DANVERS, Sir John (c.1585-1655), of Danvers House, Chelsea, Mdx. and West Lavington, Wilts.

Already among veteran MPs at the assembly of the Short Parliament, Danvers was one of those few who also weathered Pride’s Purge and sat on until the first dissolution of the Long Parliament in 1653. He brought to the House varied political experience, wide territorial interests, a long record of involvement in trade and colonial affairs, and sophisticated cultural tastes. Evidently an intellectually able man, handsome and personable, he was capable of displaying charm, devotion and generosity, not least towards his significantly older first wife, Magdalen Herbert, and her family. None the less, among contemporaries in the 1640s and 1650s he was clearly an enigma, even a suspect figure, provoking perplexity as to his political allegiances and choices, distaste for his use of his position for financial and territorial gain, and (for some) a peculiarly intense rage that in signing the king’s death warrant, he had apparently betrayed the court which had once sustained him.

Early career

Descended on his mother’s side from the Nevilles, Danvers was the youngest son by some margin in a prominent and well-connected family. Although only about nine years old at the death of his father in 1594, within two years he joined his two brothers on the continent, spending time in Rome, Padua, Brussels, Antwerp and Paris, before returning to England to complete his education at Winchester and at Brasenose College, Oxford, with which he was to enjoy a long association.55CSP Dom. 1595-7, p. 288; HMC Hatfield, ix. 70; SP12/260/37; Winchester Scholars, 158; Al. Ox. Too young to be implicated either in the violence that had precipitated his brothers’ exile, or in the Essex rebellion, for which the eldest, Sir Charles Danvers†, was attainted and executed in 1601, John was still a minor when his surviving brother Henry was given a barony and restored in blood (in 1603 and 1605 respectively).56CP. Benefiting personally from royal favour in the form of office, lands and a pension, in 1608 he defied Lord Danvers’ wishes in marrying a modestly-endowed widow with adult children.57Letters of John Chamberlain, i. 288; J. Aubrey, Brief Lives ed. A. Clark (1898), i. 196; Herbert Corresp. 69-70.

Danvers still aspired to an aristocratic lifestyle and the dispensation of commensurate patronage, habits he never shed. He associated with literati, scholars and inventors including Ben Jonson and Francis Bacon; John Aubrey suggests he knew everyone of note.58Aubrey, Brief Lives, i. 70, 75, 131, 134, 178, 244, 307-8; ii. 12. Like Henry he acquired abroad expensive tastes in Italianate architecture and gardens, doubtless cultivated during his time as a gentleman of Prince Henry’s household. Danvers House, his main home at Chelsea built on land acquired in the early 1620s, was a villa in the mannerist style probably designed by John Thorpe, while sculptor Nicholas Stone worked statues for the garden.59VCH Mdx. xii. 23, 142. His second marriage in 1628 to a Wiltshire co-heiress had the blessing of his brother (now 1st earl of Danby) and over time brought him valuable estates close to the family seat at Dauntsey and further afield.60VCH Wilts. vii. 200; x. 88; xiv. 10, 190-1. However, lavish expenditure on the beautification of his main residence at West Lavington, the purchase of the reversion of an office in the exchequer, and the fall-out from investment in risky colonial ventures and other schemes ensured a constant state of indebtedness.61Aubrey, Brief Lives, i. 196; VCH Wilts. vii. 201; Coventry Docquets, 209, 324; HP Commons 1604-1629.

The ending in 1629 of a succession of Parliaments to which he was elected on the interest of the Herberts or of his brother, and to the proceedings of which he had made a varied, though relatively modest, contribution, seem not to have curbed Danvers’ interests and social circle.62HP Commons 1604-1629. He was in contact with an international circle of horticulturalists and botanists, and by the late 1630s was overseeing the rebuilding of Chelsea manor house for James Hamilton, 1st duke of Hamilton.63Corresp. of John Morris with Johannes de Laet (1634-1649) ed. J.A.F. Bekkers (1970), 16; ‘James Hamilton, 1st duke of Hamilton’, Oxford DNB. When the revival of the Virginia Company was in prospect in May 1631, Danvers was among those named as commissioners, along with his brother and other former associates like Sir Thomas Rowe*, Nicholas Ferrar† and John Ferrar.64CSP Col. 1574-1660, p. 130. That year he recommended his one-time servant Arthur Woodnoth to the Ferrars’ Arminian-influenced religious community at Little Gidding.65The Ferrar Papers ed. B. Blackstone (1938), 4. A long-standing patron of John Donne†, who preached the memorial sermon for his first wife, Danvers remained close to his stepson George Herbert†, a relationship strengthened by the latter’s marriage in 1629 to Danvers’ cousin Jane, sister of Henry Danvers I*.66The Autobiography of Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury ed. S.L. Lee (1886), 209-10, 319; I. Walton, The Lives of Dr John Donne, Sir Henry Wootton, Mr Richard Hooker, Mr George Herbert (1670), 15-17, 36-9, 87, 96-7; CSP Dom. 1633-4, p. 234. The death of the poet and clergyman in 1633 did not sever the Herbert connection.67Herbert Corresp. 93. At this period Sir John was on good terms with his brother, a privy councillor, while at some point before 1640 he became a friend of Charles Louis, elector palatine.68Coventry Docquets, 668; CSP Dom. 1640-1, p. 121. One of the keepers of St James’s Palace since 1625, he was still, or again, a member of the privy chamber, while Henry Danvers I, who sometimes acted as his agent, had links through his wife’s family to Francis Cottington, 1st Baron Cottington, and Endymion Porter*.69LCC Survey of London, xxix. 23; Clarendon, Rebellion, iv. 487; CSP Dom. 1637-8, pp. 169, 506; 1638-9, p. 68; 1641-3, p. 1.

Ties like these suggest that Sir John, usually described as being ‘of Chelsea’, did not at this point naturally inhabit the religious and political world of godly north Wiltshire grandees like Sir Edward Hungerford*. Various factors potentially separated him from his country neighbours. In the 1620s Sir John apparently had differences with the Seymours, while the Danvers family was involved in a long-running lawsuit with Sir John’s nephew but near contemporary Sir Edward Bayntun*, who accused his relatives of conspiracy to defraud him of his mother’s inheritance.70SP16/206, f. 142; C2/ChasI/B53/50; C2/ChasI/B126/60. However, by the 1630s quarrels appear to have been to an extent resolved as Sir John came to identify more closely both with Wiltshire affairs and with opposition to government policy.

A justice of the peace for Middlesex and Westminster from 1620, a deputy lieutenant for Middlesex from 1625, and a commissioner of oyer and terminer for both from 1627, in 1630 Danvers became a magistrate for Wiltshire and Oxfordshire, and within a few years a commissioner in western and home circuits, as well as within the jurisdiction of the royal court. He also acquired the stewardship of the honour of Pickering, north Yorkshire, the former base of his mother’s family. He was active at least in Middlesex and Wiltshire.71Western Circuit Assize Orders ed. Cockburn, 49. According to Anthony Wither, sent to the latter county in 1630 with a royal commission to reform the cloth trade, Sir John, who had taken him into his ‘especial acquaintance’ in Virginia Company days, at first promoted the work among ‘all his friends’ locally. Later, however, he not only sought to postpone Wither’s prosecution of Bayntun, a ringleader of resistance to change, but motivated by a desire for personal reconciliation with Sir Francis Seymour*, another resister, covertly espoused their cause. With his brother Danby, he inveigled Wither into presenting his case at sessions in Chippenham, a town at the heart of the Wiltshire clothing district. Here, Wither alleged, Sir John’s clerk had colluded with Seymour in his public humiliation, while afterwards Danvers had tried to deflect him from reporting the justices’ recalcitrant behaviour to the privy council.72SP16/206, ff. 142-142v. This and other setbacks doubtless gave Wither many axes to grind, but Danvers was clearly no longer on his side.

In December 1636 the earl of Danby wrote to Charles I a letter making representations against the collection of Ship Money and asking for the calling of a Parliament. Thought to be the work of a group of great men meeting covertly, it made a considerable stir and was supposed to have encouraged non-payment.73CSP Ven. 1636-9, pp. 110-12, 119. Danby kept his place at court and in May 1638 Danvers, with others like Philip Herbert, Lord Herbert of Cardiff*, was at his brother’s side when he conducted the departing Spanish ambassador from Chelsea to take his formal leave of the king.74Ceremonies of Charles I: The Note Bks. of John Finet ed. A.J. Loomie (1987), 250. But participation in royal ceremonial did not signal endorsement of policy. In 1639 Danvers was among major landowners in Wiltshire who refused to contribute towards the expedition to Scotland.75Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iii. 915.

By this time Danvers’ financial situation had probably deteriorated, despite some attempts at rationalisation. While he had disposed of some property, he had acquired further land in Wiltshire, presumably in the interests of consolidation.76Coventry Docquets, 633; VCH Wilts. vii. 96; xvi. 25; Wilts RO, 212B/4847, 1178/180. By April 1639 he had surrendered the reversion of his exchequer office to his nephew John Osborne, and in October he was one of over 30 creditors of Oliver St John, Lord St John of Bletso, who petitioned the king for recovery of debts totalling £5,900.77Coventry Docquets, 209; CSP Dom. 1639-40, p. 40. On the other hand, he probably dispensed a large sum for the wardship of Wiltshire neighbour James Ley, 3rd earl of Marlborough, whose father died in 1638.78‘James Ley, third earl of Marlborough’, Oxford DNB. In addition to his own debts he was often handling money as a trustee for others, and his difficulties in repaying sums later suggests that they had been either spent or unwisely invested.79‘Sir Henry Herbert’, Oxford DNB; CCAM 389, 459-65, 749, 832-3, 1330.

