William Willoughby succeeded to the Arch-Presbytery of Beer-Ferrers 21 April, 1533,--patron _Walter Seymour_, by virtue of grant from Lord de Broke. He died 1565, and the Arch-Presbytery expired with him. Both probably were members of the same family. A review of the life of the first Lord Willoughby de Broke exhibits no salient features, beyond those associated with the social distinctions and worldly prosperity, usually conferred on and accompanying the faithful subserviency, that follows in the wake of a conqueror. His public functions scarcely reached in importance those exercised by his companion at Court and in arms, and fellow west-countryman Giles, Lord Daubeney; but in the main they were much alike; each served Henry as a military commander, both on sea and land, abroad and at home, were the envoys entrusted to negociate his crafty, vacillating, compromising policy in missions to foreign potentates, and held respectively the highest positions at his court, the one as Lord Chamberlain, and the other as Lord Steward of his Household. Although the Edgcumbe episode seems to pourtray him in his younger years as a daring and lawless marauder on his neighbour's peace and possessions, large allowance must be made for the disorganized state of society in that distracted age, where every man essayed to be a law unto himself, and might became right, in a very large sense of the word. In after years--like Lord Daubeney--when Henry was firmly seated on the throne, and order largely restored, Lord Willoughby de Broke was probably a careful and cautious courtier, steering clear of the intrigues that stalked about Henry's court (and infested the Tudor dynasty to its close), one who studied the mercenary, selfish policy of his royal master, and made himself generally useful as opportunity and circumstance occurred, and in return was rewarded with honours, accompanied by grants of his neighbour's confiscated lands, which cost the generous monarch he served, nothing to bestow. His name, somewhat prominent from the functions he exercised, helps to fill up the middle distance of the picture, that environs the advent of the first Tudor king. Concerning the history of the subsequent possession of the antient home of the Willoughbies de Broke,--Charles Blount, the fifth Lord Montjoy, who married Anne the daughter of Robert, the second Lord Willoughby de Broke by his second marriage, had in her right, livery of the manor, 31 Henry VIII., 1539. He was of eccentric turn, served in the rear guard of the army sent to France in 1544, and by his will made at that time, he ordered a stone to be set over his grave in case he was there slain, with the following epitaph, as a memento to his children, to keep themselves worthy of so much honour as to be called forward to die in the cause of their king and country-- "Willingly have I sought And willingly have I found, The fatal end that wrought Thither as dutie bound: