DAVIES, Matthew (1595-1678), of Shaftesbury, Dorset, Chicksgrave, Tisbury, Wilts. and the Middle Temple.

The Davies family resided in Flintshire and Shropshire before settling in Wiltshire in the early sixteenth century, upon acquiring the manor of Chicksgrave in the parish of Tisbury. Matthew Davies came from a cadet branch of the family, whose most prominent member during this period was his uncle, Sir John Davies†, poet and sometime speaker of the Irish House of Commons and attorney-general of Ireland.17HP Commons 1604-1629. Although Davies’ father, Edward, was referred to as a ‘tanner’, he was also styled a ‘gentleman’, and Davies himself was educated as befitted that station.18The Gen. v. 27. He was admitted in 1614 to the Middle Temple, where he was bound with William Ryves and Egremont Thynne (members respectively of Dorset and Wiltshire gentry families), called to the bar in 1623, and where he was to retain chambers until at least 1645, although he was fined for absence on a numerous occasions in the 1610s and 1620s.19MTR ii. 586, 595, 598, 604, 686, 695, 700, 705, 712. Indeed, he may have spent much of his time in Shaftesbury, Dorset, where he established the legal practice which provided his main source of income.20Hutchins, Dorset, iii. 8; SP23/175, f. 69. Judging by his sister’s portion of £40, and by the sums left to him and his three younger brothers in their father’s will proved in February 1625, the family patrimony was small.21PROB11/145/240.

Davies was returned for Hindon to the 1624 Parliament, on the interest of the Marvyns or Mervyns of nearby Fonthill Gifford, another family of Middle Temple lawyers, to whom their neighbours the Davieses became closely connected. The wife of Matthew’s uncle Sir John Davies was the visionary Lady Eleanor Davies, a daughter of George Tuchet, 1st earl of Castlehaven, and a granddaughter of Sir James Marvyn†.22Drake, Fasciculus, 29; ‘Lady Eleanor Davies’, Oxford DNB. Before January 1627 Matthew himself married a sister of Sir Henry Mervyn†, who was Sir James’s heir, husband of another of his Tuchet granddaughters, and a Member for Hindon in 1614 and 1621.23The Gen. v. 27; HP Commons 1604-1629 Matthew left no visible mark on proceedings of the 1624 Parliament, and was not elected to another that decade.

During the 1630s Davies’s attendance at his inn seems to have been more constant.24MTR ii. 794. In 1635 he was acting as a trustee for his uncle Sir John’s daughter and heir, Lucy, and her husband Ferdinando Hastings†, Lord Hastings, the future 6th earl of Huntingdon.25Coventry Docquets, 675-6, 680. Described as of Shaftesbury in 1639, he was added in July 1640 to the commission of the peace for Dorset.26C231/5, p. 394; Dorset RO, S235/C7/3/13.

On 26 October 1640 Davies was elected to what became the Long Parliament for the second place at Christchurch on the Dorset-Hampshire border, on the recommendation of its Catholic lord of the manor, Cecil Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore, who wrote to the borough on 29 September.27Christchurch Borough Council, Old Letters, no. 35; Dorset RO, DC/CC: F1/9, F2/9. As in 1624, Davies received no committee appointments, and he may have been absent from the chamber for long periods. On 19 December 1640 James Tuchet, 3rd earl of Castlehaven, who sat in the Lords as Baron Audley, complained to fellow peers that Davies, described as a ‘counsellor’, had ‘lately spoke some things to [him] which he thought his honour was to be cleared in’. Perhaps this had something to do with the ‘unnatural offences’ which had taken place in the Tuchet household a decade earlier, for which the 2nd earl had been executed, but whatever lay behind it, the Lords were evidently nervous of permitting one of their number to rush into a prosecution of a sitting MP, and made Audley take time for reflection.28LJ iv. 113a. Nothing more was heard of the matter.

Davies took the Protestation promptly on 3 May 1641.29CJ ii. 133b. However, he then made no impression on in the Commons Journal or on parliamentary diarists until 28 April 1642, when he was reported to have arrived in town, and when the Commons ordered that he should give an account of his long absence.30PJ ii. 235, 241; CJ ii. 545a. His return to Westminster was evidently in response to pressure from Edward Lawrence, sheriff of Dorset, who had been asked by Parliament on 19 April to send letters to members from the county who were absent, including Sir Gerrard Naper*, Sir John Strangways*, Giles Strangways*, as well as Davies.31Bodl. Nalson II, ff. 36-7. Davies – who might have proffered the excuse that he had been named to a commission of oyer and terminer in Dorset that February – did not become any more active in the Commons, however. 32C181/5, f. 226v. His prolonged absences from the House soon provoked complaints. Nevertheless, on more than one occasion the Commons were prepared to give him permission to return to the country. On 26 May 1642, he was given licence, upon the motion of William Strode I*, to leave Westminster in order to find papers relating to Ferdinando, Lord Hastings†, the husband of his cousin. He was also granted leave of absence on 11 July.33CJ ii. 587b, 664b; HMC 5th Rep. 5, 19, 25.

