DAVIES, Sir Paul (d. 1672), of Bridge Street, Dublin.

Sir Paul Davies was a younger son of John Davies of Kill, a co. Kildare landowner who also owned property in Dublin city, Enniskillen town and co. Donegal.26McGrath, Biographical Dict.; DIB. In 1625 Davies received his first post in the Irish government, as chief chamberlain of the Irish exchequer – a post he held jointly with one Laurence Davies, who was presumably his brother.27Cal. of Patent Rolls of Ire. 74. In the same year Davies also borrowed money on a £200 bond entered in Dublin statute staple books, and in 1626 he was made registrar of the Irish court of wards.28Irish Statute Staple Bks. 203; McGrath, Biographical Dict. From such relatively humble beginnings, Davies quickly rose through the Dublin administration. Crucial to the success of his career was his marriage, before 1630, to a daughter of Arthur Ussher; her brother Sir William Ussher had recently succeeded his father as clerk of the Irish privy council. As a result of this alliance, on 10 July 1630 the king regranted the clerkship to Davies and Ussher jointly, with Davies receiving the £300 stipend.29CSP Ire. 1625-32, pp. 556, 576. This post was worth far more than the yearly salary, as petitioners to the council were expected to pay fees to the clerk, and there were no doubt informal ‘gifts’ designed to hasten the passage of private business through the council chamber. During the 1630s, Davies became a wealthy man, acquiring estates in cos. Kildare and Fermanagh, and lending money on statute staple bonds totalling £6,800 between 1631 and 1635.30Irish Statute Staple Bks. 86-7. The Ussher match also brought Davies into contact with other influential figures within the Irish administration. The most important of these was another Ussher son-in-law, Sir Philip Percivalle*, clerk of the court of wards. In 1631 Davies was chosen as godfather to Percivalle’s son, and in 1640 he was appointed trustee of the Percivalle estate.31HMC Egmont, i. 114, 124. Davies’s friendship with Percivalle may have been cemented by their service in the administration of Lord Deputy Wentworth (Sir Thomas Wentworth†), and they were knighted together by Wentworth on 2 June 1636.32Shaw, Knights of Eng. ii. 204. On the fall of Wentworth, Davies, like so many other New English officials, sought to distance himself from the regime. He supported the opposition in the Irish Parliament of 1640, and passed information on the irregular proceedings of the Irish council which would be used in the lord deputy’s trial in March 1641.33Rushworth, Trial, viii. 179-80, 222, 235; M. Perceval-Maxwell, The Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion of 1641 (Dublin, 1994), 81, 89, 307. Despite his timely rejection of Wentworth, Davies’s position in the winter of 1641-2 was less than secure. He narrowly avoided being hauled before the Long Parliament to face charges about his part in Wentworth’s prosecution of Lord Mountnorris and Viscount Loftus of Ely; and in his defence Davies could only use the age-old excuse for civil servants, that ‘his duty [was] to obey commands and not to examine their justice’.34CCSP i. 221; HMC 5th Rep. 9; LJ iv. 614.

Davies owed his survival in office to his continuing usefulness to the Dublin administration, led by his new father-in-law, the lord justice Sir William Parsons. Davies remained on good terms with the Usshers (with whom he lodged in the early 1640s) and had family ties with Sir Robert Meredith, as well as cultivating crypto-royalists, such as Sir Philip Percivalle.35HMC Egmont, i. 243, 279. This broad range of connections would help Davies to survive the upheavals of the next few years. In May 1643, when his position as clerk of the council was undermined by the king (who had promised the reversion of the clerkship to John Nicholls), the lords justices and council warned Charles not to discourage Davies, ‘who is so able and skilful in the duties of that place’, and successfully lobbied for the grant to be revoked.36CSP Ire. 1647-60, pp. 379, 384; HMC Ormonde, n.s. ii. 274-5. Later in 1643, after Parsons and Meredith had been arrested, and James Butler, marquess of Ormond had taken control of Dublin as the new lord lieutenant, Davies was again protected by the Irish council, which moved to prevent his secondment to Oxford, on the grounds that he was too useful to the Irish government.37HMC Ormonde, n.s. ii. 334. Davies went on to play an important part in the negotiations between Ormond and Parliament in 1646-7. He was sent to Westminster with Sir Gerard Lowther and Sir Francis Willoughby in September 1646, with instructions to treat for military aid to protect Dublin against the Confederate Catholics.38CCSP i. 333; Bodl. Carte 18, f. 586v. The three were interviewed by the Derby House Committee of Irish Affairs on 12 October, and remained in London while Parliament’s own commissioners (including Sir Robert Meredith) attended Ormond in Dublin.39Bodl. Carte 19, ff. 158-9. These initial talks failed, and it was not until February 1647 that Davies and his colleagues received further instructions from Ormond to renew the peace initiative.40Bodl. Carte 20, ff. 252, 341. New commissioners were sent to Dublin shortly afterwards, and in June 1647 Ormond agreed to surrender the Irish capital to Parliament. With Ormond’s departure from Dublin a month later, the royal administration was dismantled, and Davies lost his lucrative position as clerk of the council.

