WILLYS (WILLIS), Sir Thomas (1612-1701), of Fen Ditton, Cambs.

The Willys family can be traced back to this MP’s great-great grandfather, Thomas Willys, who in the mid-sixteenth century owned Eye Hall at Horningsea, four miles to the north east of Cambridge.31Burke Dorm. and Extinct Baronetcies; Clutterbuck, Herts. ii. 184. In 1606 the then head of the family, Thomas Willys, and his eldest son, Richard, bought the adjacent manor of Fen Ditton from the crown. (This sale did not include fee-farm rents worth £97 and these were granted to Queen Henrietta Maria in 1626.)32Clay, Horningsey, 19. Richard Willys further expanded the family estates through his marriage to Jane Henmarsh, because when her father died in 1614, she inherited his principal estate, Ball’s Park on the outskirts of Hertford. It was there that their eldest son, Thomas, the future MP, was born in 1612.33Clutterbuck, Herts. ii. 184.

The young Thomas Willys lost both his paternal grandfather and his father in 1625 and his mother was also dead by the time he reached his seventeenth birthday three years later.34MIs Cambs. 51, 85; PROB11/148/238; Coventry Docquets, 464. It was later said that Willys had paid for the building of St John’s Church on the site of Hertford Priory in 1629.35Chauncy, Herts. i. 506; VCH Herts. iii. 509. After briefly attending Christ’s, Cambridge (the college which was the other main landowner at Fen Ditton), Willys married his first wife and then entered Gray’s Inn, with his brother Richard.36Al. Cant.; Peile Christ’s College, i. 399; MIs Cambs. 51; GI Admiss. 191. While Richard then went off to become a soldier, Thomas settled down to manage the family estates. In 1637, on selling his Hertfordshire lands to the wealthy customs farmer John Harrison*, he took up permanent residence at Fen Ditton.37Clutterbuck, Herts. ii. 184-5; CSP Dom. 1648-9, p. 418; VCH Herts. iii. 412, 507; CUL, EDR. H3. Fen Ditton, nos. 37-42. The manor house there was probably substantially rebuilt for him at about this time.38RCHM Cambs. ii. 52-6. As its name suggests, Fen Ditton lay on the edge of the Cambridgeshire fens and at some stage Willys invested in land reclamation scheme of Francis Russell, 4th earl of Bedford, for the Great Level.39S. Wells, The Hist. of the Drainage of the Great Level (1830), 357. Despite its timing, Willys was probably too obscure for the king’s grant to him of a baronetcy in December 1641 to represent a direct attempt to win his support.

With the advent of civil war, both Sir Thomas’s brothers, Richard and William, fought for the king, with Richard rising to become a major-general of horse and William serving as his lieutenant-colonel.40P.R. Newman, Royalist Officers in Eng. and Wales (New York, 1981), 415-16. Their uncle Thomas Willys, who was the clerk of the crown in chancery, spent much of the war at Oxford with the royalist court, although there may have been some truth in his subsequent claim that he did so only under duress.41Vis. Camb. 1575 and 1619 (Harl. Soc. xli), 121; LJ vi. 557b; HMC 6th Rep. 13; CCC 830-1; Aylmer, State’s Servants, 87-8. But there is no convincing evidence that Sir Thomas Willys supported the king, although there were some who had their suspicions. There is a Commons’ order of 14 June 1643 commanding the return of a knight called Sir Thomas Willis and 11 other royalists, who were living abroad and ‘doing ill offices against the Parliament’.42CJ iii. 129b. However, Willys’s absence abroad would make it difficult to explain how he had managed to make a loan of £20 on the Propositions to a parliamentarian official in Cambridgeshire the previous month, and thus it is quite likely that the Commons was acting on inaccurate information.43SP28/222, f.439. More substantial evidence of suspicion that Willys might be a royalist comes from the investigations in 1647 by the committee of accounts for Cambridgeshire into the conduct of Sir Thomas Martin, who was alleged to have confiscated property from Willys’s house at Fen Ditton in March 1644.44SP28/223: depositions before sub-cttee. for taking accs. at Cambridge, 2 Apr. 1647; SP28/222, f. 439. Among other justifications, Martin claimed that, ‘I had order to disarm him, and to take away his horses, seeing he was gone away from his abbey; and both his brothers in actual war, at the same time’.45SP28/207, f. 535. If this was true, it may simply have been a precautionary move just to make sure that Willys was behaving himself. Since neither the Committee for Advance of Money nor the Committee for Compounding pursued him it seems implausible that he was an active supporter of the king. Probably he spent the 1640s living quietly at Fen Ditton, where his wife gave birth to children at regular intervals throughout that decade.46CUL, EDR. H3. Fen Ditton, nos. 41-2, 44-5.

