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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
CSP Col. 1661–8, pp. 317–18.
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.
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.’
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.