Willoughby Aston 1640-1702
Sir Willoughby ASTON, 2nd baronet 1640-1702
Biographical Note
Son of Sir Thomas Aston (1600-45) of Aston, Cheshire; he was born at Risley, Derbyshire. He was admitted Fellow Commoner at St. John’s College, Cambridge at age 16, but did not graduate, and was admitted at Middle Temple on November 4, 1659. He succeeded to the Aston estate when he came of age in 1661; even before that, Charles II had granted him a lucrative contract to collect the customs on French wine imports into the ports of Chester and north Wales, in gratitude for his father's Civil War service. Sheriff of Cheshire, 1680-81 and 1690-91, Justice of the Peace for Cheshire and Warwickshire, Deputy Lieutenant for Cheshire 1672-82, when he was removed from the Lieutenancy because of his support for the Duke of Monmouth. He married, in 1664 or 1665, Mary Offley, the child of a prominent Royalist family in Staffordshire. At the time of the marriage, she can only have been fourteen or fifteen, but over the next thirty years she bore him twenty-one children, fourteen of whom survived into adulthood. He was buried at Aston, 19 December 1702, where he and his wife are commemorated by a monument with carving by Grinling Gibbons. A posthumous poem published by Thomas Yalden in 1704 describes Willoughby’s education, training, learning, accomplishments, virtues, piety, and his children in 302 lines of grandiloquent rhyming couplets.
Books
Yalden's poem praised him for his immense learning coupled with wisdom and an agreeable manner. The full extent of his library is not known. What is known falls into three categories: 1. Literary: Dryden’s Threnodia Augustalis (London, 1685) held at Princeton University; Edmund Waller’s Poems (London, 1668) held at Cambridge University Library; 2. Practical: Two discourses I. concerning the different wits of men, II. of the mysterie of vintners, lot 98 in the first W. A. Foyle, Beeleigh Abbey sale, September 2023; 3. Political controversy, legal, and governmental: 29 pamphlets at Princeton published between 1679 and 1685, including several trial transcripts, most notably that of Algernon Sidney. More than 40 of his books, chiefly political, legal and governmental in character printed in the 1680s and early 1690s, were offered for sale in the London, 1824 catalogue issued by J. H. Burn, Catalogue of an Extensive Collection comprising several thousand volumes. It is likely that given the difficulty of reading his signature when he runs forename and surname together, many of his books are in libraries but have not yet been identified.
Characteristic Markings
In all books but one identified to date, on the title page (upper left) or to the left of a caption title, he signed his name by running together his forename and surname, e.g. ‘WbyAlston,’ in an Italic hand. The elision initially eludes intelligible transcription.
Sources
- Landed familes of Britain and Ireland.
- Mayor, J.E.B. and R.F. Scott, Admissions to the College of St. John the Evangelist in the University of Cambridge, Cambridge, 1882.
- Venn, J. and J. A., Alumni Cantabrigienses, Cambridge, 1922.
- Yalden, Thomas, An essay on the character of Sir Willoughby Aston, late of Aston in Cheshire : a poem, London, 1704. ESTC T4580.
- Information from Stephen Ferguson.