Willys’s probable neutrality during the 1640s gave way to apparent acceptance of the commonwealth during the 1650s. His appointments to the Cambridgeshire commission of the peace in March 1650 and to the assessment commission eight months later show the new regime co-opting him into county administration at a time when some were refusing to serve.47C231/6, p. 177; The Names of the Justices, 7; A. and O. It is by no means obvious that Willys would have welcomed these appointments and it is not known whether he performed any of the associated duties, but he retained his place on the commission of the peace throughout the protectorate. He was also regularly appointed to the local sewers commission in this period.48C181/6, pp. 26, 247, 333, 381. It is possible that it was only because Willys was considered sound that the government allowed his brother Sir Richard to return from exile in Italy in 1652 to reside with him at Fen Ditton.49J.G. M[uddiman], ‘Sir Richard Willys’, N. and Q. 12th ser. x. 123.

How far Willys knew of his brother’s clandestine activities (in whatever cause) over the next eight years is unknown. Sir Richard’s departure from Fen Ditton in late 1653 coincided with the establishment by him and others of the network of royalist conspirators known as the Sealed Knot, and he is unlikely to have returned for any long periods before October 1655, when he was released from a spell of imprisonment.50Muddiman, ‘Willys’, 123; Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy, 74-6. Thereafter, Sir Richard seems to have remained there, keeping a low profile, until the spring of 1656. His statement to (Sir) Edward Hyde* in December 1656 that he had lived recently at Fen Ditton is demonstrably false and supports the claim that he had already betrayed his colleagues.51D.E. Underdown, ‘Sir Richard Willys and Secretary Thurloe’, EHR lxix. 382-3. Sir Richard had made overtures to Secretary of state John Thurloe*, but there is no reason to suppose that Sir Thomas was involved in that either.

The Cambridgeshire return for the 1659 Parliament paired Willys with a loyal Cromwellian, Sir Henry Pickering*. Since the person most likely to have had some influence on this result was Thurloe, it is possible but unlikely that Willys’s election was in some obscure way bound up with his brother’s intrigues. Willys made almost no discernible impact on this Parliament. No speeches by him were recorded and, apart from the formality of his inclusion on the privileges committee, his only committee appointment concerned an unimportant local petition. He was granted leave of absence in the sixth week of the session.52CJ vii. 595a, 609a, 611b.

Within months of the dissolution of this Parliament, the exiled court began taking seriously the claims by Samuel Morland that Sir Richard Willys had betrayed the Sealed Knot. The failure of the rebellion planned for that summer confirmed their worst fears.53M. Hollings, ‘Thomas Barret’, EHR xliii. 33-65; Underdown, ‘Willys’, 373-87; Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy, 248. Sir Richard avoided the arrests of all suspected conspirators after his brother contributed towards a £6,000 bond for his good behaviour.54Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy, 251. Sir Thomas was among those appointed as militia commissioners for Cambridgeshire in response to the discovery of the royalist plans.55A. and O.

Willys’s support for a conditional Restoration (presumably along Presbyterian lines) cost him the county seat in the elections to the 1660 Convention. What should have been an easy victory for Willys and Sir Dudley North* turned into a shock defeat at the hands of two lesser figures, Thomas Wendy† and Isaac Thornton†, after it became known that Willys and North were reluctant to support the return of the king without imposing some limitations on his powers.56CCSP iv. 657; Pepys’s Diary, i. 112. The freemen of Cambridge proved more sympathetic, electing both North and Willys unopposed five days later. The verdict of perpetual banishment from court imposed on Sir Richard Willys for his treachery did not dishonour the other members of the family. Rather surprisingly, in view of his lukewarm attitude toward the Restoration, Sir Thomas would have become a knight of the Royal Oak had the plans for such an order gone ahead.57Burke Commoners, i. 688 His second son, Richard, obtained a position at court in 1671, when he was appointed a gentleman pensioner by Lord Belasyse (John Belasyse*), the man who had been his uncle’s bitter rival within the Sealed Knot during the 1650s.58Badminton, Beaufort archives, Fm H2/4/1, f. 24; Armytage, ‘Peds.’, 122 Sir Thomas stood for Parliament one more time in February 1679, when the two court candidates, William Alington† and Sir Thomas Chicheley*, defeated him in the contest for the Cambridge borough seats. He was subsequently removed from most of his remaining local offices in the anti-exclusionist purges of 1680. He died ‘in the 90th year of his age’ on 17 November 1701 and was buried in the church at Fen Ditton.59MIs Cambs. 51. The grant of administration reveals that he had remarried some time after the death of his first wife in 1685, at which point he was already in his seventies.60PROB6/81, f. 111v. The line died out on the death of his grandson, Sir William Willys†, 6th baronet, in 1732.61HP Commons 1715-1754.