Short Parliament

On 9 March 1640 Danvers was selected for a fifth time by Convocation as junior MP for the University of Oxford, the senior member being a nominee of the chancellor, Archbishop William Laud. Respect for a patron of scholarship and associate of Herbert of Chirbury, and (as Anthony Wood asserted) gratitude to the brother of the man who had endowed the botanical gardens, provide some explanation, as does familiarity.80Wood, Fasti, 191. However, given the decade of reforms to which the university had been subjected since he had last represented it during the chancellorship of William Herbert, 3rd earl of Pembroke, the question arises as to whether Danvers was consciously chosen by some college fellows as a potential counterweight to Laud’s candidate, Secretary of state Sir Francis Windebanke*, or recommended by the university’s steward, Thomas Howard†, 1st earl of Berkshire.81Hist. Univ. Oxford, iv. 197-8.

Once the session opened, Danvers revealed his independent stance. His seniority was apparent in his appointment as one of the commissioners to take the oaths from MPs (13 Apr.).82PA, Main Pprs. 13 Apr. 1640. Named on 16 April with Windebanke and with other Wiltshire gentry like Sir Francis Seymour and Sir Edward Hungerford to the committee for privileges, he was soon contributing to debate on the disputed election in Great Bedwyn, close to his property at Stoke.83CJ ii. 4a. His preferred candidate had been squeezed out by two men standing in the Seymour interest; Danvers accepted defeat, but recommended action against the officer he alleged had delayed the election warrant.84Aston’s Diary, 78-9; CJ ii. 3, 14-15. He was named to one other committee, as one of the few non-lawyers delegated to reform abuses in land transactions involving children (21 Apr.). He also contributed to debate on the principles of expressing grievances (20 Apr.) and promoted the Durham minister Peter Smart’s petition from prison against ‘irregularities’ committed by his dean, the Laudian John Cosin (22 Apr.).85Aston’s Diary, 21, 25. On the 24th a delegation from fellow Middlesex deputy lieutenants called on him at his house in Chelsea to obtain his signature to warrants for the collection of coat and conduct money, but he ‘desired to be excused, for that he had not been formerly acquainted with any part of that business’.86CSP Dom. 1640, p. 68. Danvers’ answer was patently disingenuous. While Parliament was sitting he was safe from reprisal, but in May, after its dissolution, he was subjected to examination by the attorney-general; the upshot is unclear.87PC Reg. x. (Apr.-June 1640), f. 231; CSP Dom. 1640, pp. 120, 155.

From spectator to parliamentarian, 1640-5

At the October election Danvers’ place as Oxford’s junior Member was taken by the lawyer and antiquary John Selden*, for reasons that are obscure.88Wood, Fasti. 191. However, as Danvers prepared to leave Chelsea for the country on 23 December he wrote to his recently-acquired friend Sir Edward Dering* requesting in his absence letters outlining proceedings in the Commons.89Stowe 184, f. 21. Danvers’ reservations about royal policy were soon overtaken, like Dering’s, by alarm at social unrest. On 15 March 1641 he told Dering from Lavington that he was ‘prosecuting the assessing of the subsidies with the more difficulty and less hope to increase former rates whilst doubtful trade and negotiation makes tenants want money to pay their landlords’ rents’. Meanwhile ‘the monstrous easy receipt of petitions … ma[de] authority decline’ and encouraged ‘an inundation of beggars … for want of work and orderly government’. He welcomed the advent of circuit judge Sir Robert Foster, who had a record of defending Ship Money and the billeting of troops: ‘he hath an extraordinary way that cannot but proceed from great integrity’.90Stowe 184, f. 31; ‘Sir Robert Foster’, Oxford DNB.

As the situation deteriorated further in the summer of 1642, Danvers’ correspondence revealed his aspirations for a political compromise. On 18 July he wrote from Chelsea to Sir Thomas Rowe, senior Member for Oxford University, but at that time returning from embassy in Vienna, of the attempts of both sides to raise troops in the north. His ‘chief hope’ was for resolution ‘according to a Spanish tale’ of single combat to settle conflict between armies of Castile and Aragon: ‘one drawing his sword cried long live the king of Castile; the other … cast down his weapons and embraced his adversary, crying “long live we two”’.91SP16/491, f. 182; ‘Sir Thomas Roe’, Oxford DNB. Writing to Foster, Danvers relayed (21 July) legal judgments on the commission of array given by Selden, another moderate, and promised (7 Aug.) that ‘although the turbulent times may controvert, yet I may tell you what I hear as a matter of fact’. There was ‘no remedy against the worst consequences … but by God’s goodness in assisting the wisdom of the king and Parliament thoroughly united’ (9 Aug.).92SP16/491, ff. 235, 237v; CSP Dom. 1641-3, pp. 359-60, 366-8. Such thinking would explain Danvers’ sponsorship, as noted by George Thomason, of the publication of Henry Parker’s The Generall Junto (1642), a call for union of the three Stuart kingdoms to prevent fraternal strife.93H. Parker, The Generall Junto or the Councell of Union (1642), esp. flyleaf (E.246.669).

In line with these aspirations, Danvers, like his brother Danby, at first appears to have avoided direct involvement in the war.94‘Henry Danvers, earl of Danby’, Oxford DNB; cf. CCSP i. 255. There is no evidence to support the claim made in the eighteenth century Lives of the Regicides that he immediately took up a commission and became a colonel in the parliamentarian forces; this may have been one of several instances of the confusion of the career of Henry Danvers II*, the radical, with others who bore his surname.95M. Noble, Lives of the Regicides (1798), i. 165. Rather, Sir John’s allegiance emerged slowly. He attended the Wiltshire quarter sessions on 4 October 1642, when the county was dominated by parliamentarian forces.96Wilts. RO, A1/160/1. He was later accepted as a credible witness that Edmund Ludlowe II* had been governor of Wardour Castle for Parliament from 3 May 1643.97CJ vi. 509. Having paid £100 to the Committee for Advance of Money from Chelsea in July 1643, in August he was named a commissioner for levying money in Middlesex, and the following February for assessment in the same county.98CCAM 189; A. and O. In October 1643 the king excluded him formally (if ineffectively) from the Wiltshire commission of the peace, but it was not until March 1644 that he was put out in Oxfordshire, where his profile had been raised by the death of Danby two months earlier.99Docquets of Letters Patent ed. Black, 94, 169.

It was alleged in April 1646, when it was to Danvers’ advantage to say nothing to contradict it, that on his deathbed Danby disinherited Danvers because of his support for Parliament; in the conviction that the king was on the verge of winning the war, the earl had thought this the best way of preserving his estates from confiscation.100HMC 6th Rep. 113a; HMC Lords, n.s. xi. 359. However, clauses disposing of unentailed land elsewhere dated back to December 1640. In the apparently unaltered early sections of his will, Danby left a life interest in his Oxfordshire residence, Cornbury Park, together with other property as inheritance, to one of his sisters, Catherine, Lady Gargrave. Some other land went directly to Sir John’s son Henry, born in 1633. A penalty clause guarded against the possibility that Danvers might object, but the earl’s reservations about his brother seem to have related to the management of money. When Danby added further sections in November and December 1643, with Lady Gargrave in attendance at his deathbed, he postponed his nephew’s inheritance until he came of age, but made no mention of political differences between the brothers. Indeed, Danby gave Danvers his George and Garter as family heirloom and retained Speaker William Lenthall* as one of his trustees, although some doubt was expressed about business detaining him in London, and Edward Hyde*, well-entrenched in royalist headquarters at Oxford, was named as a substitute overseer.101PROB11/194/124.

It was in the months immediately after Danby’s death that Danvers emerged clearly as a supporter of measures to prosecute the war against the king and to strengthen local government to that end. He was made a deputy lieutenant for Middlesex in May 1644.102CJ iii. 485b. Nominations to the committees for the army under the command of Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex (March 1644), raising troops in Wiltshire (July; possibly the genesis of the colonelcy that he was to resign in 1650), Middlesex militia (Oct.), and New Model ordinance (Feb. 1645) were complemented by service on the county committee of Wiltshire (July 1644) and the Northern Association (for the North Riding, June 1645), and by continued inclusion on assessment commissions.103A. and O.; CSP Dom. 1650, p. 111. The timing may have been coincidental, but it was at least plausible to some contemporaries that Danvers’ motives included, or were even driven by, a conviction that adherence to Parliament was the most likely means to secure the inheritance which had eluded him. Hyde, whose generally hostile attitude to treacherous former courtiers was compounded in this case by the fact that, as the beneficiary of Danvers’ estate after his posthumous attainder, he had an interest in remembering him as unprincipled, attributed Sir John’s eventual adherence to the parliamentarian cause to the neglect of his brother and ‘a vast debt which he knew not how to pay’.104Clarendon, Hist. iv. 478-9.

The debt was there for all to see. In August 1644, following a submission by informers, Danvers acknowledged to the Committee for Advance of Money* that he owed Angel Grey of the Temple and Kingston Marwood, Dorset, a delinquent, £3,000 held in trust for Grey’s children. In January 1645 Danvers appeared again, asserting his inability and unwillingness to pay the debt, his estates being then in territory occupied by the royalists. There was some truth in this, but despite much committee work, it was not until November 1653 that increasingly coercive commissioners finally received the full balance.105CCAM 459-65. Danvers appears to have found it equally difficult to collect a £2,000 debt from Sir James Thynne* and to discharge a trust of £3,000 to the daughter of his stepson Sir Henry Herbert*, and was indebted in several thousands of pounds to at least two other former royalists.106CCAM 463, 749, 832-3, 1330. Meanwhile, as an executor and trustee of his kinswoman Lady Elizabeth Hatton (yet another delinquent), in January 1646 Danvers became the mentor of her grandson and heir Robert Villiers (Robert Danvers alias Villiers*), who had recently repudiated his royalist youth. Danvers’ oversight of Villiers’ composition argues at the same time a determination to bring delinquents to reconciliation, a lifelong habit (shared with his brother) of promoting young protégés, and a potential desire to profit: in 1648 Villiers became his son-in-law.107Northants. RO, FH939, FH1050, FH2719; Infra, ‘Robert Danvers or Villiers’.

His financial situation notwithstanding, by July 1644 Danvers’ reputation was sufficiently high, and his court experience sufficiently appropriate, for him to be entrusted by Parliament with hosting Princess Elizabeth and the dukes of York and Gloucester at his Chelsea residence.108CJ iii. 571b. Thereafter he may have seemed an obvious point of contact for royalists seeking negotiation with Parliament, his usefulness enhanced because he was also moving in very different circles. On 3 October Bulstrode Whitelocke* recorded an invitation from his associate General Richard Browne II*, newly-elected MP for Chipping Wycombe (where Villiers inherited property) to an entertainment in Fish Street. Guests included Danvers, John Holles, 2nd earl of Clare, and probably Henry Marten*.109Whitelock, Mems. (1732), 175. Meetings of Danvers’ legal counsel in which Whitelocke participated that autumn drew among others the solicitor general, the recorder of London, Samuel Browne* and John Bradshawe.110Whitelock, Mems. (1732), 178, 182; Whitelocke, Diary, 182-3.

‘Aristocratic’ Independent, 1645-1648

On 10 October 1645 Danvers was returned to Parliament on his own interest for the Malmesbury seat originally held by Anthony Hungerford*, who had been expelled the previous year for defecting to the Oxford Parliament. That the ancient clothing town acknowledged in April 1648 in the gift of a panorama map that it was in the Danvers’ family’s ‘possession and sole jurisdiction’ was a striking mark of his local consequence.111Wilts. RO, G221/1/43H. Danvers took the National League and Covenant with many others on the 29th, and thereafter became a much more active member of the House than in his previous Parliaments.112CJ iv. 326a. Although he sat on important committees, and from 29 November can be found periodically signing orders from the Committee of the West*, his was above all a visible presence in the chamber, as a frequent teller and messenger to the Lords.113Add. 22084, ff. 7, 8v, 13v, 19v, 21. His first appointments related to security and military affairs: consideration of a pass for Prince Rupert to leave the kingdom following his dismissal by the king after the surrender of Bristol (1 Nov.); correspondence captured from the royalists during an engagement in Yorkshire (4 Nov.); the establishment of a garrison at Abingdon, formerly Rupert’s headquarters (22 Nov.); regulation of officers of arms (22 Nov.).114CJ iv. 330a, 332a, 351a, 351b. He continued to be involved with such matters in subsequent months, being named to committees for the London militia (4 Dec.), sustaining campaigning in Ireland (8 Dec.), and martial law (1 Jan. 1646), and the relayer of related messages to the Lords (24 Mar.; 3, 6 Apr.; 4, 5 June).115CJ iv. 365a, 368b, 394b, 498b, 499a, 501a, 564a, 565b. He had contact with the Committee of Both Kingdoms as early as 5 December.116CSP Dom. 1645-7, p. 249. Weightier and more sensitive employment came as he carried resolutions bearing on peace negotiations: the forwarding by the Committee to the Scottish commissioners of a letter from the king (26 Mar.); the secret communication to the commissioners of the vote to arrest their secretary John Cheisly of Cresswell following seizure of his letters to Alexander Lindsay, Lord Lindsay of Balcarres, who had been in talks with the king at Newcastle (8 May); requests for conferences on where to hold the king’s person (13 May), on the Newcastle Propositions (5 June) and alternatives (20 June).117CJ iv. 490a and b; 540a, 543b, 565b, 566b, 582b, 583a; Add. 31116, p. 536. Nominated to the joint committee with the Lords to hear Archibald Campbell*, marquess of Argyll, outline his Presbyterian vision for a settlement (25 June), on 6 July Danvers was one of four MPs delegated to take propositions ‘for a well-grounded peace’ back to Charles in the north.118CJ iv. 586b, 604a; Whitelocke, Mems. (1732), 214. However, the following day he was excused this service for unspecified reasons: lack of courage to face his old master or lack of appetite for peace might have been at work.119CJ iv. 606b; Whitelocke, Mems. (1732), 215.

Meanwhile, Danvers had been active on a variety of other issues. Nominated on 1 December 1645 to the committee to investigate backhanders to MPs for support in petitions before the House, according to Thomas Juxon*, as a ‘new and disengaged Member’ he was chosen to chair it.120CJ iv. 362a; Given his financial obligations, and the extension of the committee’s remit to ensure that, notwithstanding parliamentary privilege, Members’ estates were still liable for their debts, Danvers was perhaps less ‘disengaged’ than Juxon allowed, although perhaps the diarist had alluded to perceived independence of factional allegiance at this stage. Danvers was also among those delegated to review absentee Members (17 Jan. after which he was ironically absent from the written record for the next two months) and then to establish which Members held offices of profit, military and civil, from Parliament (16 Mar.).121CJ iv. 409b, 477a. Local affairs came his way on committees setting fees for sheriffs and assize judges (with Bayntun, Selden and others, 26 Mar.) and settling the civil administration of Chester and Cheshire (17 Apr.); as a consequence of the former he was ordered on 27 June to report on business in the western circuit.122CJ iv. 491a, 512a, 589a.

Having revealed sufficiently strong views on the destination of money raised from delinquents’ estates to act as a teller against the Northamptonshire committee’s petition for £4,000 (6 Dec. 1645), he was added on 13 December to those delegated to scrutinize certificates returned from the accounts committee.123CJ iv. 367b, 376a. More direct involvement with sequestration came first the next summer when he carried to the Lords the ordinance for the settlement of the estates of Henry Somerset, 5th earl of Worcester (23 June 1646), and was nominated to committees to address the payment to adherents of Parliament of debts owing to them by delinquents exempted from composition (6 July) and prepare the ordinance for the sale of papists’ and delinquents’ estates (10 July).124CJ iv. 585a, 603a, 613a. Old ties of friendship may explain his inclusion on committees investigating an attempt to arrest the prince elector for debt (4 Apr.) and reviewing the petition (under his English title, earl of Cambridge, and from Chelsea) of the duke of Hamilton for restitution of goods and pictures following his release from imprisonment (10 June).125CJ iv. 500b, 571b. Predictable also, given his commercial and scholarly interests, and his University representation, was service on committees preparing the ordinance to drain the Great Level (28 Apr. 1646; 30 Nov. 1647), providing maintenance and a possible post at Oxford for Samuel Hartlib (25 June 1646), and, most notably, and drafting the ordinance for the regulation of that University (1 July).126CJ iv. 525b, 587b, 595b; Cambs. RO, R.59.31.9.1, p. xii.

Significant, but surprising given the sparsity of evidence of his prior interest in religious questions, is his addition on 15 May 1646 to the Committee for Plundered Ministers* and nomination on 3 June (with other Wiltshire MPs including his great-nephew Edward Bayntun* and Edmund Ludlowe II) as a commissioner for exclusion from the sacrament.127CJ iv. 545b, 562b. Perhaps his employment that spring of the Presbyterian ministers Stephen Marshall, Herbert Palmer and Obadiah Sedgwick to instruct his protégé Robert Villiers in the Protestant faith gave grounds for hope that he was sympathetic towards Presbyterian discipline.128CCC 1075; Burton’s Diary, iii. 242-3; CJ iv. 534a. Likewise, association with Denzil Holles* as a trustee for Villiers’ inheritance may have gained him friends among political Presbyterians.129PROB11/200/312; ‘Elizabeth Hatton, Lady Hatton’, Oxford DNB. However, an indication that his personal opinions were taking an Independent turn is provided on 3 July by his promotion with Sir Arthur Hesilrige of a hearing for the petition of Colonel John Lilburne*; Danvers was added that day to a committee to examine his submissions for retention of a strong army.130CJ iv. 601a, 601b.

In the midst of this activity, Danvers had not neglected his own concerns. As if to confirm suspicions that his adherence to Parliament sprang from self-interest, before 12 January 1646 he had petitioned Parliament that certain terms of his brother’s will be overturned.131CJ iv. 403b; PA, Main Pprs. 12 Jan. 1646. Referred to a committee which included Samuel Browne, Sir John Evelyn of Wiltshire* and Richard Knightley*, in March and early April the report on the matter was repeatedly postponed.132CJ iv. 494a, 502b, 503a, 504a, 506a, 511a. On 23 April, after spending ‘the greatest part of the forenoon’ debating a report from John Lisle*, the House heard a counter petition from Lady Gargrave, alleging that Danvers had unfairly received rents on lands devised by Danby for her benefit, and a deposition that the earl had declared on his deathbed that since the king would be victorious, and Danvers lost on account of his adherence to Parliament, leaving his estates in another direction would be the best course.133Add. 31116, p. 531; HMC 6th Rep. 113. Referred to the Committee for Sequestrations* ‘for speedy consideration’, the case dragged on.134CJ iv. 520a. In the meantime Danvers had some compensation when on 30 June it was ordered that he and other Members including Sir Edward Bayntun were to relieved from the burden of billeting at their houses.135CJ iv. 593a. On the 10th he successfully put paid to a House of Lords scheme to oblige the French ambassador by fixing his residence not at Goring House, but at Hatton House, ‘which he liked better’: diarist Laurence Whitaker* noted that ‘Sir John Danvers pretended an interest in that house, alleging that he paid rent for it and was now in possession of it, whereupon the House conceived that Goring house might serve [the envoy’s] turn’.136Add. 31116, p. 546.

