WILLOUGHBY, Hugh (c. 1643-1712)

Hugh Willoughby acted throughout the 1690s, his period of greatest influence, as the leader of Lancashire’s sizeable minority of Dissenters and the closest ally of the county’s lord lieutenant, Charles Gerard, 2nd earl of Macclesfield. This biography is based on the work of P.J.W. Higson, Trans. Hist. Soc. of Lancs. and Cheshire, cxlvi. 31–66, and NH, vii. 31–53. It may have been Hugh who persuaded his aged father to claim the barony of Willoughby of Parham upon the death of the 9th (CP 10th) For the numbering of the Lords Willoughby of Parham, see the appendix to volume 1 of this work. baron in 1679 and certainly he used his new position, first as the eldest son of a peer and then as a peer himself, to rise to local prominence in Lancashire during the reigns of James II and William III. James II relied on the family to lead the Lancashire Dissenters in accepting the repeal of the Test Act and penal laws, and Hugh and his father, Thomas Willoughby, 10th (CP 11th) Baron Willoughby of Parham, were personally introduced to the king during his visit to Chester in August 1687 by the leading deputy lieutenant of the county, Charles Gerard, at that point styled Viscount Brandon. Father and son were two of the small number of Protestants, among a sea of Catholics, who were placed on a revamped commission of the peace for the county in April 1688. Glassey, JPs, 275. Unlike the Catholics, Hugh was not purged from the commission at the accession of William and Mary and was even able to increase his local influence when in May 1689 he was made the principal deputy lieutenant and a captain of militia for the newly appointed lord lieutenant of Lancashire, Viscount Brandon. HMC Kenyon, 213; CSP Dom. 1691–2, p. 276; Glassey, JPs, 278, n. 6.

At the end of Feb. 1692 Willoughby succeeded to the peerage. He was an incongruous figure for a peer, as he still largely led the life of a yeoman farmer. Years later the Dutch envoy l’Hermitage, in describing the strange history of this noble title, ‘one of the oldest in the kingdom, [which] has fallen for several recent years to very obscure collateral lines’, described Willoughby upon his inheritance as a ‘farmer’ (paisan). Add. 17677 GGG, f. 229. Throughout his tenure of the title Willoughby continued to receive the pension of £200 p.a. allocated to his father, which was occasionally topped up with further ‘bounties’ from the crown. CTB, 1693–6, pp. 167, 740; 1696–7, pp. 124, 189; 1700–1, p. 69. He quickly took steps to shore up his new dignity. He first took his seat in the House on 26 Sept. 1692, a day of prorogation, and only a few days after that received a licence to marry as his second wife Honora Egerton, the widow of Sir William Egerton^‡, a younger son of John Egerton, 2nd earl of Bridgwater. He apparently made promises to release her from the clutches of her late husband’s creditors to gain her favour, but soon took advantage of her himself. In September 1693 he was able to take possession of her jointured house and demesne of Worsley Hall near Manchester, which gave him a residence approriate to his new position in local society, while at about the same time he made applications to the college of arms for a heraldic device to confirm his aristocratic status.

This rampant social climbing and acquisitiveness caused friction in the marriage and in January 1694 Willoughby’s Tory opponent Roger Kenyon^‡ was informed by his wife that ‘Lord Willoughby and his Lady are fallen out extremely; they are the talk of the town and country’, while another of Kenyon’s colleagues suggested that the dissension was over her property and Willoughby’s claims on it. HMC Kenyon, 281. By 1695 relations between the couple had broken down so completely that Lady Willoughby turned to Kenyon for support, complaining that her husband was ‘such a devil, nobody can live with him, and one of the greatest cheats that ever were, and marries only to rob and plunder all he can, and then, if he could, would set them going, to be at liberty to cheat somebody else’. HMC Kenyon, 382, 419–20.

