Sir John Davies (16 April 1569 (baptised) – 8 December 1626) was an English poet, lawyer, and politician who sat in the House of Commons at various times between 1597 and 1621.
He studied there until the age of sixteen and went to further his education at the Queen's College, Oxford, where he stayed for just eighteen months, with most historians questioning whether he received a degree.
[3] In February 1598, Davies was disbarred for the offence of entering the dining hall of the Inns in the company of two swordsmen and striking Richard Martin with a cudgel.
The victim Martin was a noted wit who had insulted him in public, and Davies immediately took a boat at the Temple steps and retired to Oxford, where he chose to write poetry.
Davies arrived in Dublin in November 1603, where Mountjoy had accepted the submission of the rebel Hugh O'Neill some six months earlier, at the close of the Nine Years War.
Finding pestilence and famine all over Ireland, Davies noted that the courts still commanded respect, but that the sloth of the protestant clergy and the ruin of the churches were detrimental to religion.
He condemned the practice of issuing debased coinage and, in pursuit of the establishment of regular quarter-sessions of the courts, went on the Leinster circuit through seven counties in April 1604.
He delivered a powerful speech on 23 November 1605 in the Court of Castle Chamber, dealing with the summonsing of recusants to answer their contempt of the king's proclamations.
In May 1606, he submitted his report of his circuit of the province of Munster to Sir Robert Cecil, the king's secretary, and was made serjeant at law after his appointment as Attorney General.
Davies always looked at Ireland as a stepping-stone towards major political office in England but he knew that his chances were hurt by the death of Cecil, his patron, and his own absence from the court.
He revisited England in 1610 on plantation business, which had so advanced that he thought his assistance to the commission charged with bringing the project to fruition would no longer be needed.
In the first sitting, he was proposed as speaker with the Crown's approval, but he met fierce opposition from the Catholic members, who formed a very large minority and nominated a former High Court judge, Sir John Everard, the knight of the shire for County Tipperary.
[5] In 1617 Davies failed to win the position of Solicitor General for England and Wales and consequently resigned as Attorney-General in Ireland, having ensured that he would be replaced by his nephew William Ryves.
This poem, written in rhyme royal, reveals a typical Elizabethan pleasure: contemplating and trying to understand the relationship between the natural order and human activity.
Davies's poem "I know my soul hath power to know all things" was set to music by the composer Hubert Parry in his choral work, Songs of Farewell (1916–18).
His only son to survive infancy, John (Jack), was deaf and dumb; his daughter Lucy married Ferdinando Hastings and became Countess of Huntingdon.
[6] On 28 July 1625, Eleanor was working on a commentary of the Book of Daniel and believed she heard the voice of the prophet; she wrote about the experience and took it to the Archbishop of Canterbury.