Having escaped the embassy to Newcastle, on 24 July Danvers obtained leave to go into the country.137CJ iv. 627a. On 11 August he was present at a commission of oyer and terminer in Wiltshire, but he was back in London by 1 September for another year of regular activity in the Commons.138Wilts. Arch. Mag. xxviii. 24. In September he was several times a messenger to the Lords, pressing in particular for the expedition of ordinances to guarantee continued supply for the army following the summer’s royalist collapse in the north west.139CJ iv. 659b, 660a, 666a, 670a, 670b, 671a. On the 23rd Danvers was again named to a committee for Cheshire, now with a remit extended to the disbanding of enemy forces, while on 3 October he was delegated to address discontent in Kent and channel petitioning to Parliament.140CJ iv. 674b, 681b. In the weeks following the Westminster Assembly’s submission of its Confession of Faith and the passing ordinances abolishing episcopacy and authorizing the sale of episcopal lands, Danvers was named to committees discussing publishing the Septuagint Bible (16 Oct.), allowances for bishops who had supported Parliament (2 Nov.), repair of churches (4 Nov.) and maintenance for their ministers (11 Nov.).141CJ iv. 695a, 712a, 714b, 719b. On 13 November he conveyed to the Lords the ordinance for ecclesiastical land sales.142CJ iv. 721a and b. His social status and contacts doubtless contributed to his inclusion on committees to investigate the alleged seizure by the former royalist commander and Somerset/Wiltshire grandee William Seymour†, 1st marquess of Hertford, and his wife Frances of personal effects and papers of her recently-deceased brother, Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex (17 Oct.), and to fix compensation for leading parliamentarians like William Fiennes, 1st Viscount Saye and Sele, and Sir Benjamin Rudyerd* who had suffered materially from the abolition of the court of wards (24 November).143CJ iv. 696b, 727a.

As peace negotiations continued, Danvers was employed on security issues, including investigation of the attempted escape of James, duke of York (23 Dec.), and that month was a regular messenger to the Lords and to the Common Council on matters such as arrears in assessments for the army, disposal of the king’s person and other details of the proposed treaty with Scotland.144CJ iv. 738a; v. 4a, 9a, 22b, 27a, 32a and b. By 1647 he was emerging as an important supporter of the army, but while related activity came to dominate his appearances in the Journal, it was not to the exclusion of other private and public business. His dispute with his sister was pursued further through the Committee for Compounding, although prone to postponement – as his agent William Yorke* explained – because of ‘the pressure of public affairs’; occasionally this case and his debts to other former royalists surfaced in the Commons and the Lords.145Leics. RO, DG39/744; CCC 1637-8; CJ v. 14a, 165b, 168b, 342a; LJ ix. 187a, 204b, 205a. At the same time he sat on committees which arranged the sale of the lands of delinquents like Henry Somerset, 5th earl of Worcester, and Edward, Lord Herbert of Ragland (4 Feb. 1647), and settled some of the proceeds on Oliver Cromwell* and Sir Thomas Fairfax* (5 and 11 May).146CJ v. 74a, 16b, 167a. Censorship (3 Feb.), the election in Newcastle, now vacated by the Scottish army (6 May), and alum works (13 May) also came his way.147CJ v. 72b, 134a, 170b.

Unsurprisingly, Danvers was included on committees for the visitation of the University of Oxford (13 Jan.; becoming a commissioner, 10 Feb.) and for the restoration of Philip Herbert*, 4th earl of Pembroke, to the chancellorship (20 July), as well as for the complementary ordinance for excluding ‘malignant’ ministers, college fellows and masters of hospitals (22 Mar.).148CJ v. 51b, 83a, 119b, 251b. Like Nathaniel Fiennes I*, he used such influence to protect his old college, to thwart the more zealous Presbyterian Visitors, and to offer succour to royalist clergy. In July 1648 the fellowship of Brasenose, where an order for the sequestration of the principal, Dr Ratcliffe, had gone unimplemented from that January until his death in June, wrote to Danvers acknowledging that ‘upon all our addresses you have been pleased to show yourself to be our most noble friend, particularly of late when our occasions and exigence required such a one’s advice, and assistance as yours’.149Brasenose Coll. Archives, PRI 1/A1/1. Although the Visitors had already invested a new principal, the fellows conducted a secret election, choosing instead Thomas Yate or Yates, one of their number who was then lodging with Danvers at Chelsea, and may long have been among his entourage.150Brasenose Coll. Archives, GOV 3/A1/2, ff. 69-87; PRI 1/A1/2; ‘Thomas Yate’, Oxford DNB. Meanwhile, in a letter to the Committee for Sequestrations on 3 February 1648, Danvers and others had recommended Dr Christopher Wren, former dean of Windsor and register of the Garter, as ‘a purposeful labourer in the work of the ministry’ and ‘a person far from meriting the doom of sequestration’, while from 1647 he allowed the sequestered minister Thomas Fuller to preach at Chelsea and encouraged him to publish, and by the early 1650s Christopher Gibbons, former organist of Winchester cathedral, was a member of his household there.151Add. 22084, f. 19v; T. Fuller, A Sermon of Assurance (1647), sig. A2; The Cause and Cure of a Wounded Conscience (1647), sigs. A3, A4; A Sermon of Contentment (1648), sigs. A2v-A3; The Just Man’s Funeral (1649, E582.5); ‘Thomas Fuller’, ‘Christopher Gibbons’, Oxford DNB; L. Huygens, The English Journal 1651-1652 ed. A.G.H. Bachrach and R.G. Collmer (Leiden, 1982), 92. Indeed Danvers seems to have dispensed hospitality and patronage generously and, as regards religion and politics, somewhat indiscriminately: in December 1647 the diarist John Evelyn recounted that he went to Chelsea to ‘inform myself of intelligence’, and dined with Sir John … who showed me extraordinary courtesy, and more than twice conjured me to make trial of his friendship upon all occasions’.152Evelyn Diary ed. Bray, 536.

In spring 1647 Danvers could still be found acting with Denzil Holles* on the question of who should be commissioners of the privy seal: on 18 March he was a teller with Holles for the majority who supported Sir John Brampton’s candidature, against Sir Arthur Hesilrige and Sir Peter Wentworth.153CJ v. 84a, 117a. But on military matters his allegiance to the war party and the New Model army was becoming clear. With Sir William Brereton* he was a teller against the disgarrisoning and slighting of Coventry (3 Mar.) and for calling in to the House a deputation from the New Model (1 Apr. against Sir William Waller* and Edward Massie*), while he opposed Presbyterian Sir Philip Stapilton* in divisions on the identity of the commander for south Wales (15 Apr. with either Henry Herbert* or John Herbert*) and on amendments to the London militia bill (15 April, with Hesilrige).154CJ v. 104a, 132a, 137b, 143b. On 12 May Danvers was placed on the committee which sought to raise money for ‘service of England and Ireland’, but he was almost certainly at odds with fellow members like Holles and Stapilton.155CJ v. 168b. On 7 June he went to the Lords to encourage them to repeal the declaration passed on 30 March that supporters of the army petition were enemies of the state and to forward indemnity for soldiers, while on 17 June, the day after the army had accused the Eleven Members of subversion, he carried to the Upper House the vote for issuing it with pay.156CJ v. 201a, 215a.

When on 5 July 1647 Danvers and Hesilrige were tellers for the proposition that those who transgressed previous orders against royalist sympathisers sitting in the House be permanently excluded, they were in a minority.157CJ v. 233b. On the 13th Danvers was one of three MPs selected to reassure the authors of the Humble Petition of Many Thousand Young Men and Apprentices of the City of London, who sought the restoration of the king and the disbandment of the army, that Parliament was considering a settlement.158CJ v. 243a. He was named to the committee set up on the 21st in response to army agitators with the object of addressing abuses in pay, but that was his last mention in the Journal until 2 September.159CJ v. 253a, 289b. As the Presbyterians enjoyed their temporary triumph, he was included on several of the lists of those MPs who left Westminster to take refuge with the army and who signed the fugitive Members’ declaration of 4 August.160Rushworth, Hist. Collns. vii. 755; LJ ix. 385; HMC Egmont i. 440. In the middle of the month, following his practice of the previous year, he was at the Wiltshire assizes.161Wilts. Arch. Mag. xxviii. 25.

By the time Danvers returned to the House, the coup had ended and the Presbyterian leaders had fled. That autumn he was on a series of committees devoted to strengthening the Independents’ grip and to pursuing negotiations with the king on a new basis: the appointment of Colonel Robert Hammond* as governor of the Isle of Wight (3 Sept.); the ordinance barring delinquents from office (28 Sept.); the preparation of propositions for a religious settlement (30 Sept., 6 Oct.); the investigation of absent MPs (9 Oct.).162CJ v. 291a, 320a, 321b, 327b, 329a. A few days after the king’s rejection of the more lenient terms suggested by the army, in a division on 17 October Danvers, with Sir Walter Erle, led the majority opposed to the motion supported by Oliver Cromwell* and Henry Marten* to press again for immediate consent.163CJ v. 335b. A fortnight later, with Erle and Marten, he was named to the committee to refine Parliament’s counter-proposals.164CJ v. 346b. Among MPs delegated to enquire into the king’s escape on 11 November from Hampton Court, Danvers was drawn further into affairs surrounding the agitation in and manifestoes emanating from the army.165CJ v. 357a. He was placed on committees to review the case of the Leveller John Lilburne (1 Nov.), investigate agents in London (16, 18 Nov.), re-establish a militia in Tower Hamlets (19 Nov.), and guarantee the security of the House (13 Dec.).166CJ v. 347b, 360a, 363a, 363b, 380a. Meanwhile, he was also engaged on economic matters and carrying messages to the Lords.167CJ v. 366b, 375a, 383a, 419b.