Although acting as Ormond’s agents, Davies and his colleagues had not been treated with hostility at Westminster. In early February 1647 Sir William Parsons lobbied for Davies and the other agents to have subsistence during their stay in England.41HMC Portland, i. 407. On 3 March 1647 the Star Chamber Committee of Irish Affairs agreed to provide maintenance for the agents, and on the same day the Derby House Committee reassured Davies and his friends that Parliament had every confidence in his loyalty to the English nation and the Protestant religion.42HMC Portland, i. 413; CSP Ire. 1647-60, p. 734. Such reassurances may have encouraged Davies to stay in London after Ormond had surrendered Dublin. At first, he associated with Irish Protestants sympathetic to Ormond, including the Percivalles, who came under Davies’s protection after Sir Philip’s death in November.43HMC Egmont, i. 415, 424, 482-4. Despite his royalist links, by October Davies had become an enthusiastic supporter of Colonel Michael Jones as governor of Dublin, and he soon started to collaborate fully with the parliamentarian regime.44HMC Egmont, i. 478. In November 1647 the Derby House Committee included Davies among the Irish Protestants who were to be their advisers.45CSP Ire. 1647-60, p. 767. In January 1648 he was named as a commissioner (and, from June, trustee) for the £50,000 ordinance, to raise money from delinquent estates to fund to Irish war.46CSP Ire. 1647-60, p. 771; A. and O. In these various positions, Davies was joined by his old friends from the Irish council, including Parsons, Meredith and Lowther. This group remained attached to Parliament throughout the political crisis which saw the execution of the king and the establishment of a commonwealth, and Davies was still receiving payments from Parliament in August and October 1649.47CSP Dom. 1648-9, p. 267; 1649-50, pp. 372, 584. When Parsons died in 1650, he left Davies in charge of the welfare of his numerous grandchildren.48PROB11/215/501; Chatsworth, CM/29, unfol.: 18 Feb. 1659.

Davies returned to Ireland in June 1651, and was soon able to re-establish his financial position and his political influence.49CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 373, 394; 1651, pp. 252, 574. From 1653 he once again had money to spare, and lent significant sums on statute staple bonds; and in 1654 he began to lobby for the return of his position as clerk of the Irish council, newly reformed under the Cromwellian lord deputy, Charles Fleetwood*.50Irish Statute Staple Bks. 86-7. This quest was to preoccupy Davies’s attentions throughout the decade. In 1654 he asked George Monck* (whose secretary, Matthew Locke, was Davies’s son-in-law) to intervene on his behalf; he held out hopes that leading Irish Protestants, including Lord Broghill (Roger Boyle*), Sir Robert King*, Daniel Hutchinson* and Arthur Annesley*, would lobby Oliver Cromwell* on his behalf; and he also counted on the support of the protector’s younger son, Henry Cromwell*.51HMC Egmont, i. 540-557. Broghill and Annesley tried to stall Davies, however, arguing that it would be better to gain a general grant rather than private concessions.52HMC Egmont, i. 541, 543, 553, 555. The claim was not pursued, and Davies spent the next few months sulking. In the 1654 elections he refused to stand, claiming ‘unfitness and disability every way for such an employment’; in response to those who had urged him to seek other employment opportunities he snapped that ‘there was no ministerial office here equal to his own’; and added darkly that some of his supposed friends might have altered the petition to make sure it failed.53HMC Egmont, i. 548-9, 564-5.

