Sir John Davies (16 April 1569 (baptised)8 December 1626) was an English poet, lawyer, and politician who sat in the House of Commons at various times between 1597 and 1621. He became Attorney General for Ireland and formulated many of the legal principles that underpinned the British Empire.
Early life
Davies was born in Wiltshire, possibly at Chicksgrove Manor at Lower Chicksgrove, to John and Mary Davies. He was educated at Winchester College for four years, a period in which he showed much interest in literature. He studied there until the age of sixteen and went to further his education at the Queen's College, Oxford, where he stayed for just eighteen months, with most historians questioning whether he received a degree.
Davies spent some time at New Inn after his departure from Oxford, and it was at this point that he decided to pursue a career in law. In 1588 he enrolled in the Middle Temple, where he did well academically, although suffering constant reprimands for his behaviour. Following several suspensions, his behaviour cost him his enrolment.
Davies travelled to the Netherlands in 1592 with others of the Middle Temple (William Fleetwood, Richard Martin). There, in Leiden, he met the jurist Paul Merula, to whom the group had a letter of introduction from William Camden.
In 1594, Davies's poetry brought him into contact with Queen Elizabeth. She wished him to continue his study of law at the Middle Temple and had him sworn in as a servant-in-ordinary. In the following year, his poem, Orchestra, was published in July, prior to his call to the bar from the Middle Temple. He was elected Member of Parliament for Shaftesbury in 1597.
In February 1598, Davies was disbarred for the offence of entering the dining hall of the Inns in the company of two swordsmen and striking Richard Martin with a cudgel. The victim Martin was a noted wit who had insulted him in public, and Davies immediately took a boat at the Temple steps and retired to Oxford, where he chose to write poetry. Another of his works, Nosce Teipsum ("Know Thyself"), was published in 1599 and found favour with the queen and with Lord Mountjoy, later Lord Deputy of Ireland.
Davies became a favourite of the queen, to whom he addressed his work Hymns of Astraea in 1599. Later that year, however, his Epigrams was included in a list of published works that the state ordered to be confiscated and burned. In 1601 he was readmitted to the bar, having made a public apology to Martin, and in the same year sat as the member of Parliament for Corfe Castle.
In 1603, he was part of the deputation sent to bring King James VI of Scotland to London as the new monarch. The Scots king was also an admirer of Davies's poetry, and rewarded him with a knighthood and appointments (at Mountjoy's recommendation) as solicitor-general and, later attorney-general, in Ireland.
Ireland
Davies arrived in Dublin in November 1603, where Mountjoy had accepted the submission of the rebel Hugh O'Neill some six months earlier, at the close of the Nine Years War.
Finding pestilence and famine all over Ireland, Davies noted that the courts still commanded respect, but that the sloth of the protestant clergy and the ruin of the churches were detrimental to religion. He condemned the practice of issuing debased coinage and, in pursuit of the establishment of regular quarter-sessions of the courts, went on the Leinster circuit through seven counties in April 1604. In 1605 he travelled to England with the commendation of Sir Arthur Chichester, who succeeded Mountjoy in government, and had returned to Ireland by July.
Davies was very much committed to reform not just in the law but in religious affairs too. He was all for banishing Catholic clergy from Ireland and for enforcing church attendances, and strict measures to this end were taken on his return. He delivered a powerful speech on 23 November 1605 in the Court of Castle Chamber, dealing with the summonsing of recusants to answer their contempt of the king's proclamations.
In May 1606, he submitted his report of his circuit of the province of Munster to Sir Robert Cecil, the king's secretary, and was made serjeant at law after his appointment as Attorney General. In the summer he travelled through counties Monaghan, Fermanagh and Cavan, and a year later through Meath, Westmeath, Longford, King's and Queen's counties, both of which circuits he reported to Cecil. Davies always looked at Ireland as a stepping-stone towards major political office in England but he knew that his chances were hurt by the death of Cecil, his patron, and his own absence from the court.