In his youth, he travelled through France and Italy, developing sophisticated tastes in gardening and architecture, which in later life he indulged at his house in Chelsea.
[1] Danvers was engaged in mercantile transactions, and in 1624 he learned that the government were contemplating a seizure of the papers of the Virginia Company.
With the aid of Edward Collingwood, the secretary, he had the whole of the records copied out and entrusted them to the care of Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, a family friend, who deposited them at his house at Titchfield, Hampshire.
He refused to contribute to the expenses of the king's expedition to Scotland in 1639, and was returned to the Short Parliament of 1640 by Oxford University.
In 1642 he took up arms for the parliament, and was granted a colonel's commission which he held in command of the Wiltshire foot militia until 1650, but he did not play a prominent part in military affairs.
Danvers was ordered by the parliament to receive the Dutch ambassadors late in 1644, and on 10 October 1645 was returned to the house as member for Malmesbury in the place of Anthony Hungerford, disabled to sit.
At a young age Danvers acquired a fine garden and house at Chelsea: the latter he furnished sumptuously and curiously, and the former he laid out after the Italian manner. '
Still in pecuniary difficulties, Danvers resisted this disposition of his brother's property, and his influence with the parliamentary majority led the House of Commons to pass a resolution declaring that he had been deprived of his brother's estate 'for his affection and adhering to the parliament' (14 June 1644), and that Danvers's eldest son Henry was entitled to the property.