Danvers’s stance on the Vote of No Addresses to the king on 3 January 1648 does not appear. In the next five months he was involved in a variety of Commons business. Having supported religious toleration (by appealing to international example) in answers to the Scots commissioners in February, in May he was part of a small committee delegated to prepare yet another response.168CJ v. 472b. Hospitals (6 Jan.) and the restoration of the feoffees for impropriations (28 Mar.), the courts of king’s bench (14 Jan.) and admiralty (20 Mar.), the equal rating of assessments (15 Jan.) and the Westminster militia (12 Apr.) all claimed his attention.169CJ v. 421a, 432a, 434a, 505b, 519a, 527b. But he was notably active on matters surrounding delinquency. In divisions he successfully led support for the ordinance abolishing first fruits and tenths due to the crown (5 Jan.), for an article of impeachment against James Howard, 3rd earl of Suffolk (29 Jan.), and for sending to the Tower the young son of Murrough O’Brien, 1st earl of Inchiquin, following the latter’s defection to the royalists (13 Apr.).170CJ v. 420a, 448a, 529b. He was defeated in attempts to resist the proposition that papists in arms in Oxfordshire at the time of the surrender there could compound only in so far as permitted by the Oxford Articles (16 Mar.) and to block the restriction of disarming papists generally to those ‘actually’ adhering to the king (21 Apr.).171CJ v. 501b, 539b. At a period when he purchased (though his agents William and Thomas Baxter) a substantial piece of Yorkshire property within the archdiocese of York which he could ill afford, and property in Salisbury cathedral close which he soon shed, he was nominated to a committee to expedite sales of episcopal lands.172CJ v. 460b; Bodl. Rawl. B.239, pp. 10, 14, 15; Wilts. N and Q xxv. 176. Meanwhile, John Lisle finally reported from the Committee for Sequestrations on 15 March that the earl of Danby was sequesterable; this both indicated that Danvers’ claims might be heard sympathetically and that the process of enforcing them would be protracted.173CJ v. 486a, 493a, 498a, 499a; CCC 1637.

None the less, even as he was chosen to carry messengers to the Lords in May, Danvers was a divisive figure.174CJ v. 553a, 577b, 578a. When additions to the Derby House Committee were brought forward for confirmation on 30 May after the rash of royalist risings, there was a division on his inclusion: it was carried with 75 voices, but there were 59 against; one of the tellers for that minority was the inveterate Presbyterian Clement Walker.175CJ v. 578b, 579a. However, having taken the oath on 1 June, in a summer of insurrection Danvers was an assiduous attender there and in the House, to which he several times delivered its reports on the fluctuating military situation around the kingdom.176Supra, ‘Derby House Committee’; SP21/26, ff. 149, 165, 168-71; CSP Dom. 1648-9, pp. 90-340; CJ v. 584a, 585b, 612a, 649b; vi. 32a, 58b. On its behalf he examined prisoners, supervised a watch on the Chelsea ferry, chivvied the Revenue Committee for payments and, with Basil Feilding, 2nd earl of Denbigh, and Richard Knightley* (in whose company he seems to have been often around this time), visited the Spanish ambassador to confront him with suspicions of harbouring priests.177CSP Dom.1648-9, pp. 132, 161, 169, 245, 275; Burton’s Diary, iii. 241-2. On 3 July Danvers and Evelyn of Wiltshire were tellers for the large minority who opposed compromise on former articles put to the king, while in August he twice took the ordinance for settling the Wiltshire militia to the Lords, and was named to the contingent sent to discuss defence with the London militia.178CJ v. 612a, 667b, 673, 676b, 678a. Following the defeat of the Scots at the Battle of Preston he carried lists of prisoners to the Lords (25 Aug.), sat on the committee organising the dispersal of their soldiers (29 Aug.) and led with Godfrey Bossevile the small majority who voted on the 26th that an intercepted letter from Charles to the Scottish Parliament should not be returned to its carrier for delivery.179CJ v. 682b 688b, 692a.

That autumn, as ‘aristocratic’ Independents and Presbyterians vied for control of the treaty of Newport in pursuit, respectively of a ‘hard’ and a ‘soft’ peace with the king, Danvers found himself a teller for the minority in a series of divisions. He unsuccessfully opposed the chasing of absentee MPs (5 Sept.), compliance with Charles I’s desire for a blank pass to Scotland (11 Sept.), and rejection of the addition of 3,000 foot to the army (14 Nov.), as well as the denial to John Lilburne of reparations for his star chamber sufferings from the estate of the late lord keeper, Thomas Coventry†, although in this last case Danvers was added to a committee investigating alternative compensation.180CJ vi. 6b, 18b, 73a, 76a. With motivation that is unclear, on a day of sparse attendance, he voted against the banishment of the former parliamentarian Major-general Rowland Laugharne† who had joined royalist insurrection (10 Nov.).181CJ vi. 7b. Named to committees on Bath stone monopoly (22 Sept.) and raising money for maintaining horse guards round Parliament (9 Oct.), Danvers relayed to the Lords varied orders for continuing the payment of assessments for the army (23 Sept.), remodelling the judiciary (including promoting Whitelocke), clamping down on the activity of reformadoes (officers without commands), and settling the church and militia (13 Oct.).182CJ vi. 27b, 30a, 47a, 51b. The Commons kept holding out the possibility that his ‘business’ with his sister, repeatedly postponed owing to the complex and dangerous political situation, would soon be heard, and perhaps this energised him over this period.183CJ vi. 50a, 50b, 53b, 56b, 58a, 63a, 69a, 73a, 78a. On 4 November he was one of the committee appointed to consult with the common council over the security of the House, while on the 17th he went to the Lords with a letter from the Estates of Scotland and encouragement to expedite their proceedings on the treaty, but thereafter his spell of unprecedented activity ceased.184CJ vi. 69b, 79a. That on the 23rd his elder daughter married Robert Villiers provides some explanation for his apparent absence from the House, but – in view of the young man’s antecedents – a curious backdrop to what followed.185Aubrey, Brief Lives, ii. 97; Burke, Extinct Peerages, 558-9.

Regicide and republic

Four weeks later, and a week after Pride’s Purge, Danvers was again visible in the Commons Journal. On 13 December, when Parliament reinstated the Vote of No Addresses and formally rejected the Treaty of Newport, he was nominated to the committee chaired by John Lisle and Cornelius Holland which was to prepare material for debate on the following day, while on the 15th, as the army resolved to bring the king to Windsor, he was one of four MPs added to the revenue committee for the purpose of organising attendants on Charles.186CJ vi. 96b, 98a. He was duly among MPs who on 20 December took the dissent to the vote of 5 December for prolonging negotiations with the king; his presence among the ‘Rumpers’ had already been noted in the press.187C. Walker, Anarchia Anglicana (1649), 49 (E.570.4); Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 38 (12-19 Dec. 1648), sig. Ddd 4v (E.476.35). In the meantime, on the 18th and 19th, he and Philip Skippon* had attended meetings of the Derby House Committee with Pembroke and other peers, his potential importance recognised in an army-derived proposal issued on the 22nd that he and the earl might be among ‘the committee of state for the next ensuing intervals of Parliament’.188CSP Dom. 1648-9, p. 340; ‘Derby House Committee’, infra; J. Jubbes, Several proposals for peace and freedom (1648), 10 (E.477.18). It may be no coincidence that the civilians involved were all added to the DHC the previous summer: a nascent caucus might be suspected. At any rate, among other appointments in the Journal at this time – to deal with a petition from the widow of the murdered Colonel Thomas Rainborowe* (19 Dec.), a communication from the elector palatine (23 Dec.), and a submission from the rulers of London (23 Dec.) – Danvers was twice sent with messages to the Lords, relating, among other things, to the exclusion from public office in London of those who had supported engagement with the king.189CJ vi. 100b, 101a, 102b, 103a, 103b.

Critically, Danvers was among those to whom the ordinance for the king’s trial was committed on 29 December.190CJ vi. 106a. That he was a willing party was apparent by at least 2 January 1649, when he was nominated to the Committee for Indemnity (the Commons confirmed this appointment on 6 Jan.).191CJ vi. 109a, 113b. Following the Lords’ rejection of the trial ordinance, Danvers – perhaps left rather high and dry by aristocratic associates; perhaps relied upon discreetly to represent their interests – was in the group delegated on 4 January to formulate the declaration that the Commons had authority to act alone.192CJ vi. 111a, 113b. Observers with perspectives as different as those of Edward Hyde and John Aubrey, a kinsman and admirer, were surprised that Danvers had been in such company. The latter, noting that he was ‘a great friend of the king’s party’ (a proposition suspected and dismissed possibly in equal measure) and ‘a patron to distressed and cashiered cavaliers’ (indisputable), asserted that he finally turned regicide ‘contrary to his natural inclination’; echoing Hyde, Aubrey implies an element of financial impulsion, a conviction that it was the only course to salvage his ailing fortunes.193Aubrey, Brief Lives, i. 196; Clarendon, Hist. iv. 478-9. Yet even if this were the case, taking into account Danvers’ conduct both in relation to peace-making in 1642 and to succouring delinquents thereafter, it cannot be excluded that, to some extent, he had taken a political decision that regicide was also the only realistic course for the public good.

