Back to the railway station again, and a place among the cohort of the iron horse, for a long journey is before us, even from the open, breezy chalk-plains of Wiltshire, to the marge of the majestic Tamar in westernmost Devon, and the granite-bouldered precincts of east Cornwall, where we hope to get further clue to the haunts of Willoughby when in the flesh. Here, we are leaving what was probably his first home and earliest associations before ambition dawned on his future path; there, we shall visit his later possessions when the sun of fortune had shone on him, and he basked in its rays of honours and wealth. There also our pilgrimage will eventually lead us to that last house, the which he in common with earth's humblest denizen must share.
Before, however, we proceed further on our way to what we may term his second home, it behoves us to say something anent the antecedents and coming of the knight himself, and how the name of Willoughby originally became located in the west country. Like many a younger son rejoicing in a titled extraction, coupled with probably only a slender portion of the family patrimony, the wooing of a distaff--who, beside let us hope, being endowed with her full share of love's talisman, personal attractions, enjoyed also the further potent charm of being an heiress to boot--brought the father of our knight from the fens of Lincolnshire to the distant altitudes of Wilts, and in winning the hand of Anne Cheney for a wife, subsequently became in her right the Lord of Broke. A similar errand sent his son away to the boundary line that divides Devon from Cornwall, and with the well-dowered Blanche Champernowne of Beer-Ferrers for his helpmate, there to find his future home, and where we propose to look for him again, after we have gossiped over his lineage awhile.
In common with many of our old titled names, Sir John de Willoughby its first possessor in this country was a Norman knight to whom the Conqueror gave the manor of Willoughby in Lincolnshire.[2] His descendant Sir William in the reign of Henry III. married Alice daughter and coheiress of John Bec or Beke of Eresby, summoned to Parliament as Baron Beke of Eresby 1295-6. He was succeeded by his son Robert, who inherited at the decease of his grand-uncle Anthony Beke, Bishop of Durham, the great possessions of that prelate, and 7 Edward II., was summoned to Parliament as Baron Willoughby de Eresby.