D’ANVERS, Henry (c.1622-1688), of Swithland, Leics., and Perry Hall, Staffs.

The D’Anvers family had resided in Leicestershire since the early fourteenth century, acquiring Swithland, six miles from Leicester, through marriage during the second half of the fifteenth century.19Nichols, Leics. iv. 189. D’Anvers may have studied at Trinity College, Oxford – although there is no record of his admission to either university – and in 1644 he would marry a daughter of his kinsman, the former secretary of state Sir John Coke†, thereby becoming the brother-in-law of Sir John Coke* and Thomas Coke*.20HMC Cowper, ii. 103, 331, 337; B.S. Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men (1972), 94; R.L. Greaves, ‘The tangled careers of two Stuart radicals: Henry and Robert Danvers’, Baptist Quarterly, xix (1981), 32-3.

With the outbreak of civil war, D’Anvers’ father became a captain in the parliamentary army, an active member of the county committee during 1643 and advanced £1,000 towards arms and ammunition for the East Midlands Association under Thomas Lord Grey of Groby*.21SP28/236, pt. 3, unfol.; LJ vi. 341b. By early 1643, Henry, too, had taken up arms for Parliament, commanding a troop of dragoons in Groby’s Leicestershire forces.22SP28/236, pt. 3, unfol. No evidence has been produced to support the contention that D’Anvers participated in the debates within the army during 1647-8 concerning the Levellers’ manifesto The Agreement of the People.23L.F. Brown, The Political Activities of the Baptists and Fifth Monarchy Men (1912), 22; Oxford DNB, ‘Henry Danvers’. That he held radical convictions by the late 1640s is clear from a pamphlet that he published in March 1649 in which he denied that the magistrate had any power in matters of religion and asserted that there was ‘no lawful authority which is not originally derived from the consent of the people’.24H. Danvers, Certain Quaeries Concerning Liberty of Conscience (1649, E.548.20). In the spring of 1650, he was commissioned by the Rump as a major and colonel in the Leicestershire and Staffordshire militia respectively, and by September of that year he had been appointed governor of Stafford.25CSP Dom. 1650, pp. 211, 223, 505, 506. He was added to the Staffordshire sequestrations commission in August 1650 at the request of the serving commissioners, who informed the Committee for Compounding* that ‘his presence would add much to the public service’.26CCC 292, 296, 564.

It was as governor of Stafford that D’Anvers first embraced Baptist views, becoming a member of the town’s General Baptist congregation associated with Henry Haggar.27Crosby, Baptists, iii. 97; A.G. Matthews, The Congregational Churches of Staffs. (1924), 21, 34; Greaves, ‘Henry and Robert Danvers’, 33. In his capacity as governor he had the Presbyterian minister Richard Bell ejected from the town for refusing to subscribe the Engagement.28Matthews, Calamy Revised, 46. In August 1651, the council of state thanked him for his ‘diligence in getting so speedily and seasonably so great a number [of troops] together and of your forward march with them’.29CSP Dom. 1651, p. 332. Early in 1652, he publicly endorsed Roger Williams’s The Fourth Paper, which protested against the Independents’ scheme for a national church that would deny toleration to those who proclaimed beliefs deemed contrary to Scripture.30R. Williams, The Fourth Paper, Presented by Maior Butler, to the Honourable Committee of Parliament, for the Propagating the Gospel of Christ Jesus (1652), title page (E.658.9). At about the same time, March 1652, ‘having to leave these parts [Staffordshire] and come to London’, he asked permission of the Committee for Compounding to relinquish his place on the Staffordshire sequestrations commission, recommending in his place ‘an able Christian’.31CCC 564, 565. Nevertheless, it would appear from the accounts that he submitted as a commissioner that he remained in office, or at least continued to receive sequestrations money, until the spring of 1654.32SP28/214, pts. 4, 5, unfol.; CCC 700.

