, 2nd earl of Lindsey, at the Restoration. 24 He does not appear to have exercised any interest in the elections either to the Convention or to the Cavalier Parliament, his own influence in the county being outweighed by his distant kinsmen the Berties and by the county Member, George Saunderson‡, 5th Viscount Castleton [I]. In the House he attended 42 per cent of the meetings of the first session of the Cavalier Parliament in 1661–2, but was particularly attentive in the first part before the summer adjournment. He first sat on 16 May 1661, a week into proceedings, but three days earlier his younger brother William Willoughby had informed the House that the goods of one of Willoughby’s servants had been seized. The perpetrators of this breach of privilege were both released upon their submission by 24 May. Barely a month later, on 10 July the House heard of another breach of Willoughby’s privilege, when one of his menial servants in Lincolnshire had also been arrested in a suit, but both parties had submitted themselves to Willoughby by 26 July.
Earlier that month Wharton had forecast that Willoughby would oppose the petition of Aubrey de Vere, 20th earl of Oxford, claiming a hereditary right to the office of lord great chamberlain, which had been held by the Berties since the early seventeenth century. On 17 July Willoughby subscribed to the protest against the second passage in the House of the bill to vacate the fines of Sir Edward Powell, the bill having been lost at the dissolution after its earlier passage in the Convention. Before the summer adjournment he was named to six committees, including those for the bill for draining the Lincolnshire fenland (16 May) and for the Corporation bill (18 July), in both of which he would have had an interest in his role as a deputy lieutenant.
After Parliament resumed in November 1661 Willoughby was a far less frequent attender, coming to only 35 per cent of the sitting days. He was named to five committees and on 6 Feb. 1662 probably signed the protest against the passage of the bill to restore to Charles Stanley, 8th earl of Derby, the lands he had conveyed by legal instruments during the Interregnum. Willoughby’s signature appears to have been among those cut off from the bottom of the page of the protest in the manuscript journal, and thus is omitted from the printed Journal for that day, which only lists 25 protesting lords. But his name does appear among the longer lists of 34 protesters compiled by two different contemporaries both involved and interested in Derby’s bill – James Butler, duke of Ormond [I], and Theophilus Hastings, 7th earl of Huntingdon.25 Near the end of the session, on 25 Apr. 1662, Willoughby was placed on the committee for the bill to distribute £60,000 among ‘loyal and indigent’ royalist officers.
He came to just under a quarter of the sittings of the session of February–July 1663. On 2 Apr. he introduced a bill on behalf of Bulstrode Whitelocke and, as a trustee for Whitelocke’s underage sons, to settle a long-standing dispute between Whitelocke and the recently deceased Jerome Weston, 2nd earl of Portland. The bill aimed to settle an annuity of £300 on the young Charles Weston, 3rd earl of Portland, in lieu of bequests formally made to him under the will of Dr Thomas Winston, which had been disputed by Whitelocke. The bill was contentious and, after hearings in committee on 6 and 7 Apr., it was recommitted. In the end it took the combined efforts of Clarendon, Whitelocke and the young earl of Portland himself to steer the bill through both Houses so that it received the royal assent on 3 June, just before Willoughby left the country for the Caribbean.26
On 12 June 1663 Willoughby finally received his long-awaited commission as royal governor of Barbados, although the proprietorship of the island had had to be ceded to the crown itself, which then bought out Carlisle’s remaining creditors.27 Further, on 6 May Willoughby and Laurence Hyde, later earl of Rochester, second son to Edward Hyde, now earl of Clarendon, had received a joint grant of the Surinam plantation.28 Willoughby’s friend Clarendon appears to have been instrumental in furthering his colonial interests, and the inclusion of his younger son in the Surinam grant can probably be seen as an indication of the price exacted for his assistance.
