DAVIES, Sir John (1569-1626), of Serjeants’ Inn, Fleet Street and Charing Cross, Westminster; later of Englefield, Berks.

Davies must be distinguished from the Sir John Davys knighted at Dublin in 1599, and from Sir John Davies of London, dubbed by James I in 1618. Shaw, ii. 96, 144. Davies’ grandfather moved from South Wales to Wiltshire with the 1st earl of Pembroke. Poems of Sir John Davies, xxiii-iv. His father, a magistrate, was a successful tanner, but this lowly occupation was used to ridicule Davies when he entered the Middle Temple, SP12/145, f. 42; Pawlisch, 19. as was Davies’ physical appearance. One fellow student observed that Davies ‘goes waddling with his arse out behind as though he were about to make everyone that he meets a wall to piss against ... He never walks but he carries a cloakbag behind him, his arse sticks out so far’. In Ireland Davies was described by the earl of Tyrone as more fit to be a stage-player than a counsellor to the king. Manningham Diary ed. R.P. Sorlien, 235; CSP Ire. 1606-8, pp. 382-3.

Davies followed his elder brother Matthew to Winchester before going to Oxford in 1585. He can only have spent about 18 months at Queen’s before entering New Inn, for in 1588 he paid a 20s. fine on his admission to the Middle Temple (indicating that he had spent at least a year at New Inn). Poems of Sir John Davies, xxvii. For Davies the law was undoubtedly a means of advancement rather than a subject which genuinely interested him; he complained of the tedium of legal studies, and Wood states he had ‘no great geni[us] to it’, but he was nevertheless sufficiently talented to be called to the bar after the minimum period of study. Pawlisch, 17; Ath. Ox. ii. 400; Poems of Sir John Davies, xxviii. During this time he wrote his most important poetic works, these being his Orchestra, or a Poeme of Dancing, dedicated to Richard Martin*, and Nosce Teipsum, a verse on the immortality of the soul influenced by Richard Hooker, master of the Temple church 1584-91. Pawlisch, 17; Poems of Sir John Davies, xxxvii, xxx-i.

At the Middle Temple Davies shared chambers with Sir Robert Cotton*, who became a friend. MTR, 322. It may have been through Cotton that Davies came into contact with William Camden. In 1592 Davies, Richard Martin* and William Fleetwood II* travelled to Leiden to visit the Dutch scholar and jurist Paul Merula. Pawlisch, 16-17. Subsequently Davies contributed several papers to the Society of Antiquaries, and in 1606 he sent Cotton maps of the principal cities of Ireland. Collection of Curious Discourses ed. T. Hearne, i. 238-45; ii. 35-7, 108-11, 180-90; Works, ii. pp. cxiv-v. However, Davies remained the butt of cruel jokes. The subject of satires penned by John Donne* and Ben Jonson, among others, Manningham Diary, 8, 312. in 1598 he was ridiculed in the Middle Temple Candlemas revels, which hurt him deeply as the performance was directed by his friend Richard Martin. On 8 Feb. 1598 he entered Middle Temple Hall and repeatedly hit Martin on the head with a stick until it broke, for which offence he was expelled. Pawlisch, 19-20; MTR, 379-8.

After his expulsion Davies may have spent some time back in Oxford. By 1601, however, he had returned to London and was using his literary skills to mobilize support for an attempt to gain readmission to the Middle Temple. He sent lord keeper Thomas Egerton† an autographed copy of Orchestra with a condolatory sonnet on the death of his second wife. Ath. Ox. ii. 400-1; Pawlisch, 23. His main attentions were directed at Sir Robert Cecil†, for whom he wrote several works, Poems of Sir John Davies, xxxviii-ix; English Literary Autographs 1550-1650 ed. W.W. Gregg, ii. item 47; HMC Hatfield, xi. 544. but he also seems to have won the support of the lord chief justice, Sir John Popham† and effected a reconciliation with Martin. Faced with this concerted pressure, the Middle Temple readmitted him in October 1601. Poems of Sir John Davies, xxxix-xl; Chamberlain Letters, i. 126; MTR, 416.