The fuss over the clerkship did little to help Davies’s reputation in England, where he was again under suspicion as a closet royalist, although his inclusion in the Kildare assessment commissions in October 1654 and January 1655 suggest that his local standing was unaffected.54An Assessment for Ire. In early 1657 Davies was elected for Parliament, probably for the county seat of cos. Kildare and Wicklow left vacant by Sir Hardress Waller*, who had chosen instead to sit for cos. Limerick and Clare. On 23 February 1657, Henry Cromwell recommended Davies to Secretary John Thurloe*, saying that he had been sent over ‘to attend the service of his country in Parliament’ and as ‘an agent from the ancient Protestant inhabitants here, to supplicate his highness for the like remittal of their quit-rent for such a time as is remitted to the soldiery and adventurers’.55TSP vi. 71. On 24 March Sir John Reynolds* was confident that Davies would be accepted as an MP, as ‘he hath been declared at the council, [and] will make his entrance tomorrow’.56Henry Cromwell Corresp. 236. Yet for some reason Davies was still refused permission to take his seat. On 30 March his fellow-MP for Kildare and Wicklow, Anthony Morgan, told Henry Cromwell that ‘poor Sir Paul Davies is yet in suspense’, and ‘thinks he shall be hurt to wound you’; but added that there might be other reasons for his exclusion, for ‘if he be qualified to sit in Parliament, they may fear he’ll produce a patent to be clerk of the council’.57Henry Cromwell Corresp. 238. Davies returned to Dublin in July 1657, empty-handed, shortly after Parliament adjourned.58HMC Egmont, i. 583. His petition was considered by the protectoral council in August, and referred to a committee in September, but no decision was taken.59CSP Dom. 1657-8, pp. 63, 94. In December, as the second sitting approached, Davies did not cross to England again, but instead encouraged William Dobbins to stand for one of the vacant Irish seats (his own?), saying that ‘there will not be so much striving for them, because of the cost of coming over and living here [in London], as there was formerly’, and promised that he and Sir Theophilus Jones* could secure his election.60HMC Egmont, i. 593. In the meantime, Davies tried to influence Henry Cromwell, now lord deputy of Ireland, in the hope of securing the elusive clerkship. Henry Cromwell was sympathetic, but unwilling to pursue the point in England, and finally persuaded Davies to drop the case by promising him lucrative leases in cos. Carlow and Dublin in compensation.61TSP vii. 624-5.

After the fall of the protectorate in May 1659 Davies shared the anxiety of the other Old Protestants faced by a hostile regime at Westminster. In July he was a member of a group of former royalists (including the 2nd earl of Cork (Sir Richard Boyle*), Viscount Ranelagh (Arthur Jones*) and Sir Maurice Eustace), who appointed Arthur Annesley as their agent ‘for soliciting the Irish Protestant interests in England’.62Chatsworth, CM/29, unfol.: 11 July 1659; CM/31, no. 44. In October 1659 Davies was working with Ranelagh, Sir William Ussher, John Bysse* and others in recouping Annesley’s expenses.63HMC Egmont, i. 610. Davies remained at the heart of Irish Protestant circles in the winter of 1659-60. Although he took no part in the Irish officers’ coup of December, in January he was appointed to the committee of safety at Dublin.64Clarke, Prelude to Restoration, 146n. He was returned for co. Kildare in the General Convention which met in Dublin in March, and was active on its committees; and in May was appointed to the committee to attend Charles II and to assure him of the fidelity of his Irish subjects.65Clarke, Prelude to Restoration, 202, 247-8, 255, 267, 299. Davies arrived in London shortly after the king’s triumphal entry into the city at the end of May, hoping ‘soon enough to be heard ere the crowd be over’.66HMC Egmont, i. 612. His mission may have been aided by Ormond, who told Charles II that he thought Davies ‘honest and tractable’.67Bodl. Carte 214, f. 221v. By the time he returned to Ireland in September 1660, Davies had secured his own position as well as that of the Old Protestants generally.68CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 268. He was re-appointed clerk of the council, and in July 1661 was appointed principal secretary of state in Ireland, holding both positions until his death in 1672.69HMC Ormonde, n.s. iii. 377, 404; SP63/331, f. 276. He was elected for co. Kildare in the Irish Parliament of 1661.70CJI i. 591. During the early 1660s Davies was intent on using his position to improve the prospects of his children. On 1 February 1661 the reversion of the clerkship was granted to his son, (Sir) William Davies, and in the next few years the king included another son, (Sir) John Davies, and two sons-in-law in the same award, thus ensuring that the lucrative clerkship, which had been held by his father-in-law and brother-in-law, would now pass to his own offspring.71CSP Dom. 1672-3, p. 473. By other deals struck in the early 1660s he was also able to keep hold of the substantial estates in Kildare and Dublin he had acquired during the interregnum, as well as the estate he had inherited.72CSP Ire. 1660-2, pp. 188, 234-5, 248, 387, 440, 523. Davies’s eldest son, Sir William, became chief justice of the king’s bench in Ireland in 1681, and was succeeded by his nephew, Paul Davies, who was created Viscount Mountcashell in 1706.73Elrington-Ball, Judges in Ire. 357-8; CP.