Whatever his motivation, his conversion was thorough. From its preliminaries on 8 January 1649, he was recorded as present at all but one day of the king’s trial before signing the death warrant on the 29th.194Muddiman, Trial, 195-227; The manner of the deposition of Charles Stewart (1649) (E.537.4); King Charls his tryal at the high court of justice (1650). In the meantime he sat on important committees to raise money for public service and the church (12 Jan.), deal with unrest in London (15 Jan.) and choose commissioners to be sent to Scotland and elsewhere (17 Jan.); on the 29th he was an organiser of the reception of ambassadors from the United Provinces.195CJ vi. 116a, 117b, 120a, 124a. Following on from the proposal of the previous month, and doubtless from his dealings with John Lilburne, he was named in the redrafted Agreement of the People, presented to the Commons in the middle of the month, as the second trustee, after Thomas Grey*, Lord Grey of Groby, of the proposed elections for a novel representative assembly.196A Petition from his Excellency Thomas, Lord Fairfax, and the General Council of Officers of the Army (1649), 19; Whitelocke, Mems. (1732), 368.

Discussion of the Agreement was shelved, but Danvers was fully occupied with the business of the new commonwealth. Already involved in the act prohibiting the proclamation of a king, he sat on committees for the repeal of key acts regarding treason and monarchical jurisdiction (30 Jan.) and for deciding the fate of the late king’s body and papers (31 Jan.).197CJ vi. 124a, 126a, 127a. In the next ten days he was nominated to consider further legislation on delinquents, the navy and customs, the greater London militia, the revenues of the dean and chapter of Westminster, London freemen’s oaths, and the regulation of food prices for the benefit of the poor.198CJ vi. 126b, 127b, 129b, 132a, 137a, On 10 February he delivered a final report from the Derby House committee, dissolved three days earlier, requesting that money be paid for service in Ireland.199CJ vi. 137a; CSP Dom. 1648-9, p. 340; 1649-50, p. 5. Having been confirmed as a member of the council of state on 14 February, the next day he supported with Valentine Wauton* the temporarily unsuccessful move to establish a lord president.200CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 6; CJ vi. 141a, 143b. For at least the next six months he was a fairly active councillor. On 31 March he was placed on the sub-committee for Irish affairs, an appointment reaffirmed later; with his kinsman William Cecil*, 2nd earl of Salisbury, and Cornelius Holland* he considered which of the royal houses and parks should be kept for state use (12 May).201CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 48, 62, 136, 221. On 28 March he was deputed to move in the House for the acceptance of the report on proceedings of the king’s trial, just one of several occasions on which he conveyed the council’s recommendations to the Commons.202CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 57, 126, 264; CJ vi. 152a, 176a, 276a, 286a The status of ‘a great statesman’, as he was dubbed in a critical pamphlet that summer, seemed to be his.203A Bartholomew Fairing (1649), 9 (E.572.7).

Having been placed on the committee to examine dealings with insurgents in Kent (19 Feb.), Danvers took a hard line against those condemned to death for their part in the second civil war, leading with Sir Arthur Hesilrige the rejection of last-minute petitions from Henry Rich, 1st earl of Holland, and others (7 Mar.).204CJ vi. 146b, 158b. He continued to be involved in preparation of measures on land sales (and related divisions on the employment of the profits for preaching ministers), delinquents, the draining of the Great Level, hospitals, settling lands on Sir Thomas Fairfax (now 3rd Baron Fairfax), money and other local matters, with only a brief period of absence in April 1649.205CJ vi. 160b, 178b, 179b, 180b, 181a, 197b, 198a, 202b, 204b, 206b, 209b, 225b. His reward came in May with debate on his challenge to Danby’s will, although it was at first more controversial than he may have hoped. It was resolved on 17 May that Danby’s will was void and his estate sequestrable after his death, but on the Speaker’s casting vote the business was again passed back to Goldsmiths’ Hall.206CJ vi. 190b, 210a, 211a. It was not until 14 June, when according to Whitelocke there was ‘much time spent’ on the business, that MPs led by Sir Henry Mildmay and Cornelius Holland (both former courtiers) voted that Danvers had been deprived of the estate which would have descended to him at common law ‘for his affection and adhering to Parliament’; once again the detail of restitution was referred for consideration, although on 3 July it was agreed that Cornbury Park should be exempted from sequestration.207CJ vi. 221b, 227b, 232a, 232b, 249a; CCC 1638; Whitelocke, Mems. (1732), 402, 409; Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 9 (12-19 June 1649, E.560.19). On 9 October it was finally ruled that Lady Gargrave’s composition could proceed, and that Danvers could also benefit from the sequestrable estate.208CJ vi. 303b, 304a, 304b; CCC 1637-9.

Meanwhile, sometimes thanks to informers, Danvers’ complicated financial obligations became ever more evident in hearings of external committees and the council of state, and occasionally they surfaced in the House.209CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 63; 1653-4, p. 411; 1654, p. 445; CCAM 459. Indeed, over the course of the Rump Parliament numerous allegations emerged to corrode Danvers’ reputation. A petition from the widow of Sir Edward Hungerford*, former parliamentarian commander in Wiltshire, and Sir Neville Poole*, another leading activist, revealed Danvers’ involvement in underwriting loans for raising horse (29 May 1649); periodically Parliament had to address the consequences of Danvers’ standing surety in 1641 for borrowing by the Catholic nobleman John Paulet, 5th marquess of Winchester (2 July, 14 Sept.).210CJ vi. 218b, 219b, 247b, 296a. Another petition to Parliament which apparently failed to surface in the House, but which still had damaging potential owing to its implications of fraud and persecution of godly ministers at the expense of delinquents, came from a daughter of Sir John Danvers of Culworth, Northamptonshire, who claimed that, as her father’s executor, Sir John Danvers of Chelsea had detained her portion and then ejected her husband from a living in order to present Brasenose alumnus Jonathan Yate(s), a brother of Thomas Yate.211The Case of Anne Smyth, the Wife of Daniell Smyth (1650, 669.f.15.61); PROB11/203/231 (Sir John Dauers); Al. Ox.; E134/1654/Mich7. Danvers also emerged badly from testimonies given by two women in connection with an aspect of the Vanlore inheritance dispute which was to detain the House from time to time: an attendant on Danvers’ Chelsea neighbour Mary, Lady Powell, who had been accused of her murder, and the deceased’s niece Anne, wife of Thomas Levingston*, accused Sir John of attempting to pervert justice and of manipulation for financial gain of provisos in the Act of Indemnity.212A Declaration in Answer to several lying Pamphlets concerning the Witch of Wapping (1652), 6; A. Levingston, A True Narrative of the Case (1655). At the very least he was guilty of negligence, delay and evasion. Colonel Ralph Weldon, governor of Plymouth, had approached the Committee for Advance of Money in September 1648 for assignment of the £3,000 debt which Danvers owed to Angel Grey, expressing himself confident that Sir John, as a man of honour, would pay when the sum was to be employed in the state’s service, but the Committee’s experience over the next five years was largely otherwise: it was not until December 1653 that, after continued pressure and the eventual seizure of some of his goods by Middlesex commissioners, he discharged his bond.213CCAM 460-65.

Service in the Rump 1649-53

In 1649 and early 1650 much of Danvers’ activity in the Commons related to his conciliar work. His membership of the council’s committees on Ireland and on relations with Scotland was complemented in the House (4, 18 and 20 July; 10, 15 and 28 Aug.).214CJ vi. 249b, 266b, 78b, 279a; CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 224. When he reported a proposed censorship act, he was promptly placed on the parliamentary committee (9 Aug.).215CJ vi. 276a. On 9 November he was nominated to consider arrangements for subscription to the Engagement, while three days later he and Denis Bond* joined the conciliar committee to choose officers to receive the subscriptions.216CJ vi. 321b; CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 387. He was on the Mint committee (20 Oct., 8 Dec.), investigated the packet boat (8 Dec.) and the transportation of pepper and spices, and appropriately for a longtime member of the Somers Island Company, prepared an act to encourage adventurers in the Caribbean (25 July).217CJ vi. 270a, 275a, Measures for relief of imprisoned debtors (27 July, when he led opponents of reform proposals; 28 Nov.), institution to benefices (18 July, 8 Feb. 1650) and propagating the gospel (20 Dec.) also engaged him.218CJ vi. 263b, 270b, 327a, 336a, 359a. The day after he and Gilbert Pykeringe* led a successful vote against a clause upholding tithes in Parliament’s proposed declaration on the church, he was placed on the committee to amend it and the Directory of Worship ‘with lenity to tender consciences’ (7 August).219CJ vi. 275a and b. His own interests and those of royalists for whom he interceded (like the Osbornes or Robert Villiers) were probably advanced when on 2 November he was one of a number of MPs added to the committee at Goldsmiths’ Hall as it moved to vacant rooms once occupied by the Lords.220CJ vi. 318a; ‘Dorothy Osborne’, Oxford DNB. He clearly considered that the issue of the estates of papists and delinquents should be kept under review, leading a narrow majority on 25 January 1650 for restricting the life of a prospective act to two years.221CJ vi. 349b.

Danvers’ involvement in considering petitions to the House and as a teller in divisions over pensions and offices probably added to his enemies as well as his friends.222CJ vi. 258b, 264b, 267a, 279b, 298b, 326b. A consistent political position is difficult to trace, and it may be that on issues other than religion, on which he was evidently tolerant of varied forms of traditional Protestantism, he was driven above all by personal considerations. Notwithstanding his relation to Lilburne, he was no social radical, successfully opposing Edmund Ludlowe and Henry Marten in a division that rejected unread a petition from Levellers in the Tower (25 Oct. 1649).223CJ vi. 313b, 326b; Whitelocke, Diary, 232. With Bulstrode Whitelocke, who had remained a friend, the same month he tried unsuccessfully to block the appointment of his neighbour Robert Jenkinson* as sheriff of Oxfordshire, probably on the basis of local considerations rather than an uncharacteristic objection to Jenkinson’s royalist background.224CJ vi. 313b, 326b; Whitelocke, Diary, 232. Suspicion of Danvers’ own conduct and motives at this period (still detectable also in 1659 debates on his son-in-law), was reflected in the fact that when elections were held on 12 February 1650 for renewal of the council of state, Danvers was the only prospective continuing candidate over whom there was a division; despite the support of veterans like Sir William Masham* and Philip Skippon, opponents led by Colonel John Downes* and Sir Michael Livesay* carried the day.225CJ vi. 362b; Burton’s Diary, iii. 241-53. Danvers’ exclusion was widely reported, and attributed to ‘private’ rather than ‘public’ reasons; Roger Dodsworth heard that the catalyst had been his bid for one of the offices vacated by the death of the earl of Pembroke, but there is no evidence to substantiate this.226CCSP ii. 44; Mems. of the Verney Family, iii. 9; The Life, Diary and Corresp. of Sir William Dugdale ed. W. Hamper (1827), 224.

