Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Garvey, John
GARVEY, JOHN, D.D. (1527–1595), archbishop of Armagh, eldest son of John O'Garvey of Morisk, co. Mayo, was born in the county of Kilkenny in 1527. He was educated at Oxford, where he graduated in the reign of Edward VI; but through some negligence his name does not appear in the public register of the time (Wood, Athenæ Oxonienses, ed. Bliss, ii. 838). His first ecclesiastical preferment was the deanery of Ferns, to which he was appointed by letters patent in 1558; in the following year, 13 July, he became archdeacon of Meath and rector of Kells, when he probably resigned the deanery, and in 1560 he was instituted to the prebend of Tipperkevin in St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin. On 27 Jan. 1561 he received ‘letters of denization’ from the crown (Rot. Pat.). He must have been in great favour with the higher powers, for, with liberty to retain at least two of his preferments, he was made dean of Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, in 1565, and likewise a member of the Irish privy council. He was even designed for the archbishopric of Armagh in 1584, when it was conferred on John Long, D.D., as appears from a letter addressed by the lords justices of Ireland to Secretary Walsyngham, dated 14 May 1584 (Calendar of State Papers, Ireland, 1574–85, p. 512). In April of the following year he was promoted to the bishopric of Kilmore, on the recommendation of Sir John Perrot, lord deputy of the kingdom, and was allowed to hold in commendam his deanery and archdeaconry. From Kilmore he was translated in May 1589 to the archbishopric of Armagh, still retaining his minor preferments; and as a special mark of favour Queen Elizabeth, by mandate from Westminster, dated 12 July 1591, remitted the payment of his first fruits, amounting to 137l. 13s. 1d., ‘on account of his great hospitality, and also for his painful and true service to the queen of a long time continued, being her ancientest counsellor in that kingdom’ (Rot. Canc.). In 1591, in answer to a circular appeal from Sir William Fitzwilliam, lord deputy, and council, he gave in concordatum 76l. towards building the college of Dublin. He had married Rose, widowed daughter of Thomas Ussher, and dying in Dublin 2 March 1595, he was buried in Christ Church, his successor in the archbishopric being his brother-in-law, Henry Ussher, D.D., archdeacon of Dublin.
Garvey is not included in Sir James Ware's ‘History of the Writers of Ireland;’ but on Wood's authority a small treatise is ascribed to him, entitled ‘The Conversion of Philip Corwine, a Franciscan Friar, to the Reformation of the Protestant Religion, an. 1589,’ which was published by Robert Ware in his ‘Foxes and Firebrands,’ Dublin, 1681, from the original found among Archbishop (James) Ussher's manuscripts. Philip ‘Corwine’ was nephew to Hugh Curwen, archbishop of Dublin [q. v.]
[Sir James Ware's Works, ed. Harris, i. 96, 331; Mant's Hist. of the Church of Ireland, i. 311, 315; Cotton's Fasti Ecclesiæ Hibernicæ, ii. 41, 180, 348, iii. 19, 116, 127, 157, 183, v. 89, 198; Stuart's Hist. of Armagh, p. 263; Dublin University Calendar, 1876, ii. 160.]