WILLOUGHBY, Charles (1650-79)

Just before his departure in March 1667 to take up the government of Barbados, William Willoughby, 5th (CP 6th) Baron Willoughby of Parham, wrote to the king asking him to take care of ‘the good breeder (my good wife) I leave behind, who hath brought your Majesty seven he subjects such as I dare own’. CSP Col. 1661–8, p. 454. All the pride and hope he placed in this large brood were dashed in a little over ten years. Only four of these sons outlived him and three of these were to die within five years of their father’s death. V.L. Oliver, The History of the Island of Antigua, iii. 242–9. Charles Willoughby, the 9th (CP 10th) Baron Willoughby of Parham, was the youngest of the 5th Baron’s many sons, and only came to the title after his whole cohort of male siblings (and one nephew) had expired as young adults. Charles himself was not to enjoy the title long. He died aged 29, at which point this branch of the Willoughbys of Parham was left without any male heirs at all, despite the impressive fecundity of his parents.

Like his elder brothers, Charles spent the period before coming to the title helping to administer Barbados and in May 1673 he, with his brother John, had been made executor of his father’s will on the island. CSP Col. 1669–74, p. 492. He was probably still on Barbados, or en route from it, in late 1678, for he was not present in the House during the last weeks of the Cavalier Parliament. Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby (later marquess of Carmarthen and duke of Leeds), also noted his absence during the first few weeks of the first Exclusion Parliament and tentatively placed him among the opposition lords in a list of peers absent from the House on 12 Mar. 1679. Willoughby of Parham first sat in the House on 9 May 1679, when the issue of the procedures for the trials of Danby and the Catholic peers was coming to a head. He attended every sitting until that Parliament was prorogued on 27 May, 28 per cent of the whole. On 14 and 15 May he was named to two select committees, both of them for private estate bills. Danby’s earlier calculation that Willoughby would be part of the opposition turned out to be incorrect, judging from the few votes he did cast. Danby recorded him as voting on 10 May (although he is not noted in the attendance list for the morning session of that day) against the motion to have a separate Lords’ committee meet with the Commons to discuss procedure for the trials of the lords; later, on the last day of the Parliament, he probably supported the Lords’ insistence that the bishops could attend these trials, even though they could involve a capital sentence. Browning, Danby, iii. 136, 139.

Willoughby of Parham died in early December 1679, during the long prorogation of the second Exclusion Parliament. At his death the male line of his grandfather William Willoughby^†, 3rd Baron Willoughby of Parham, became extinct. The 77-year-old son of the youngest son of the 9th baron’s great-great-grandfather Charles Willoughby^†, 2nd Baron Willoughby of Parham, thereupon claimed the title and was summoned to the first meeting of the second Exclusion Parliament in October 1680 by writ. In the mid-eighteenth century, when it was discovered that the barony had passed to the wrong branch of the Willoughbys, this writ was retrospectively considered to have established a new creation of the title. Bodl. Carte 109, ff. 3–4.