Willoughby also looked to Clarendon as his advocate at court, especially in light of the many conflicts he had with the island’s leading planters as he tried, with little attempt at conciliation, to impose the royal authority. He arrived in Barbados by mid-August and first presided over a meeting of the island’s council on 18 Aug. 1663.29 On 12 Dec. news reached England that he had seized 1,000 acres of land of merchants living in England, ‘which hath so incensed them here that they talk very high, and threaten to have my Lord sent for over’.30 He continued to impose his and the king’s rule with a high hand, causing serious rifts with the island’s council and even with his own officers.31 In February 1664 he wrote to Clarendon warning him of the imminent arrival in England of Robert Harley‡, whom Willoughby had appointed keeper of the seals and chief justice of the revenue court in Barbados upon his arrival there, but had had arrested when Harley refused to seal a writ which he considered illegal.32 Clarendon later recounted how his enemy George Villiers, 2nd duke of Buckingham, had tried unsuccessfully to extract from the resentful Harley allegations that Willoughby had bribed Clarendon for the post as governor, ‘for’, Clarendon admitted, ‘it was well known that the Chancellor [i.e. Clarendon], had been his chief friend in procuring that government for him, and in discountenancing and suppressing those who in England or in the islands had complained of him’.33
An even more serious case arose around Willoughby’s principal opponent in the Barbadian Assembly, Samuel Farmer, who in 1665 had led that representative body in defying Willoughby’s request for a further levy to help defend the island during the second Dutch War. Willoughby’s political views may perhaps best be seen in his description of Farmer as
a great Magna Charta man and Petition of Right maker, the first that started up that kind of language here … where he set all the people into a flame, and brought them to think that they were not governed by his Majesty’s Commission, or anything but their own laws … for they were beginning to dance after the Long Parliament’s pipe, styling it the best of Parliaments.34
Farmer was at liberty in England by February 1666 and was confident that the Privy Council would see the justice of his cause, particularly if he could enlist the support of Ashley, whom he had understood was one of Willoughby’s enemies.35
By the time of the session of 1666–7 Farmer and Willoughby’s other foes in London had publicized his arbitrary actions and belligerent imposition of royal authority in Barbados to the point where his behaviour became a political issue in the Commons. In a letter of 1 Dec. 1666 Andrew Marvell‡ informed the mayor of Kingston-upon-Hull that, in the Commons, ‘The Committee of Grievances hath had much work and still continues about my Lord Mordaunt’s misgovernments at Windsor and my Lord Willoughby’s at the Barbados.’36 As Willoughby was an ally of Clarendon, the attack on him was part of, and ammunition for, the larger attack on the lord chancellor. One of the articles of impeachment eventually levelled in winter 1667 against Clarendon was ‘That he had introduced an arbitrary government in His Majesty’s foreign plantations; and had caused such as complained thereof before His Majesty and his Council, to be long imprisoned for so doing’. In his rebuttal to these articles, Clarendon concentrated on his involvement in Barbadian affairs, aware that the article was mainly aimed at Willoughby, and he provided a detailed defence of his role in settling the government of the island on his friend and in prosecuting his enemies, particularly Farmer, in England.37
Willoughby was a central figure in the second Dutch War, in which the West Indies was a major theatre of operations between England, France and the Dutch. In July 1666, hearing of the loss of the island of St Christopher’s to the French, he fitted out and led an expedition himself for its recovery, but was lost at sea in the wake of a sudden hurricane.38 News of his certain death did not reach England until December 1666, when the Commons was still considering his arbitrary acts in Barbados.39 His will, written just before he left on his campaign, made provision for the payment of his large debts and left his plantations and the revenue allotted to him in Barbados and Surinam to his only surviving children, his two daughters, Frances, wife of Sir William Brereton‡, 3rd Baron Brereton [I], and Elizabeth, wife of Richard Jones‡, earl of Ranelagh [I].40 His estate was seriously depleted by this time through his colonial ventures. In 1676 the then governor of Barbados, Sir Jonathan Atkin, writing to the lords of trade and plantations of the futility of the Surinam plantation, told how Willoughby, ‘a gentleman of stirring spirit’, was forced to mortgage and sell his lands in England ‘to manage these fruitless designs’, which cost him in total £50,000.41 Willoughby’s younger brother William, who inherited the title as 5th (CP 6th) Baron Willoughby of Parham, also found the estate in bad condition, estimating that the 4th Baron had ‘in his Majesty’s service in the West Indies spent his paternal estate to the value of £4,000 per annum’.42
C.G.D.L.- 1 TNA, PRO 11/356.