This represented a potentially substantial humiliation. Two days later Danvers recovered to lead a substantial majority in a division which rejected election by balloting box to the four vacant council seats; he subsequently was chosen by the Speaker to tell the number of the House at the election itself.227CJ vi. 365b, 368b. However, his next appearance in the Journal is a nomination to a committee on the salt monopoly on 20 March.228CJ vi. 389a. Thereafter he was absent from the record until 22 June, when a unspecified petition from him was committed.229CJ vi. 429a. His resignation on 17 April as a colonel of Wiltshire militia cited indisposition and attendance at Parliament, but in the circumstances the possibility that he was exhibiting a sense of grievance cannot be excluded.230CSP Dom. 1650, p. 111.

Nonetheless, from at least 27 June he was back in the Commons, where he returned to familiar issues. There were some periods of inactivity, consistent with bouts of illness, but he was still visible, if somewhat removed from the most arduous military and financial business. Before a very brief absence from the House granted during the debate on the suppression of Ranters (9 Aug.), he had been on committees sharpening the powers of Goldsmiths’ Hall (3 July), settling lands on Sir Henry Vane II* (16 July), prohibiting Anglo-Scottish commerce and traffic during Oliver Cromwell’s* campaign in Scotland (25 July), and chasing unfulfilled undertakings to John Lilburne (27 June), as well as acting as a teller in debate on the excise commissioners.231CJ vi. 433a, 436b, 441a, 443a, 444b, 453b. With a gap in November 1650, he was then active until late July 1651. On 18 September he was a potentially far from disinterested addition to the committee investigating charges of bribery against Edward Howard, 1st Baron Howard of Escrick, allegedly committed in the course of his service on the committees for Compounding and Advance of Money.232CJ vi. 469a. Considering his own apparent lack of financial probity, Danvers was a disconcerting addition to the committee for excise, which he attended moderately often between mid-December 1650 and April 1652.233Bodl. Rawl. C.386. His work on matters relating to compositions and land sales by individual delinquents, most notably his son-in-law’s natural father, Sir Robert Howard* (29 July 1651), gave him opportunities to pursue private ends: Lord Herbert wrote on 22 November that year that Danvers had ‘ever appeared most ready’ to help him secure his Irish estates without composition.234Herbert Corresp. 138. Opportunities were perhaps greatest through Danvers’ involvement in the formidable task of disposing of the goods belonging to the royal family, for which he was nominated on 3 April and 21 May 1651.235CJ vi. 455b, 556a, 574a, 576b, 584b, 596a, 611b. As a the brother of a key player in the formation of the royal art collection, who himself had acknowledged taste, Danvers was in a position to offer knowledge and to turn a profit if he wished.236J. Brotton, The Sale of the Late King’s Goods (2006), 74-5, 78, 111; Original Unpublished Papers illustrative of the Life of Sir Peter Paul Rubens ed. W. N. Sainsbury (1859), 48-9, 57-8, 61-4, 270-2. He also sat on the sensitive committees preparing acts of pardon and oblivion (4 Mar.) and of abolition of titles of honour conferred by Charles I during the conflict (16 Apr.).237CJ vi. 544b, 562b.

With Spain and Portugal vying for an English alliance, on 31 December 1650 Danvers was among MPs who prepared an answer to Don Alonzo de Cárdenas and who in January gave audience to the Portuguese ambassador, while in April he was on the committee to investigate the unauthorised printing, by Portuguese order, of the resultant treaty.238CJ vi. 517a, 522b, 558a. If reports were true that his son-in-law Robert was in Paris on covert but officially-sanctioned diplomatic business in 1652, then he was almost certainly behind it.239CCSP ii.135. From time to time Sir John continued to be engaged in Irish affairs, including the acts for adventurers (20 Dec. 1650) and impressing soldiers (5 Feb. 1651), and on 24 April led with the earl of Salisbury support for the exemption of Jesuits, priests and others with papally-derived authority from pardon for acts of war in Ireland.240CJ vi. 512b, 530a, 562b, 567a. On 18 April he voted against referring the raising of horse for Scotland to the council of state.241CJ vi. 564b.

Like Whitelocke and other notable MPs in the Rump, Danvers had not lost his longstanding interests in economic, commercial and colonial affairs. Alongside committee work on bills for rendering the River Wye navigable in Surrey (26 Feb.), hospitals and relief for soldiers and their widows (2 May), and soap manufacture (29 May), he backed an unsuccessful move to allow the shipping of £2,500 worth of foreign coin and bullion to the East Indies (12 Mar.).242CJ vi. 542a, 548a, 569b, 581a. He sat on the committee preparing a bill for naturalisation, and the encouragement thereby of freer trade (20 May).243CJ vi. 575b. In A Discovery of New Britaine (1651) the merchant Edward Bland described him as a ‘great favourer of the western plantations’.244E. Bland, The Discovery of New Britain (1651), dedication. As governor of the Somers Islands or Bermuda Company during this period he apparently entertained its members in Chelsea. A publication of 1651, which also incorporated a celebration by Danvers’ late servant Woodnoth of his helpfulness to the Virginia Company, was at pains to emphasise both his ‘constant endeavours’ to preserve the ‘just rights and privileges’ of islanders and his promotion of the republic and the Engagement in the colony.245[J. Foster], Copy of a Petition from the Gov. and Co. of the Sommer Islands (1651) with [A. Woodnoth], A Short Collection of the Most Remarkable Passages from the Original to the Dissolution of the Virginia Co. esp. 9, 26, [appendix] A2v. In September he was consulted by the council of state for his views on a submission by the deputy governor, London merchant and fellow regicide Owen Rowe, who appears to have been unconvinced by the islanders’ professions of loyalty.246CSP Dom. 1651, p. 454; CSP Col. 1547-1660, p. 361. Later he was also to serve on a committee on the East India trade (27 Feb. 1652).247CJ vii. 100a.

Danvers was regularly active in the Commons until late July 1651. One of numerous occasions when – with a variety of partners – he was a teller that spring and summer was on 16 July, when he helped secure £100 a year in reparations to Thomas Foxley, former clerk to the feoffees for impropriations, for his sufferings at the hands of the court of high commission.248CJ vi. 605a. However, with the exception of a committee nomination on 1 October, when he was included on the committee to settle lands on Roger Boyle*, Lord Broghill, as a reward for his victories in Ireland, Danvers was then absent from the Journal until December.249CJ vii. 53a. No explanation for this temporary disengagement has come to light.

When Danvers returned it was to resume activity on delinquency and forfeited lands (3 Dec.).250CJ vii. 46b. This was to dominate his work for the remainder of the Parliament, although he was also prominent in what was probably to him the very congenial task of receiving foreign diplomats. Ordered with the earl of Salisbury and Sir Henry Mildmay to attend and dine with ambassadors from the United Provinces (18 and 19 Dec.), he appears to have been in their company on an number of occasions over the next few weeks; judging by the diary of Lodewijck Huygens, he and his household impressed the visitors.251CJ vii. 53a, 54a; Huygens, English Journal, 40, 41, 57, 61, 70, 92. He was later on the reception committees for envoys from Portugal (29/30 Sept. 1652), Hamburg (28 Jan. 1653) and Sweden (8 Apr. 1653), while he joined Whitelocke in voting unsuccessfully for retaining the old form of ‘the French king’ (upholding English claims) in addressing the ambassador from the king of France (28 Dec. 1652).252CJ vii. 187a, 236b, 252a, 276b.

During February 1652 Danvers was four times a teller (twice acting with General Cromwell) in divisions on clauses of the proposed Act of General Pardon and Oblivion.253CJ vii. 84b, 87a, 88a, 92b. Here he seems to have been generally in favour of the more generous line also advocated by the army, although in the many divisions that followed over insertions in the bill for sales of land forfeited for treason or petitions over sequestered land, there were exceptions to his clemency. Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton, Cromwell’s former friend, gained his support; others did not.254CJ vii. 102b, 148b, 154b, 206b, 213a, 218a, 218b, 248b, 268a. He voted for transferring responsibility for sales of all confiscated lands to the Committee for Compounding (30 Mar.) and usually endorsed other measures which increased and concentrated its power.255CJ vii. 112a, 144b, 150b, He also seems to have advocated protection of the rights of copyholders and leaseholders of confiscated land during sales.256CJ vii. 190b, 191a. Continuing earlier work, he was nominated to committees to consider complaints about the sale of the king’s goods (23 Jan. 1653) and an additional act for land sales (1 Mar. 1653).257CJ vii. 250b, 263b.

