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 to 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.

Later career

In 1617 Davies failed to win the position of Solicitor General for England and Wales and consequently resigned as Attorney-General in Ireland, having ensured that he would be replaced by his nephew William Ryves. In 1619 he returned to England permanently, in the expectation that his chance of gaining office there would be improved by his presence. He practised as king's serjeant, and eventually went on circuit as a judge. He was a founder member of the Society of Antiquaries. In 1621, he was elected MP for Hindon, but was then appointed Lord Chief Justice. He had always been corpulent, and on 7 December 1626 he died in his bed of apoplexy brought on after a supper party, and thus never enjoyed the appointment he had been angling for throughout his career.

Poetry

Davies wrote poetry in numerous forms, but is best known for his epigrammes and sonnets. In 1599 he published Nosce Teipsum (Know thyself) and Hymnes of Astraea. Queen Elizabeth became an admirer of Davies's work, and these poems contain acrostics that spell out the phrase Elisabetha Regina.

His most famous poem, Nosce Teipsum, gained him the favour of James I, by which he won promotion in Ireland. The three-part poem is written in decasyllabic quatrains, and is concerned with one's self-knowledge and the immortality of the soul. A. H. Bullen described it as being "singularly readable for such a subject: highly accomplished verse, no Elizabethan quaintness, both subtle and terse".

Bullen also described Davies's Orchestra, or a Poem of Dancing as "brilliant and graceful". This poem, written in rhyme royal, reveals a typical Elizabethan pleasure: contemplating and trying to understand the relationship between the natural order and human activity.

Davies's works are very well represented in Elizabethan anthologies. The last complete edition of his poems appeared in 1876 and is long out of print.

Legacy

In political terms, Davies was significant in his work on constitutional law and in framing the terms of the Plantation of Ulster, a model that served the English crown as it extended its colonial reach in North America and elsewhere. In literary terms, he was a fine poet who lay quite neglected from the mid-17th century, until his cause was championed by T. S. Eliot. Davies's poem "I know my soul hath power to know all things" was set to music by the composer Hubert Parry in his choral work, Songs of Farewell (1916–18).

Family and death

Davies married Eleanor Touchet, daughter of the first Earl of Castlehaven, in March of 1609. She was one of the most prolific women writing in early seventeenth-century England, author of almost seventy pamphlets and prophecies, and one of the first women in England to see her works through to print.

During the marriage, Eleanor published numerous books of prophecy, particularly anagrammatic prophecies; her prophetic writings were a source of conflict in the marriage and Davies burned a set of the prophecies that Eleanor had been writing. She had continued to make prophesies until her death.

Footnotes

Notes

Citations

References

  • Dictionary of National Biography 22 vols. (London, 1921–1922).