By the time D’Anvers was selected to represent Leicester in the Nominated Parliament of 1653, it is likely that he was a member of the General Baptist congregation that met in Aldgate, London, under the leadership of the radical army officer Captain Edmund Chillenden.33J. More, A Lost Ordinance Restored (1654, E.727.1); Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 215; Oxford DNB, ‘Edmund Chillenden’. This congregation was ‘influenced by the doctrines of the Fifth Monarchy’ and was opposed to tithes, although D’Anvers had served on the Rump’s commission for the use of sequestered tithes.34Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 237; Oxford DNB, ‘Edmund Chillenden’. In June 1653, he was assigned the lodgings in Whitehall that had previously been occupied by Sir Henry Vane II*.35CSP Dom. 1652-3, p. 412. He was named to three important standing committees in July – to consider the continuation of tithes; for Scottish affairs; and to review the prison system.36CJ vii. 286a, 286b, 287b. After 20 July, however, his name disappears from the Journal until 25 October, when he was appointed a committee to consider a petition from the aldermen and common council of London.37CJ vii. 339b. Between 29 October and 9 November, he made three reports from the committee for prisons, and on 10 December, he was a majority teller with the radical John James in favour of rejecting the first clause in a report from the committee on tithes for a system of triers and ejectors to remove ignorant and scandalous ministers.38CJ vii. 342a, 343b, 347a, 363b; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 336. This clause was regarded by the opponents of tithes as an underhand means of preserving the interests of lay patrons of church livings – and its rejection was regarded as ominous by the supporters of a national, tithe-maintained ministry and helped to precipitate the Nominated Parliament’s dissolution two days later (12 Dec.).39[S. Hyland*], An Exact Relation (1654), 21-4 (E.729.6); Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 336-43.

With the ending of the Nominated Parliament, Danvers began some 30 years of plotting against succeeding regimes. At a ‘very great assembly’ of Baptists, convened shortly after the establishment of the protectorate late in 1653, he moved that all Baptist congregations declare openly against the new government but was successfully opposed by Chillenden (or so Chillenden would later claim).40TSP iv. 365. In March 1656, Secretary John Thurloe* informed the protector that D’Anvers was among a group of ‘discontented’ Baptists and Fifth Monarchy men who were attempting to raise rebellion among the sects. D’Anvers, he claimed, ‘would fain be in arms [against the protectorate] and was at one of these meetings to incite others to the same thing’.41TSP iv. 629; Brown, Baptists and Fifth Monarchy Men, 100. When one of London’s Fifth Monarchist congregations split in 1656 over whether to conform to the protectorate, D’Anvers, Arthur Squibb* and other prominent Fifth Monarchists supported the dissenting party that declared against their former brethren, and particularly the soldiers among them (who included Thomas Kelsey*), ‘as being principal abettors unto and supporters of the apostasy of this day, headed by the person now in power’ [i.e. Cromwell].42[H. Hathorn], The Old Leaven Purged Out (1658); Capp, Fifth Monarchy Men, 276-8. On the discovery of the plot organised by the Fifth Monarchist Thomas Venner in the spring of 1657, D’Anvers was arrested, along with Thomas Harrison I*, John Okey* and Nathaniel Rich* but was detained only briefly.43TSP vi. 186; Clarke Pprs. iii. 105-6; CSP Dom. 1656-7, p. 351; Brown, Baptists and Fifth Monarchy Men, 117; Capp, Fifth Monarchy Men, 115-16, 118. By this time, D’Anvers was residing in Stoke Newington, Middlesex, possibly in, or close to, the house there of Charles Fleetwood* and his extended family.44Leics. RO, 2D31/104-106, 120; G.F. Nuttall, ‘Henry Danvers, his wife and the ‘heavenly line’’, Baptist Quarterly, xix. 217-18. In September 1659, D’Anvers and Hugh Courtney* were among the signatories to a Fifth Monarchy petition (which attracted widespread support from Baptist congregations) to the restored Rump, which was later published, declaiming against ‘the setting up or introducing any person whatsoever as king or chief magistrate or a House of Lords or any other thing of like import, under what name or title soever...upon the old corrupt and almost ruinated constitution’. The petitioners demanded that all former supporters of the protectorate be removed from office and that the law and ministry be reformed along biblical lines.45An Essay Toward Settlement upon a Sure Foundation (1659, 669 f.21.73); Brown, Baptists and Fifth Monarchy Men, 189-90; Mayers, 1659, 65, 70.

