[1] Also a civil lawyer, he is now remembered for political views, which moved from an absolutist position in the 1630s to a justification of resistance to authority by 1640, within a contractarian setting.
[2] He was son of Calybute Downing of the manor of Sugarswell in Shenington, in an exclave of Gloucestershire,[3] (between Banbury, Oxfordshire and Upper Tysoe, Warwickshire), and Elizabeth Morrison née Wingfield, who married in December 1604 at Tinwell, Rutland.
He left Oxford and was apparently curate at Quainton, Buckinghamshire when on 2 December 1627 he married Margaret, the daughter of the rector Richard Brett.
Downing's stepmother, Anne, daughter of Edmund Hoogan of Hackney, Middlesex, died at Quainton in December 1630 and was buried there.
[18] Preaching before the Artillery Company of London on 1 September 1640, however, he stated that for defence of religion and reformation of the church it was lawful to take up arms against the king.
Samuel Butler comments that Downing on this occasion was acting for Puritan leaders to test opinion, and that after preaching the sermon he went to the house of Robert Rich, 2nd Earl of Warwick at Little Lees, Essex.
[19] In the December following Downing made a petition to the House of Lords for the living of Hackney, on the grounds that the rector had received another incumbency.
[25] He died suddenly soon afterwards: he was deceased by 2 November 1643, when the House of Lords approved the Commons nomination of John Dury to succeed him in the Assembly of Divines.