During the summer of 1642, it was probably clear that Davies’ allegiance was to the king rather than Parliament, although he was not named as a commissioner for array. Nevertheless, his continued failure to attend the House eventually led to the decision, on 12 November 1642, that he should be taken into custody, which was followed by another order, on 15 February 1643, that he and two other Dorset lawyers were to be sent for as delinquents, for contempt of Parliament in failing to attend.34CJ ii. 845b, 966a; Add. 18777, f. 155v. Finally, on 16 March 1643, ‘after some debate’, an order was issued that he be disabled as a Member of Parliament.35CJ iii. 4b. However, having been arrested by the serjeant-at-arms, the Commons ordered on 13 May that he was to be bailed pending consideration of his case by the committee for absent members, and he was released from restraint three days later.36CJ iii. 84a, 88a. Meanwhile, the Lords were still addressing instructions to him as a justice of the peace (11, 16 May).37LJ vi. 42a, 48b.

Sometime after his release, Davies went to the royalist headquarters at Oxford, where he sat in the Oxford Parliament, subscribing their letter to Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, on 27 January 1644.38Rushworth, Hist Collns. iii. pt. 2, p. 574. On 13 February the king made him joint commissioner for administering oaths to muster masters.39Docquets of Letters Patent ed. Black, 145-6. How far his activity extended in practice is unclear. On 25 October 1645 the issue of a new writ was ordered for a by-election to replace both Members for Christchurch, Henry Tulse I* having died, resulting in the return of John Kemp* and Richard Edwards*.40CJ iv. 322a; C231/6, p. 31. Having submitted to the governor of Poole, on 13 November Davies asked to compound for his delinquency; prompt submission of a survey of his estates seems to have contributed to the rapid resolution of the case, with his fine, set at £300 on 10 January 1646, paid sometime before 9 July.41CCC 959; SP23/79, p. 702; SP23/175, p. 54-7.

Inability or unwillingness to pay his assessment, which was set at £200 in March 1647, probably lay behind Davies’s arrest by the Dorset county committee, and his (eventual) imprisonment at Weymouth. Sometime before 14 September 1650 the council of state received a petition on his behalf, and on that day ordered an investigation into his case, somewhat suggestively alongside that of Dr Bruno Ryves, the royalist clergyman and journalist (confined at Melcombe), with whom he had a distant kinship connection through the Mervyns and perhaps a closer one through Middle Temple friends.42CSP Dom. 1650, p. 339; ‘Bruno Ryves’, Oxford DNB. In May 1651 the decision was made, on consideration of Davies’s debts and the money which he had already paid, to reduce his twentieth part to £17. Swift payment led to the discharge of his estate, and he was presumably released from detention.43CCAM 784.

For the remainder of the 1650s, Davies appears to have lived quietly in Shaftesbury, unmolested by the authorities, and uninvolved in royalist conspiracies. The only indication of his activity is his having acted as trustee in 1657 for Sir George Savage in relation to property in Dorset.44Dorset RO, D/BLX/T3. He continued living in Shaftesbury after the Restoration, when he appears to have shown no inclination to secure election to an further Parliaments.45Dorset Hearth Tax, 22. He returned to the commission of the peace, however, and served on a number of other local commissions during the 1660s and 1670s. In 1662 he was active as a commissioner for corporations, at least in relation to the town of Lyme Regis, with whose town clerk his correspondence survives.46Dorset RO, DC/LR/D2/1, unfol.

Davies died in 1678 at the age of 83, and in accordance with the terms of his will was buried at his native Tisbury (evidently after 30 July, when a volume of the parish register ends), beside his wife, who had died in 1657. Davies had also been predeceased by his only son, but lack of detail about his lands suggests his estate had already been settled on a grandson. Two of the latter – John and Matthew, who was at the Middle Temple and to whom Davies bequeathed his law books – received, alongside numerous uncles, aunts, siblings and cousins, cash sums totalling little more than £450.47PROB11/358/368; Tisbury par. reg.; MTR iii. 1295-6; Aubrey, Top. Collections, 363; Hutchins, Dorset, iii. 8.