In 1594 Charles Blount†, 8th Lord Mountjoy presented Davies at Court, and in the same year Davies accompanied Robert Radcliffe, 5th earl of Sussex, to Scotland for the christening of Prince Henry, a journey which brought him into contact with James VI. Pawlisch, 17. On James’s accession to the throne of England, Davies left London hoping to meet the new king on his way south. His prior acquaintance with James was clearly an advantage, and indeed his friend Francis Bacon* asked Davies to speak to the new monarch on his behalf. Chamberlain Letters, i. 189; Works, ii. pp. cvi-ii. In September 1603 Davies was appointed solicitor general of Ireland thanks to Mountjoy, now lord lieutenant of Ireland and 1st earl of Devonshire. He arrived in Ireland on 20 Nov. 1603, CSP Ire. 1603-6, pp. 88, 111, 463. and in early 1606 not only ousted Ireland’s attorney-general but also succeeded to his post. HMC Hatfield, xviii. 5-6. As attorney, Davies was responsible for indicting the earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell for treason, and was a leading figure on the commission that established the Ulster plantations. CSP Ire. 1606-8, p. 389; CSP Carew, 1608-24, pp. 13-22, 38-40.

Davies played a major role in the calling of the 1613 Irish Parliament. He seems to have assumed on his arrival in Ireland that a Parliament would soon be summoned, but previous assemblies had been dominated by the Catholic Old English. CSP Ire. 1603-6, pp. 111-13. In order to establish a Protestant majority, new boroughs were established in the plantations of Ulster and Munster, which returned 84 Protestant Members. Pawlisch, 31. In 1611 Davies sent one of his servants, who had been appointed clerk of the Irish House of Commons, over to England to confer with Ralph Ewens†, clerk of the English House, and take notes from the records in his hands, because no information concerning previous Parliaments had been found in Dublin. CSP Ire. 1611-14, pp. 13-15. In 1612 James nominated Davies as Speaker of the House of Commons, and in the ensuing elections Davies was returned for County Fermanagh. Ibid. 286. On the first day of the Parliament (18 May 1613), Sir Thomas Ridgeway* formally proposed Davies as Speaker, but the Catholics present refused to accept the right of the Members for the new boroughs to participate in proceedings until an inquiry had been held into their election. They also questioned Davies’ right to sit in Parliament, since, as attorney-general, he was arguably ineligible for membership of the Commons. Instead, they nominated as Speaker Sir John Everard, a former justice of the Irish King’s Bench who had been dismissed for recusancy. The matter proceeded to a division, but when the Protestants left the chamber the Catholics installed Everard in the chair. On re-entering the Protestants tried to remove Everard by force, and eventually had to place Davies on Everard’s lap before he would vacate the chair. CSP Carew, 1603-24, pp. 271-5. Both sides appealed to the king, and Davies himself travelled to Westminster. James not surprisingly ruled in favour of the Protestants and upheld Davies’ right to sit. Thereafter, in the autumn of 1614, Davies presided over a relatively peaceful session, and over a third and final session in the spring of 1615. CSP Ire. 1611-14, pp. 498, 514-17, 536-7; CSP Ire. 1615-25, pp. 49-51.