D’Anvers was reportedly complicit in several plots against the restored monarchy and spent much of the period 1660-5 either in the Netherlands or in hiding to evade arrest.46CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 661; CSP 1663-4, pp. 51, 328, 346, 367, 393, 463, 565, 608, 624, 638; Capp, Fifth Monarchy Men, 211; Greaves, ‘Henry and Robert Danvers’, 35; Oxford DNB, ‘Henry Danvers’. He has been identified as the author of the 1663 pamphlet The Mystery of Magistracy Unvailed, in which a sharp distinction is drawn between the ‘true magistrate’, governed and guided by God’s law, and the ‘false magistrate ... to whom the Saints yield most unwilling subjection, being they are the Devil’s vicegerents’. Indeed, the Saints had a duty to resist an anti-Christian ruler ‘by open or secret resistance, when the providence of God makes way for the same’.47The Mystery of Magistracy Unvailed (1663); Capp, Fifth Monarchy Men, 208; Greaves, ‘Henry and Robert Danvers’, 35; Oxford DNB, ‘Henry Danvers’. Arrested in August 1665 for suspected complicity in the Rathbone conspiracy to assassinate Charles, he was freed by a mob in Cheapside while being taken to the Tower.48CSP Dom. 1664-5, pp. 506, 542; Capp, Fifth Monarchy Men, 211; Greaves, ‘Henry and Robert Danvers’, 35-6; Oxford DNB, ‘Henry Danvers’.

D’Anvers spent the next ten years or so on the run from the authorities, during which time he published a series of pamphlets on millenarian themes and defending General Baptist practice.49CSP Dom. 1664-5, p. 555; 1666-7, pp. 537, 545; 1670, pp. 239, 661; Greaves, ‘Henry and Robert Danvers’, 36-7; Oxford DNB, ‘Henry Danvers’. In 1675, he was reported to be ‘preaching to his party in this country [Staffordshire] at all their meetings and went throughout the kingdom ... on foot’.50CSP Dom. 1675-6, p. 419; Greaves, ‘Henry and Robert Danvers’, 36-7; Oxford DNB, ‘Henry Danvers’. The following year he was apprehended leaving a conventicle near Aldgate, but because his health was much impaired and his wife had ‘great friends at court’, he was released from the Tower on giving £1,000 security and remaining under house arrest.51CSP Dom. 1676-7, p. 90; HMC Le Fleming, 124; HMC Townshend, 43, 44; Crosby, Baptists, iii. 97; Capp, Fifth Monarchy Men, 218. From the late 1670s, he became closely involved in the whig political circles around Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper*, 1st earl of Shaftesbury, and Algernon Sydney*.52Greaves, ‘Henry and Robert Danvers’, 37-8; VCH Mdx. viii. 144; Oxford DNB, ‘Henry Danvers’. In 1682, it was reported that he was preaching to a London congregation of Fifth Monarchists numbering about 700 people.53SP29/419/55, f. 75; CSP Dom. 1680-1, p. 613; Greaves, ‘Henry and Robert Danvers’, 37-8. He was implicated in both the Rye House Plot and Monmouth’s rebellion, and – with the authorities determined by 1685 to apprehend him – he fled to the Netherlands, dying in Utrecht early in 1688.54CSP Dom. 1685, pp. 5, 246; SP29/437/44, f. 58; Luttrell, Brief Relation, i. 324, 432; Crosby, Baptists, iii. 97; Capp, Fifth Monarchy Men, 220-1; Greaves, ‘Henry and Robert Danvers’, 38-9; Oxford DNB, ‘Henry Danvers’. His place of burial is unknown and no will is recorded. His grandson represented various constituencies between 1722 and 1747.55HP Commons 1715-1754, ‘Joseph Danvers’.