- 2 A. and O. i. 691, 723, 804, 853, 905, 914, 927, 937.
- 3 Ibid. i. 2, 58, 294.
- 4 TNA, SP 29/11/168.
- 5 SP 29/26/73.
- 6 Peacock, Army Lists, 48.
- 7 Whitelocke, Memorials, ii. 366, 375, 436; CSP Dom. 1648–9, p. 209.
- 8 Bodl. Clarendon 92, ff. 148v–157.
- 9 Whitelocke Diary, 203.
- 10 T. Allen, The History of the County of Lincoln, ii. 48.
- 11 A. and O. i. 58–60, 294; HMC Cowper, ii. 341; HMC 4th Rep. 268.
- 12 J. Adamson, ‘The Peerage in Politics, 1645–9’ (Camb. Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1986), apps. A–D.
- 13 Whitelocke, Memorials, ii. 206–7; CSP Dom. 1645–7, p. 570; Clarendon, Rebellion, iv. 339–42, 416–17.
- 14 CSP Col. 1574–1660, p. 327; V.T. Harlow, A History of Barbados, 56–82.
- 15 Whitelocke Diary, 409, 449–61, 491.
- 16 Letter Book of John Viscount Mordaunt 1658-60 ed. M. Coate (Cam. Soc. 3rd ser. lxix), 3; CCSP, iv. 156.
- 17 Clarendon, Rebellion, vi. 111–12, 118–19; CCSP, iv. 330.
- 18 CCSP, iv. 452–685.
- 19 Clarendon 71, ff. 305–6.
- 20 Clarendon 72, f. 438; CCSP, iv. 665–6.
- 21 Whitelocke Diary, 595-6, 598-9, 604.
- 22 Clarendon, Life, ii. 548–58; Harlow, History of Barbados, 128–43.
- 23 CSP Col. 1661–8, pp. 83, 92; HMC Portland, iii. 295–6.
- 24 Procs of Quarter Sessions, Kesteven (Lincoln Rec. Ser. xxv), cxliv; TNA, C 181/7, pp. 75, 239, 259; SP 29/11/168; SP 29/26/73.
- 25 PA, HL/PO/JO/1/49, pp. 523–3; Add. 33589, f. 220; Bodl. Carte 77, f. 520.
- 26 Whitelocke Diary, 660–9; R. Spalding, Contemporaries of Bulstrode Whitelocke, 269–70; TNA, C89/15/28; PA, HL/PO/CO/1/1, pp. 323, 325, 328; Clarendon 79, ff. 160–1.
- 27 Eg. 3340, ff. 106–7.
- 28 APC Col. i. 305–6; CSP Col. 1661–8, pp. 114, 131, 139–43.
- 29 TNA, CO 31/1, p. 79.
- 30 Eg. 2359, f. 383; Add. 70010, f. 79.
- 31 Clarendon 80, f. 280; Clarendon 81, ff. 5, 129; Clarendon 84, ff. 126, 138.
- 32 Clarendon 81, f. 110; HMC Portland, iii. 274, 277, 278, 280, 283.
- 33 Clarendon, Life, ii. 462–3.
- 34 CSP Col. 1661–8, pp. 317–18.
- 35 HMC Portland, iii. 295–6.
- 36 Marvell ed. Margoliouth, ii. 47.
- 37 Clarendon, Life, ii. 546–61.
- 38 HMC Portland, iii. 300.
- 39 Marvell ed. Margoliouth, ii. 47.
- 40 PRO 11/356; CSP Col. 1661–8, p. 398.
- 41 CSP Col. 1675–6, p. 423.
- 42 CSP Col. 1661–8, p. 430.