WILLOUGHBY, Francis (1615-71), of Wapping, Surr., Portsmouth, and Charlestown, Massachusetts

Willoughby was distantly connected to the prestigious noble family of Parham in Sussex. In the 1620s and 1630s his father William Willoughby, a shipowner and entrepreneur, built up a wide-ranging business trading with the colonies, sometimes in association with the prominent ‘new merchant’ Maurice Thomson. Among other interests, he became a purveyor of wood for the navy.15CSP Dom. 1629-31, pp. 281, 269, 425; 1631-3, pp. 33, 49, 52, 140, 166, 196, 183, 141, 325; 1633-4, pp. 333, 551; 1635-6, pp. 381, 526, 382, 421; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 134-5, 186, 554. On 17 June 1642, with Thomson and his brothers George Thomson* and Robert Thomson, William Willoughby was among the 16 commissioners appointed to provide ships for the campaign against the Irish rebels.16LJ v. 144a-b.

Like the Thomsons, following the outbreak of civil war Willoughby served Parliament as a captain in the trained bands and later as colonel of the Tower Hamlets militia regiment.17CJ ii. 926b; LJ v. 252a, 267a, 646a; CSP Dom. 1648-9, p. 261; L. Nagel, ‘The Militia of London, 1641-1649’ (London Univ. PhD, 1982), 82, 101, 317. In May 1648 Maurice Thomson and Willoughby were given responsibility for securing the Thames to prevent royalist insurgents passing from Kent to Essex, a service for which Willoughby incurred substantial costs on Parliament’s behalf in relation to Tilbury Fort.18CJ v. 649a; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 529. Under the republic, in February 1649 he was appointed a navy commissioner to reside at Portsmouth.19CJ vi. 144a, 1481-b; CSP Dom. 1648-9, p. 369; 1649-50, pp. 38, 72, 138, 212, 230, 239, 241, 248, 378, 404, 408, 441, 452, 467, 478; 1650-1, pp. 152, 162, 177, 199-200, 242, 254, 268, 294, 296, 301, 312, 329, 361, 400, 498, 545, 578, 589; 1651, pp. 4, 109; HMC Popham, 17, 20, 34, 98.

Francis Willoughby, who was baptised at St Margaret Pattens, London, in 1615, followed in his father’s footsteps, and at his marriage in November 1635 was styled a ‘shipwright’ of Wappingwall. His wife was the daughter of a prominent shipwright, John Taylor of Wapping.20LMA, P93/DUN/266, f. 27. In 1638 Willoughby and his family emigrated to Massachusetts, where he was admitted an inhabitant on 22 August, and where he joined the first church in Charlestown on 10 October 1639. His first wife appears to have died shortly after their arrival, whereupon Willoughby married her sister, Sarah Taylor.21J.F. Hunnewell, The Recs. of the First Church in Charlestown, Massachusetts, 1632-1789 (Boston, Mass. 1880), 10; Greenwood, ‘Willoughby fam.’, 72.

By 1641 Willoughby owned wharfs and a shipyard in Charlestown; he was later appointed to a committee to draft a code of maritime laws for the colony (May 1650).22W.R. Chaplin, ‘Nehemiah Bourne’, Publ. Col. Soc. Mass. xlii. 68-9. He rose steadily through the ranks of Massachusetts administration. Having been made a freeman in May 1640, between 1642 and 1649 he served as one of the deputies for Charlestown in the general court of Massachusetts, and as comptroller in 1646.23Recs. Mass. i. 376, ii. 22, 145, 159, 162, 264; iii. 62, 68, 76, 78, 147, 157, 193; iv (pt. 1). 10; Publ. Col. Soc. Mass. viii. 152. In 1650 Willoughby was made one of the assistants to the governor and Company of Massachusetts, and was re-elected in May 1651, but relinquished the post later in the year.24Recs. Mass. iii. 182, 220; iv (pt. 1), 1, 36. He was probably still in New England in October, when he was recorded as having made payments towards the costs of his son’s education at Harvard, but news of his father’s death in March prompted him to return to England; his wife and children followed him in December 1653.25Harvard Coll. Recs. III (Publ. Col. Soc. Mass. xxxi), 108-10; CSP Dom. 1653-4, p. 534.