Membership of the House was another marker of Willoughby’s new status that he initially took seriously. He first attended the House for a full session of Parliament on 4 Nov. 1692, and he came to just over three-quarters of the sittings of this session, during which he was named to 18 select committees. He voted for the commitment of the place bill at the end of December 1692, but when the bill came up for a final vote early the next year he decided against it. Thomas Bruce, 2nd earl of Ailesbury, noted this surprising change of heart in his record of the division, which may be attributable to Willoughby’s dependence for payment of his pension by the court, which had made its opposition to the measure clear in the intervening days. In early 1693 Willoughby also voted in favour of reading the bill allowing the divorce of Henry Howard, 7th duke of Norfolk, and on 4 Feb. he found Charles Mohun, 4th Baron Mohun, not guilty of murder, along with the majority of his peers.

Willoughby left the House at the prorogation of 14 Mar. 1693 and did not attend again until 2 Dec. 1695. He was not inactive in this intervening period, but limited his involvement to local Lancashire affairs, where he served both as a justice of the peace and as the principal deputy lieutenant for the lord lieutenant, the 2nd earl of Macclesfield, as Viscount Brandon had become upon the death of his father in January 1694. Willoughby took the opportunity of his patron’s promotion to the House to register his proxy with him on 12 Feb. 1694 for the remainder of that session, and in March it was reported to Roger Kenyon that Macclesfield, about to travel to Flanders to take part in the wars there, had expressed the wish that ‘if he had power to depute one to act as lord lieutenant in his absence the Lord Willoughby would be the man’. Trans. Hist. Soc. of Lancs. and Cheshire, cxlvi. 51.

Willoughby was also an engaged justice of the peace at the quarter sessions, where he proved himself aggressive in support of nonconformists and their attempts to establish ‘chapels of ease’ in the large Lancashire parishes. HMC Kenyon, 246, 274, 280, 289, 290. In May 1694 Lady Margaret Standish, widow of Sir Richard Standish^‡, who had been an opponent of Willoughby’s patron Macclesfield, was worried about her case coming before the magistrates at Manchester sessions, for ‘I fear there is too many of my Lord Willoughby’s faction there, and I have no reason to expect any justice of that gang’. In January 1695 there were rumours that Willoughby was behind the plans to place a number of his Dissenting friends who worked in trade and manufacture on the county’s commission of the peace. HMC Kenyon, 292, 373, 374. In the summer of 1694, in his role both as a deputy lieutenant and a magistrate, he played a leading role in the prosecution against the suspects in the pretended Jacobite ‘Lancashire Plot’, which was aggressively pursued by Macclesfield upon his return from the continent. HMC Kenyon, 309, 319. Willoughby assigned his proxy again with Macclesfield for the following parliamentary session, from 4 Jan. 1695, and it was the earl who on 29 Apr. conveyed to the House Willoughby’s reluctant decision to acquiesce to the petition of Lady Margaret Standish that he waive his privilege in her suit, as her opponents (‘Lord Willoughby’s faction’) had brought him in as a party to their cause so that his privilege could frustrate the course of law in the inferior courts. HMC Kenyon, 379; HMC Lords, n.s. i. 573.

In the autumn of 1695 Willoughby also assisted the lord lieutenant in his attempt to have Whig members returned to Parliament. He had already played a leading role in the controversial by-election at Clitheroe in 1693, where the poll had to be held twice because of the underhanded methods used to return the lord lieutenant’s younger brother Fitton Gerard, later 3rd earl of Macclesfield. Willoughby had involved himself in elections for the borough of Wigan, close to his family’s home of Horwich, since at least 1690 and had been the principal agent for the lord lieutenant’s candidate Colonel Edward Matthews in a by-election in late 1693. Matthews was unable to build an interest in the borough, and at the 1695 election Willoughby, as Macclesfield’s agent, was present on polling day to support Alexander Rigby^‡, though this candidate was also unsuccessful against the stronger interest of Sir Roger Bradshaigh^‡. HP Commons, 1690–1715 ii. 324, 342.