On 13 April 1652 Danvers was named to prepare the act for incorporating Scotland into the commonwealth and for abolishing monarchy there.258CJ vii. 118b. Later the same month John Harington I* met him at dinner with Cromwell, Cornelius Holland* and others.259Harington’s Diary, 73. The impression is that Danvers was close to the centre of power at this time, yet for all that he seems to have remained a maverick figure with an idiosyncratic set of opinions that he was not afraid to voice. He had employed high-profile Presbyterian ministers to preside over the conversion of Robert Villiers, but his two presentations to benefices in 1652 (with Henry Marten*, a frequent opponent and occasional collaborator in the House, and with Daniel Blagrave*) were to relatively obscure men, not distinguished for any particular allegiance.260Add. 36792, ff. 44, 58. On 28 January 1653 he was in a minority who voted for William Dell, the former army chaplain, to preach to the House: perhaps he endorsed Dell’s disinclination for religious uniformity, but the choice is surprising given Dell’s parallel disinclination for humane learning.261CJ vii. 252a. While he voted (also unsuccessfully) against Marten for engrossment of an act against scandalous and unlicensed books and pamphlets (7 Jan. 1653), in some other respects his thinking was unfettered.262CJ vii. 245a. Although an active member of the Navy Committee, he was happy to have it run by men who were not MPs (1 Oct. 1652), but he opposed a successful attempt by Marten and John Lisle* to gain stay of execution for a man convicted of horse-stealing.263Add. 22546, f. 69; Add. 74734W; CJ vii. 188b, 277a.

An insight into Danvers’ mindset at this period is provided by a letter to Whitelocke of 26 December 1651 in which he put forward recommendations for members of the commission on law reform, ‘persons experimentally known of the greatest ability and faithfulness’, who would ‘be likely to consort in particular affection as well as in general for the public service’. These included not only Whitelocke’s fellow commissioner of the great seal, John Keble, who had presided in measured fashion over the trial of John Lilburne and been sponsored by Danvers when he became a serjeant at law, and the Presbyterian judge Henry Rolle†, both ‘fittest under the notion of their profession’, and ‘one or two’ army officers to be chosen by Lord General Cromwell, but others selected for their special skills. William Methwold, the experienced East India Company merchant, ‘who hath many times passed the line, and observed the laws and customs of many regions where he hath been’; Samuel Moyer, the leading Independent, ‘alike conversant in many parts beyond the seas, being of able parts, and of good estate’; and John Sadler*, the town clerk of London, conservative as regards the law but with reforming interests. In reserve were Basil Feilding, 2nd earl of Denbigh, with ‘intelligent breeding’, experience of Venice, ‘ingenuity and faithfulness’, ‘the better to temper those reformadoes who seem to value his worth and magnanimity’; and Robert Overton, ‘rational and learned’, ‘whose forward taste to justice and right made the Levellers assume to own him as a pillar of theirs, but remaining trusty to the public interest’. Wide comparative experience, wealth, even-handedness, and proven integrity appeared to be Danvers’ criteria.

In an elliptical conclusion he ventured a comment on the commissioners’ remit which is striking in its humanity. He wondered whether ‘mere personal transient vice either of youth or age’ should really be the business of the law, ‘especially when the proofs are but hearsays, more often false than true, which is mentioned in regard the times show us more practices of slander than justification’.264Longleat, Whitelocke pprs XI, f. 159; ‘John Keble (d. 1683/4)’, Oxford DNB. The sentiments were thoughtful, balanced and open-minded, but Danvers himself was hardly either of acknowledged probity or consistent moderation. Although he served on a committees to consider petitions for relief (27 Aug. 1652), establish salaries for judges instead of fees (12 Nov. 1652) and encourage merchants to fit out warships for the public good (4 Nov. 1652), and promoted a bill for poor relief (11 Feb. 1653), Danvers appears to have played his part in the general failure of the Parliament to bring any reform to fruition: on 17 March 1653 he and Denis Bond* led negative voices which sabotaged the bill to remodel probate for wills.265CJ vii. 171b, 210a, 215a, 258a, 268b. He was active in debate on the new representative (voting with Hesilrige, 16 Mar.) and was still ready to help poor Irish petitioners (23 Mar. with Marten), but appropriately his last nomination in his last Parliament, the day before its dissolution, was to a committee dealing with a private petition from his nephew Edward Bayntun (19 Apr.).266CJ vii. 268a, 280a; CSP Ire. 1647-60, p. 454.

Last Months

As long as Parliament was sitting, MPs’ privilege meant that Danvers was relatively safe from his creditors. Within three weeks of the dissolution, Middlesex commissioners reported on 12 May that they had seized and inventoried Danvers’ goods in pursuance of an order for payment to the state. This debt was eventually recovered, but he had powerful friends like Sir Edward Atkyns, chief justice of common pleas and a cousin of Danvers’ third wife Grace Hewes (bap. ?13 Apr. 1607), whom he had married in 1648 or 1649), who seem to have limited the damage.267CCAM 464-5; PROB11/359/694 (Grace Danvers); St Mary, Tewkesbury par. reg. Six years earlier he had taken steps to sell land in Yorkshire, but this was designed to satisfy only selected creditors like Sir Peter Osborne, and the conveyance was not finalised until 1655.268Wilts. Arch. Mag. l. 215-16. By an indenture of 5 June 1652, apparently intended to settle his affairs more thoroughly, other lands were vested in trustees, including new men who were either part of the political regime or robust enough to hold their own against it – Richard Salwey* (fellow member of numerous parliamentary committees), Robert Atkyns* of Lincoln’s Inn (son of the judge), Rowland Jewkes of the Inner Temple, William Yorke* (Danvers’ Wiltshire steward, who had married the widow of Henry Danvers I*), and Thomas Yate (the covertly-elected president of Brasenose, now his attorney, who had married the widow of Sir Richard Cave*).269Wilts. RO, 9/26/3; CCAM 464. Most of his property appears to have remained intact.

Danvers did not again sit in Parliament, although the election of Yorke to sit for Wiltshire in 1654 probably owed something to his patronage and may have been intended to prolong his influence at a time when he was in bad health. Yorke, like Robert Villiers, had a royalist past which periodically returned to haunt him, and to the end of his life Danvers seems to have moved in company which both belied his status as a regicide and included an eclectic mix of his contemporaries, including his aforementioned neighbour Lady Powell. When Sir John made his will on 28 July he named as his overseers Whitelocke, Rolle, Salwey, Judge Atkyns, Chief Justice Oliver St John* and Dr John Owen*, dean of Christ Church.270PROB11/248/213. Following the death of his son Henry from smallpox that November, Thomas Fuller, the sequestered minister whom Danvers had supported, preached the funeral sermon at Lavington on 2 December.271Aubrey, Brief Lives, i. 258; W. Lavington par. reg. According to a certificate signed in 1660 by one Thomas Gunter of Sussex, at the persuasion of his wife Danvers had facilitated the escape of Henry Wilmot*, Lord Wilmot, and Charles II to France after the battle of Worcester.272CCSP v. 148-9. This cannot be verified, but one of Sir John’s last actions before his death in April 1655 must have been to arrange the betrothal of his younger daughter Anne to Wilmot’s stepson, Sir Henry Lee*; the marriage took place five weeks later, with Yorke presiding.273CB; W. Lavington par.reg.

In his last months Danvers suffered, but apparently recovered from, ‘a long and dangerous sickness’. In a sermon dedicated to his daughter Anne, Fuller celebrated his return like a Hezekiah to the magistracy, ‘more effectively serviceable’.274T. Fuller, Life out of Death (1655), A2, 12, 26 (E.1441.3). Danvers died shortly afterwards at Chelsea, but his body was taken from there on 26 April for burial at Dauntsey.275N and Q 2nd ser. x. 322. Much of the Dauntsey inheritance descended to his two daughters and their husbands, while Henry’s interest in the earl of Danby’s estates passed to the younger, Anne Lee (d. ?31 July 1659); both Danvers’ sons-in-law subsequently sat as MPs for family-dominated boroughs, although Sir Henry Lee died suddenly early in 1659.276LPL, MS 3476, ff. 89-90. Meanwhile, the inheritance of John Danvers, Sir John’s infant son with his third wife Grace Hewes, was modest.277PROB11/359/694. In the face of Danvers’ attainder at the Restoration, and the forfeiture of his unentailed lands, she put up a robust fight, protesting her royalist credentials, but as Danvers’ creditors emerged with new vigour she secured only a small estate, and her son never sat in Parliament.278Wilts. RO, 9/26/3; LPL, MSS 951, ff. 48-9; 3476, ff. 85-90; HMC 7th Rep. 151b; CSP Dom. 1660-1, pp. 261, 339, 448; 547; 1661-2, pp. 153, 172, 428, 450, 467; 1663-4, p. 403 More fortunate were Danvers’ granddaughters, Eleanora and Anne Lee. By the terms of their mother’s will, their considerable fortunes, and attendant patronage, were in left to the care of their grandmother, Anne (St John), Lady Wilmot (now countess of Rochester), and an array of trustees and ‘good friends’ including Sir Ralph Verney*, Richard Salwey and Thomas Yate.279PROB11/296/536; CSP Dom. 1661-2, p. 119. In the 1670s Eleanora married James Bertie, 1st earl of Abingdon, and Anne married Thomas Wharton†, 5th Baron Wharton.280CP.

Assessment

Danvers’ death under the protectorate spared him the retribution meted out to regicides after the Restoration. Although the embarrassment attendant on the punishment of a (by then) 75-year-old man with many close links to royalists would have been considerable, age, eminence and connections were insufficient to exempt others from punishment. But while many whom he had employed, sheltered and sustained in difficult times enjoyed successful careers thereafter, profiting from the opportunities he had given them, Danvers’ own reputation was open to attack. His behaviour over his brother’s will, his property transactions and his general carelessness over financial obligations offered much scope to detractors of all political persuasions, while investigation of his son-in-law Robert (now Danvers) in the 1659 Parliament and beyond did not reflect well on his integrity in other matters. Yet, scrutiny of his parliamentary service reveals that the man who was a generous patron and an agreeable host on private occasions could also be a hard-working Member of the House and attendant committees, whose wide interests underpinned some valuable contributions to its proceedings, and whose experience and charm might be called on to grace its public face.