William Willis

William Willis was born at Dunstable, Bedfordshire, on 29 April 1835, the eldest son (of 14 children) of William Willis (1811–1886), a straw-hat manufacturer at Luton, and his wife Esther nee Kentish Masters (1811–1877), daughter of Johnson Masters, of a Norfolk family, who carried on a straw-hat business at Dunstable. His family had deep roots in the dissenting congregations of Bedfordshire, a consciousness of past persecutions which shaped William's liberal politics, independence of mind, and his disestablishmentarianism. His grandfather had been a Whig MP for the area. Willis was educated at the free grammar school, Dunstable, then at schools at Hockcliffe, Bedfordshire, and at Hatfield, and lastly at Huddersfield College. He took two degrees at London University (B.A. 1859; LL.D., with gold medal, 1865). After a short experience in a drapery business in St. Paul's Churchyard, London, Willis entered the Inner Temple on 21 April 1888 on an Inns of Court studentship. He was called to the bar on 6 June 1861.

Willis proved a forceful and successful lawyer, 'endowed with a style of advocacy which rendered him singularly effective with juries'. He took silk on 13 Feb. 1877, and was made a bencher of his Inn, 28 Jan. 1880, becoming 'one of the most conspicuous figures ... in the courts of law at Westminster and in the Strand'. Fervid and voluble, he would 'took no prisoners' (as they say) in defending his clients, an approach which brought him into conflict with both the bar and the bench. 'His services were greatly in demand in cases which required violent appeals to sentiment and emotion, and he could be forcible and convincing where the issue turned on points of law'. He was not above 'improving the occasion', something which caused some amusement to his colleagues at the bar. Nevertheless, he formed close friendships, among his closest friends being Sir John Day.

A Baptist by religion and a radical in politics, Willis was likewise forceful in expression of his principles. In 1903 he was chosen President of the Baptist Conference, a rare distinction for a layman. In 1880 he was returned as liberal member for Colchester, speaking regularly in Parliament. In 1884 he carried a motion to exclude the bishops from the House of Lords. He failed to obtain reelection at the elections of November 1885 and June 1886. In March 1897 he made county court judge, gaining a reputation for supporting the worker over the employer and clashing with counsel.

Willis was widely read in English literature: he lectured on Milton and Bunyan, and defended the genuineness of Shakespeare's authorship against those legal colleagues who had supported the Baconian side. It was no doubt out of his combined independent religious and 17th century interests which drew him to consider the interactions of Cromwell and the Waldensians in the Pinerolo. His knowledge of the Vaudois was not limited to popular sources such as Milner and Muston (both of whom he references in his public lecture), but it is clear that he visited Northern Italy, and had a personal knowledge of the terrain of the Valleys. Led by his core anti-Catholicism and Baptist pietism, he accepted without critique the apostolic originist theory: "There in these valleys, while the Roman Empire was suffering its overthrow from Visigoths, Huns, Vandals, and Lombards, while corruption was entering the Christian Church until you could find scarcely a trace of the Apostolic Church in its doctrine and practice—there were these men, age after age, exhibiting the light and power of divine grace and truth." (Willis 1895, 5) For Willis, the sufferings of the Vaudois and the faithfulness of Cromwell, Milton and other reformed Christians were a tradition which could be used to oppose the rise of Anglo-Catholicism in his own day, a religious 'innovation' which threatened to absorb the state Church of England back into the Catholic world. The Caroline church was, to Willis, a disaster - and Cromwell (who, like Willis himself, was a commoner, a practical man) 'the noblest leader of a people's interests that ever, in my judgment, trod this earth'. He showed the way for the opponents of the Catholicisation of the Established Church - 'the members of the free Churches of this country contributed more to the establishment of Protestant truth than all the Bishops and Clergy of the Church of England at that time put together. Now, after two hundred years, we have again in our midst the practices which our fathers disapproved, from which they shrunk, and which they thought had been put in the background for ever; and the question comes, How shall we deal with these things: how shall we conflict with the errors that are in our midst?' For Willis, the answer was disestablishment, and 'true equality of religion'. This was the message of the Waldensians for Britons in high imperial Briton, riven as it was by matters of conscience over the nature of a global empire.

Willis died at his residence at Blackheath on 22 Aug. 1911, after a prolonged illness, and was buried in Lee cemetery. He was twice married: (1) on 21 March 1866 to Annie, eldest daughter of John Outhwaite of Clapham, by whom he had issue four sons and five daughters; and (2) on 2 Sept. 1897 to Marie Elizabeth, daughter of Thomas Moody, of Lewisham, who survived him.

Works

• ‘Milton's Sonnets,’ a lecture, privately printed, 1887.

• ‘Sir George Jessel,’ a lecture, 1893.

• 'Oliver Cromwell and the Vaudois', a lecture delivered to the Lee Chapel Literary Society, 4 February 1895. London: E. Marlborough, 1895.

• ‘The Law of Negotiable Securities,’ six lectures delivered at the request of the Council of Legal Education, 1896.

• ‘The Society and Fellowship of the Inner Temple,’ an address delivered in the Inner Temple Hall, 1897.

• ‘Law relating to Contract of Sale of Goods,’ six lectures, 1902.

• ‘The Shakespeare-Bacon Controversy: a report of the trial of an issue in Westminster Hall, 20 June 1627,’ read in the Inner Temple Hall, 29 May 1902.

• ‘The Baconian Mint: its Claims examined,’ 1903.

• ‘The Baconian Mint: a Further Examination of its Claims,’ 1908.

• ‘Recollections of Sir John C. F. Day, for Nineteen Years a Judge of the High Court,’ 1908.

• ‘Cowper and his Connection with the Law,’ privately printed, Norwich, 1910.

Sources

Atlay, James Beresford, 'Willis, William', Dictionary of National Biography, 1912 supplement, Vol. 3

The Times, 23 Aug. 1911

Hansard, 3rd series, cclxxxvi. 502