William Willoughby’s will, drawn up in November 1650 and proved by his widow in May 1651, reveals his lasting relationships with Maurice Thomson and John Taylor, and gives vivid insights into the pious environment from which Francis came. The latter’s younger brother, another William, was left a portion of only £10 until ‘it shall please God to give him grace, or till he be civilised, betaking himself to some lawful calling to live in the world as a man should do’, and even then his further inheritance was conditional on testimony to a year of righteous living delivered ‘under four godly men’s hands’. Francis, meanwhile, received property in Wapping and Portsmouth, as well as £200, and the prospect of more if his brother continued ‘unreformed’.26PROB11/216/425. William senior’s post of navy commissioner and master attendant at Portsmouth initially went to Robert Moullon or Moulton, but when he too died ‘Captain Francis Willoughby’ was on 28 September 1652 appointed to the post, perhaps on the personal recommendation of Sir Henry Vane II*, who reported on the matter from the council of state, or of George Thomson, another member of the Navy Committee.27CJ vii. 185b-186a; CSP Dom. 1651, pp. 125, 128, 131; 1651-2, p. 425. Robert Thomson was already a navy commissioner, while two commissioners appointed in December, Nehemiah Bourne and Edward Hopkins, had been in New England from the late 1630s, and were close friends of Willoughby.28CJ vii. 239a; Harvard Coll. Recs. I (Publ. Col. Soc. Mass. xv), 385.

Arriving in Portsmouth to take up his duties in mid-October 1652, Willoughby reported restive unpaid shipwrights, sickly and needy families, empty stores and damaged ships.29CSP Dom. 1651-2, p. 444. His demanding joint regional and central appointment – in January 1654 he requested a replacement at Portsmouth, arguing fruitlessly that it was impossible to combine both functions – brought him a salary of £250, supplemented by additional payments of £150 in January 1654 and June 1655.30CSP Dom. 1653-4, pp. 351, 564; 1655, pp. 200, 491. His intense activity emerges from his frequent communications with naval administrators in London, which also give vivid glimpses of local mutinies and of the impact of first Dutch war.31CSP Dom. 1651-2, pp. 458, 461, 463, 465, 479, 489, 495, 511, 533, 534, 537-40; 1652-3, pp. 7, 10, 17, 23, 28, 47, 54, 57, 61, 63, 76, 88, 106, 107, 152, 163, 174, 178-9, 187-8, 235, 248, 298, 389, 400-1, 410, 434, 438, 497, 502-617; 1653-4, pp. 14, 34, 151, 154, 224, 252-3, 337, 506-27, 535, 549, 565, 573-82; 1654, pp. 14, 460-1, 463, 465, 470, 475, 477, 483-4, 487-90, 496, 502, 514, 519-89; 1655, pp. 431, 447, 452, 465-7, 475, 480-95, 505, 507, 512, 515, 518, 526, 533-5, 574; 1655-6, pp. 82, 386, 401-513, 522, 532, 544, 548-9, 552, 569; 1656-7, pp. 57, 149, 412-579; 1657-8, pp. 86, 291, 383-547; 1658-9, pp. 24, 268, 352, 355, 397-572; 1659-60, pp. 398, 470-2, 479, 494, 543, 553; SP46/114, f. 60; SP46/117, f. 55; SP46/119, ff. 107, 322; SP46/120, ff. 75, 94, 100, 141, 175, 187, 200, 208, 240. His many letters to his friend Robert Blackborne, secretary to the admiralty commissioners, also reveal Willoughby’s own political views and his profound puritan faith. Like others, he was conflicted about war with another protestant nation: news in November 1653 that the Dutch had suffered a reverse

had a double effect upon me of joy and mourning: joy in the righteous hand of God, wherein he was pleased to blast their design, and they dealing proudly, that the Lord should declare himself to be above them; sorrow and mourning that they should not have eyes to see, nor heart to consider to this very day.

While patently a patriot, thankful for this outcome, he hoped that his country would not, ‘by unsuitable walking, abuse those gracious appearances of the Lord for us’.32SP18/41, f. 301. In September 1654, hearing of the opening of the first protectorate Parliament, he hoped that God would make all its Members

apprehensive of the weight of the work they have undertaken, and help them to set themselves as in the sight of God, to intend his glory and the good of this poor nation, and help them not to deal doubly with him who knows the heart and will reward every man according to his works.33SP18/76, f. 70.

Contemplating recent political history, he concluded that ‘the revolutions in the world are under divine guidance, and we must have faith’; he hoped that ‘the Parliament will not meet with any more great rubs, but if they sit, will be helped to carry their work’.34SP18/76, f. 85. News from Blackborne in May 1655 of the massacre of Waldensians by the duke of Savoy’s forces in Piedmont – an event which elicited widespread revulsion and condemnation – presented ‘matter of mourning and lamentation’; there had been ‘great dishonour done to the Lord, and the unheard of cruelty exercised upon the saints’. He hoped that God would avenge himself

on (not only) those bloody men who have lately had their hands imbrued in the blood of the saints, but [also] on those powers that uphold and maintain those devilish principles

and further

if the Lord shall be pleased to make this nation and those in present power instrumental in so great and so glorious a work, I shall look upon it as one of the greatest dignities [that] can be conferred.35SP18/97, f. 173.

