Willys baronets

Sir Richard, who fought as an officer in the Royalist army during the Civil War, also worked as a double-agent for Oliver Cromwell during the Interregnum and was banned from court following the Restoration, retiring to his estate having married a rich wife.

On Thomas's death in 1726 his younger brother William inherited the title, but died childless in 1732, predeceased by the only remaining heir, his first cousin, John Willys (vide infra), making the baronetcy extinct.

When researching his (it came to be shown) unrelated Willis ancestors, he visited the College of Arms regarding a potential link to the baronetical Willyses, and observed: 'I was told that the male line of the grandsons had died out, though there was a suggestion without evidence that the last member of the family, John, had refused the baronetcy because he was in trade and had gone North'.

Looking at the Willis family pedigree in Burke's Extinct and Dormant Baronetcies (1844), he concluded: This was interesting but curiously silent about the John, grandson of the first baronet, not giving as one would expect the record of his death, only saying that his father Robert died in 1692 "leaving an only child John"... it may be taken as fairly certain that full investigation was made at the time the baronetcy lapsed, but the vagueness did lend some colour to the story related by the College of Arms.

'[6] The Victoria County History of the County of Cambridge, however, in giving an account of the ownership of the rectory estate at Histon, Cambridgeshire, notes that on Robert Willys's death in 1692, it was held by his wife, before passing to his son John, who had died, unmarried (as noted by Thomas Wotton in The English Baronets of 1727) by 1729, predeceasing Sir William Willys, 6th Baronet, to whom John devised the rectory estate and 60 acres of copyhold land.