Davies may have come into contact with his future father-in-law, Lord Audley, before he went to Ireland in 1603. Audley was sometimes a guest at the Middle Temple, and his wife’s Wiltshire home, Fonthill Gifford, lay close to Tisbury. Cope, 16. However it was undoubtedly Ireland that was the key to his marriage. Audley had fought in Ireland in the Elizabethan wars and was determined to carve out a large estate for himself there. He was probably willing to overlook Davies’ humble social origins for the assistance that Davies could give him as attorney-general. Audley and Davies co-operated in the Ulster plantations, in which Davies received 3,500 acres. CPR Ire. Jas. I, 164, 189. Davies also received a number of other smaller grants of Irish land, some of which he seems to have sold quickly. Ibid. 156, 213, 206, 250, 293, 389, 300. In 1609 he started to build up an estate in England, purchasing the manor and rectory of Pirton in Hertfordshire for £3,200. His principal acquisition, however, was the manor of Englefield in Berkshire, which he bought for £6,400 in 1623. Englefield became his English country residence for the rest of his life, and in 1626 he contracted to rebuild a great part of the house for £1,000. C54/1986, 54/2553/22; VCH Som. iii. 63; Cal. of Sherborne Muns. 190; Cope, 25. It is clear that Davies had become enormously wealthy, for in the same year that he bought Englefield Davies provided his daughter Lucy with a dowry of £6,600 on her marriage to Ferdinando Hastings, heir to Henry, 5th earl of Huntingdon. Cope, 26.

Long before the 1613-15 Parliament had met, Davies had been seeking to return to England. In 1610 he reminded Salisbury that James had promised that after he had proved himself in Ireland he would be appointed to office in England. CSP Ire. 1608-10, pp. 451-2. His pleas to return continued, and to keep him quiet he was appointed one of the king’s serjeants-at-law in 1612. That same year he resumed his practice at the bar while in London. However, his hopes of further preferment were frustrated by the death of Salisbury, whom he had kept informed of events in Ireland with regular, lengthy newsletters and whom he described as the ‘root and foundation’ of his preferment. CSP Ire. 1611-14, pp. 13-14, 91, 153-4, 263; SO3/5, unfol., 27 Apr. 1612. Attempts to establish similar relations with Salisbury’s successors failed. In October 1614 he sent the earl of Somerset an account of the beginning of the second session of the Irish Parliament and wrote to Sir Ralph Winwood*, recently appointed secretary of state, stating that Salisbury had instructed him to keep the secretary informed of Irish affairs. However, there is no evidence that a regular correspondence ensued, and in 1615 he wrote in similar terms to Sir Thomas Lake I*, again apparently without impact. CSP Ire. 1611-14, pp. 514-17, 521-2, 536-7; CSP Ire. 1615-25, pp. 105-7. By now Davies may have been worried that his position at Court was being undermined, for in April 1615 he defended himself against unspecified criticism by Ireland’s chancellor of the Exchequer and secretary of state, Sir Richard Cooke. CSP Ire. 1615-25, p. 46. On this occasion his explanations were accepted, but later that year he was severely criticized by the king for misrepresenting what James had said when Davies had been in London. Ibid. 107-8. Consequently, when he sought to succeed (Sir) Henry Yelverton* as England’s solicitor general in 1617, Davies lost out to Buckingham’s client, Sir Thomas Coventry*. HMC Hastings, iv. 16. The lesson of this débâcle was not lost on Davies, who in 1619 applied to Buckingham, describing himself ‘as one that have separated my self from all other dependencies’. As a result Davies obtained permission to nominate his successor as attorney-general and move permanently back to England. However, he failed to obtain any further preferment, and despite being a king’s serjeant he described himself as almost an alien in England. Works, ii. pp. cix-cxi.