Willoughby had staunchly defended the churches in Massachusetts from charges levelled by Presbyterians.36Winthrop’s Journal ed. Hosmer (1946), ii. 340. However, he opposed extreme sectarians and tolerationists. In July 1654, for example, he investigated one Waldo, chaplain of the Samson, and obtained respectable testimony that he was ‘very erroneous in doctrine, denying the resurrection’ and ‘loose in his life and conversation, giving ill examples by playing at cards and etc’.37SP18/73, f. 68. In 1655 he was also profoundly sceptical about the projected readmission of the Jews to England, questioning ‘whether a nation shall be suffered to live amongst us to blaspheme Christ by a law’.38SP18/102, f. 33. He thought that the advice proffered by former New England minister Hugh Peter ‘came as near as some others’: the Jews were

indeed a people to whom many glorious promises are made, but they are a people as full of blasphemy as any under the sun; a self-seeking generation, and those persons in particular who are the greatest sticklers I fear minding little but their own accommodation; and whether they be able to prove themselves Jews is a question to me.39SP18/102, ff. 73, 75.

Willoughby’s duties entailed regular attendance at meetings in London, where, as his reference to Hugh Peter suggests, he is likely to have re-engaged with the godly networks of his youth. Some time between 1653 and 1659 his second wife died and he found a third wife in that community. She was Margaret, daughter of William Locke of Wimbledon, who owned land in Southwark and Lambeth, who at his death in 1664 was described as ‘esquire’, and who may have been a kinsman of Willoughby’s mother.40PROB11/313/533, PROB11/314/193 (William Locke). Margaret had previously married Daniel Taylor, esquire, of the Independent congregation of St Stephen, Coleman Street, at the equally godly church of Holy Trinity, Clapham; Taylor, who was conceivably a kinsman of Willoughby’s first two wives, and who may plausibly be identified with the man of that name who was a commissioner for customs and for prize goods, died in April 1655.41St Stephen, Coleman Street, and Holy Trinity, Clapham, par. regs.; CJ vi. 193a; A. and O.; CSP Dom. 1650, p. 503; 1652-3, pp. 298, 528. Francis and Margaret Willoughby’s son Francis was baptised at St Olave, Hart Street, in February 1660.42St Olave, Hart Street, London, par. reg.

In January 1657 Willoughby obtained approval from the second protectorate Parliament of his claim for reimbursement of sums expended by his father in defence of the Thames in 1648 and on the navy more generally.43CSP Dom. 1656-7, p. 209, 256. His multiple links with Portsmouth, and the concern for the welfare of its sea-faring community evident in his correspondence, probably enabled him to secure election as one of its MPs, by the unanimous consent of the mayor, aldermen and burgesses, to the third protectorate Parliament in 1659.44CSP Dom. 1658-9, p. 248. His only recorded impression on the proceedings of the assembly, however, was his nomination to the committee for privileges on 28 January.45CJ vii. 595a. Conceivably, during its short life he was preoccupied with his duties as a naval commissioner.

Like Robert Thomson, at the Restoration Willoughby was busy at the navy victualling office, from where both men petitioned the admiralty commissioners on 9 May 1660 drawing attention to the costs incurred from the considerable quantities of beer lately consumed at the behest of the state.46CSP Dom. 1659-60, pp. 398, 435-6, 443-4. On 11 July Samuel Pepys† called at Willoughby’s London residence, ‘where I was received by him very civilly and slept well’.47Pepys Diary, i. 197. But within a fortnight Willoughby lost his post and relinquished his house to the diarist: arriving home on the evening of the 26th, Pepys found that ‘Commissioner Willoughby had sent for all his things away out of my bedchamber; which is a disappointment, but it is better than [to] pay too dear for them.’48Pepys Diary, i. 208.

Willoughby returned to New England with his third wife. He had arrived in Massachusetts by early May 1662, when he was named to a committee of the general court, and he resumed his colonial career at the rank he had attained by 1651, as an assistant.49Recs. Mass. iv (pt. 2), 56. In May 1665 Willoughby was elected deputy governor, and held that position until his death in April 1671, when he left an estate worth £4,050, and made a bequest of £200 to Harvard college.50Recs. Mass. iv (pt. 2), 141-462. Johnson, ‘Topical verses’, 516-18; W.I. Budington, The Hist. of the First Church, Charlestown (1845), 208; Harvard Coll. Recs. I, 53, 245.