Willoughby returned to the House in the first session of the new Parliament, sitting for 13 meetings from 2 Dec. 1695 before assigning his proxy to Macclesfield again on 19 Dec. for the remainder of the session. He renewed his proxy with his lord lieutenant in the following session on 10 Jan. 1697. Meanwhile he was still causing controversy in Lancashire during these years with his aggressive support of Dissent and Dissenters. Respectable Anglican opinion was shocked by Willoughby’s vigorous espousal of the miraculous claims of the notorious ‘Surey demoniac’ in 1695, which prompted a vigorous pamphlet war between Anglicans and Dissenters from 1697. Trans. Hist. Soc. of Lancs. and Cheshire, cxlvi. 61–63. His long-anticipated project to intrude Dissenting colleagues involved in trade and manufacture onto the commission of the peace was finally effected in March 1696 and at the Ormskirk quarter sessions that summer he was able to engineer that St Helens chapel of ease be awarded to the Dissenters, although Roger Kenyon was later able to reverse this decision through a direct appeal to the chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster. HMC Kenyon, 411, 412. Kenyon was similarly angered when Willoughby, ‘the only nonconformist of anything that hath the name of a gentleman in our country’, tried to expel the conformist minister from Ellenbrook chapel, which Willoughby successfully claimed was a domestic chapel of his house of Worsley Hall, and worked to insert a Dissenting chaplain there. HMC Kenyon, 417, 418.

Willoughby returned to the House after his long absence on 3 Dec. 1697. He probably came to Westminster specifically to present to the king an address from the members of the nonconformist Lancashire Association of United Ministers. Chetham Soc. n.s. xxiv. 360. He stayed for a further 38 meetings of the session, attending for the last time on 26 March. Shortly afterwards, on 6 Apr., he assigned his proxy to Macclesfield, who probably continued to be the recipient of his proxy in the following sessions as well, but the proxy registers are missing from December 1698. Willoughby did not return to the House until 10 Mar. 1701, when he attended 36 sittings until 27 May (thereby not taking part in the eventual acquittal of the Junto lords).

At the beginning of the eighteenth century Willoughby’s fortunes took a turn for the worse. By the death of his step-son John Egerton in July 1700, the head of the senior branch of the family, John Egerton, 3rd earl of Bridgwater, was able to reclaim possession of Worsley Hall. In November 1701 Macclesfield died, to be replaced as lord lieutenant by the far less sympathetic William Richard George Stanley, 9th earl of Derby, the nominal leader of the Lancashire Tories. Not surprisingly, Willoughby suffered in the Tory redistribution of offices in the early days of Anne’s reign, and was excluded from the commission of the peace and the deputy lieutenancy in July 1702, although he was reappointed to these offices when the Whigs were in the ascendancy from 1706. Glassey, JPs, 286–8. In this role he led the roundup of ‘Papists, nonjurors and disaffected persons’ in Lancashire during the invasion scare of Mar. 1708. During Anne’s reign he came to just eight sittings of the House, in November 1703, and he sat for his last time on 26 November. He was marked as having voted against the second occasional conformity bill on 14 Dec. 1703 by proxy, but the proxy register for this session is unfortunately missing. Willoughby did later register his proxy on 7 Nov. 1704 with Richard Savage, 4th Earl Rivers (who had land-holding interests in Lancashire), and that earl may have held Willoughby’s proxy in December 1703 as well, as he did vote against the bill.

Although he never sat again in Parliament, Willoughby was still included in the calculations of parliamentary managers and observers. He was listed as a Whig in a printed list of Parliament in May 1708, and in January 1712 John Churchill, duke of Marlborough, suggested to the Hanoverian agent in England, Bothmer, that the emperor give Willoughby a pension of £300 in order to secure his opposition to a separate Anglo-French peace. Willoughby died childless in July 1712, and his personal estate was shortly thereafter valued at £395. By his will of 29 Nov. 1711 he entailed his Lancashire properties in Heath Charnock, Rivington, Anglezark, Adlington, Witton and Mellor to his nephew Edward Willoughby, who succeeded as 12th (CP 13th) Baron Willoughby of Parham.