During his later years in Ireland Davies again took up his pen, probably to further his search for English office. In 1612 he published A Discovery of the True Causes Why Ireland was Never Entirely Subdued Nor brought under Obedience of the Crown of England. Three years later he brought out his law reports. Both works, in emphasizing what had been done in Ireland since James’s accession, inevitably publicized Davies’ own achievements. Pawlisch, 31. The law reports also contained an extended eulogy on the English Common Law in the introduction, a draft of which was sent to the dedicatee, lord chancellor Egerton (now Lord Ellesmere), who naturally edited out references to the Civil Law even though the latter evidently played an important part in Davies’ thinking. V. Treadwell, Buckingham and Ire. 291. In 1613 Davies attempted to curry royal favour by producing an uncontroversial defence of Prince Charles’s title to the duchy of Cornwall. Works, ii. pp. 397-8. Sometime between 1614 and 1621 he also penned a defence of the Crown’s right to levy impositions, possibly at Buckingham’s request. Though not published until the 1650s, it was widely circulated in manuscript. It may well have been written in response to the debates of the 1614 Parliament, as Davies was in London at the time. Indeed, on one occasion he carried a bill from the Lords to the Commons. Works, iii. pp. 1-116; Diary of Sir Richard Hutton ed. W.R. Prest (Selden Soc. suppl. ser. ix) 69; Procs. 1614 (Commons), 89.

Davies probably sought election to the 1621 Parliament as a means of furthering his search for office. His was returned for two seats, Hindon in Wiltshire, and Newcastle-under-Lyme in Staffordshire. The former place he undoubtedly owed to the influence of his brother-in-law, Sir Mervin Audley alias Tuchet*, but how he obtained the nomination at Newcastle is uncertain. It may be significant that the chancellor of the duchy, (Sir) Humphrey May*, was at the Middle Temple in the 1590s, and had also been gentleman usher to Lord Mountjoy, Davies’ old patron. Furthermore, Davies had corresponded with May when the latter was remembrancer for Irish affairs in 1611-17. HMC Hastings, iv. 5; CSP Ire. 1615-25, p. 46. However, Davies may have come by the Newcastle seat via the 3rd earl of Pembroke, the son of Davies’ patron in the 1597 Parliament, as Pembroke, having been appointed steward of the duchy properties in Staffordshire in succession to his father-in-law, Gilbert Talbot†, 7th earl of Shrewsbury in 1616, was trying to influence the elections in other parts of the former Talbot affinity at this time. Duchy of Lancaster Office-Holders ed. R. Somerville, 166. See EAST RETFORD, NOTTINGHAM, DERBY. It may also be significant that Davies’ father-in-law, Lord Audley, had previously owned substantial estates in north Staffordshire. Audley had sold the large manor of Tunstall, to the north of Newcastle, to his uncle Ralph Sneyd, an important local landowner, and consequently Davies’ wife’s family retained connections with the area. Moreover, at the time of Davies’ election, Sneyd’s son was the farmer of the manor of Newcastle-under-Lyme. Staffs. Hist. Colls. ed. H.S. Grazebrook (Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. v. pt. 2), p. 274, VCH Staffs. viii. 184; J. Ward, Bor. of Stoke-upon-Trent, 83, 135, 144.

Once the Parliament began Davies chose to sit for Newcastle, perhaps because the election there took place three days before the one at Hindon. T. Pape, Newcastle-under-Lyme, 259. Seeking to make an early impression in the Commons, he delivered a long speech on 5 Feb. in which he argued that there had never been more reason to vote money since the Conquest, even allowing for the Crusades, the ransoming of Richard the Lionheart, the Hundred Years’ War and the Conquest of Ireland. However, the speech was not a success. Pym said it was ‘more length of speech than the House had patience to hear’, and Davies’ friend William Ravenscroft, who called it ‘a chronicle comparative discourse’, reports that he was interrupted. CD 1621, iv. 14-15; HEHL, EL6470.

As a prominent lawyer, Davies was frequently nominated to committees for legal bills, and on 10 Mar. he reported the bill concerning women convicted of small felonies. CJ, i. 520a, 548a-b, 560a, 602b, 624a, 626a. He also acted as a messenger for the judges of the Fleet Street Serjeants’ Inn, who told the Commons that they had not approved the fees of the masters of Chancery. Ibid. 595b. Not surprisingly he also spoke on Irish issues, but this was always in response to initiatives from others. When he contributed to the debate on Irish abuses initiated by Sir John Jephson on 26 Apr. he seems to have been mostly concerned to assure the House that there were few grievances in Ireland and that these should be dealt with by the Irish Parliament. CD 1621, iii. 90. Davies also spoke at great length on 18 May against a bill to prohibit the import of Irish cattle, Ibid. v. 173-4, 381. but proposed including Ireland in the bill to prohibit the import of foreign tobacco on 25 May. Ibid. iii. 305. On 17 May Davies forcefully opposed a private bill concerning the property of the Mohun family, alleging that Sir Reginald Mohun* was seeking to defraud his son John*. Davies may have been personally connected with Mohun, for in December 1621 he sold Mohun bonds owing to Davies by Mohun’s brother-in-law, John Trelawny. Nicholas, Procs. 1621, ii. 86; Cal. of Chs. and Rolls Preserved in Bodl. ed. W.H. Turner, 152.

The largest number of Davies’ contributions to the Parliament concerned economic matters. On 26 Feb., advocating the establishing of a committee on the shortage of money, Davies said that he had heard a wise man compare the hammers of the Mint to the pulse of a body. This metaphor was used in Gerald Malynes’ Maintenance of Free Trade, published a year later, suggesting that Davies was a friend of the author. CD 1621, ii. 137-8. During the Elizabethan parliaments of which he had been a Member, Davies had attacked monopolies, and it is therefore not surprising that on 13 Mar. he criticized London’s trading companies for engrossing trade. He also argued that while the king’s right to levy impositions might be defended, the Merchant Adventurers’ right to do so could not. Nicholas, i. 153. On 26 May Davies spoke in support of the bill to make it a felony to export wool, telling the Commons that the judges in the Lords sat on woolsacks to remind them of wool’s importance. Ibid. ii. 106-7.

There is no mention of Davies in the surviving records of the autumn session. Appointed the first, or ancient, king’s serjeant two years later, he was summoned to the Lords in 1624, 1625 and 1626 by writs of assistance and was consequently no longer eligible to sit in the Commons. Having failed to advance his career in Parliament, Davies again turned to his pen, revising Orchestra in 1622, perhaps intending it to be part of a Court entertainment for a Spanish embassy. In that year he published an edition of his major poetic works, with a dedication to Prince Charles. J.R. Brink, ‘1622 Edition of Sir John Davies’s Orchestra’, The Lib. (ser. 5), xxx, 27. Davies also abridged the reports of Sir Edward Coke* and turned them into law French, which work was translated into English and published posthumously in 1651.J. Davies, Perfect Abridgement of Eleven Books of Reports, of Rev. and Learned Kt. Sir Edw. Cooke (1651). Davies’s interest in Coke’s law reports is perhaps surprising, for unlike Coke in the latter part of his career he held an exalted opinion of the royal prerogative, which he believed could not be changed by statute. He justified the Crown’s right to levy impositions on the basis of the Civil Law and numerous precedents, Works, iii. pp. 21, 31-52, 89. and argued that every Christian prince had the power to reform religion on their own authority. CSP Ire. 1603-6, p. 144. His objection to monopolies probably stemmed from the fact that they necessarily involved delegating the prerogative to private individuals. His opposition to the delegation of royal powers is evident in his writings about Ireland, in which he compared the traditional clan rulers to the medieval old English nobility, who had exercised an authority over their tenants that rightfully belonged to the king and so kept the country in turmoil and poverty. Ire. under Elizabeth and Jas. 1st ed. H. Morley, 222-3, 276-81. He believed that the early Tudors’ accomplishment in breaking the power of the nobility and bringing in the rule of law could also be achieved in Ireland by introducing English property laws. Ibid. 334; CSP Ire. 1603-6, p. 160. For Davies, a strong Crown, in England and in Ireland, was necessary to enforce the law, the only guarantee of peace, property and prosperity. Cockburn, 308-11.

Davies regarded Parliament as more important than Magna Carta, but his respect for Parliament derived from his respect for the Crown. In his speech delivered at the beginning of the second session of the 1613 Parliament he described being a Member of Parliament as the greatest honour that a subject of a monarchy could hold: ‘For if the law do adjudge the king himself to be then in his highest exaltation of majesty when he sits in his most High Court of Parliament, what a dignity, what an honour are his common subjects called unto when they are summoned to sit, as it were, with the king himself, and are made councillors of estate in that great council’. CSP Ire. 1611-14, p. 519. Davies’ belief that Parliament’s powers derived from the Crown was also reflected in his intervention in the debate about the words spoken by the Catholic barrister Edward Floyd in 1621, in which he argued that the Commons had jurisdiction over Floyd because his remarks about James’s daughter reflected on James himself, who was present in his courts, including Parliament. CD 1621, v. 135. Davies believed that royal power was much older than the representation of the people in Parliament. Works, iii. p. 34. For Davies the great privilege of being a Member of Parliament was the right to participate in the making of laws with the king. CSP Ire. 1611-14, p. 519. Consequently, when the Commons reneged on its duty he could be contemptuous. On 26 Feb. 1626 Davies wrote to Huntingdon complaining that although the Commons had sat for 20 days it had done nothing except send up one bill to the Lords and spend its time in ‘high’ speeches. HMC Hastings, ii. 69-70.

On 28 July 1625, while working on a commentary on the Book of Daniel, Lady Davies heard what she believed was the voice of the prophet. She subsequently composed a prophetic tract, which she took to Archbishop Abbot. When Davies burnt this document his wife predicted that he would die within three years, and went into mourning. Prophetic Writings of Lady Eleanor Davies ed. E.S. Cope, 80-1, 186; Cope, 40. In the meantime, in November 1626, Davies’ long search for high office seemed at last to bear fruit, as he was appointed lord chief justice in place of (Sir) Ranulphe Crewe*, who had been sacked for opposing the Forced Loan. He had his robes made in preparation but he had recently been in poor health and in early December his wife suddenly started weeping over dinner with friends. On asking her why she was crying, Davies was told that it was in anticipation of his funeral, to which he replied ‘I pray weep not while I am alive, and I will give you leave to laugh when I am dead’. On the morning of 8 Dec. he was found dead at his house in Charing Cross, having dined the evening before with lord keeper Coventry and then supped with Sir William Uvedale*. (Sir) James Whitelocke* at least welcomed his death, saying ‘God prevented so inconvenient an intention to the common wealth’. This was, perhaps, an allusion to the rumour that Davies had been writing a defence of the Forced Loan, but if so the rumour may have been false, as all the judges and serjeants were said to have refused to endorse the legality of the Loan. T. Birch, Ct. and Times of Chas. I, i. 173, 181, 182; Ath. Ox. ii. 43; C24/569/62; Prophetic Writings of Lady Eleanor Davies, 186; Diary of Sir Richard Hutton, 69; Liber Famelicus of Sir J. Whitelocke ed. J. Bruce (Cam. Soc. lxx) 105; Works, iii. p. 18.

Davies was buried in St. Martin-in-the-Fields on 9 December. St. Martin-in-the-Fields (Harl. Soc. Reg. lxvi), 226. His funeral sermon was reputedly preached by Donne. Pawlisch, 33. His daughter Lucy succeeded him, as one of his two sons had died in infancy while the other had drowned in Ireland. Ibid. 28. His will was proved on 16 Dec. by his son-in-law, Ferdinando Hastings. PROB 11/159, f. 282v. Davies’ estate had dwindled considerably by the time of his death. Huntingdon thought the Irish estate was worth much less than he had been led to believe, HEHL, HA5513. but even Davies’ personal estate was not considerable. In England it was valued at only £2,300, which, after deducting Davies’ bequests, came to only £100. As for the estate in Ireland, it did not produce any profits until the late 1630s. T. Cogswell, Home Divisions, 204-5.