with the parliamentary majority led the House of Commons to pass a resolution declaring that he was 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. He was ordered by the parliament to receive the Dutch ambassadors late in 1644, and on 10 Oct. 1645 was returned to the house as member for Malmesbury in the place of 'Anthony Hungerford, esq., disabled to sit.' He took little part in the proceedings of the house, but was appointed a member of the commission nominated to try the king in January 1649. He was only twice absent from the meetings of the commission, and signed the death-warrant. In February of the same year Danvers was given a seat on the council of state, which he retained till the council's dissolution in 1653. He died at his house at Chelsea in April 1655, and was buried at Dauntsey (Notes and Queries, 2nd ser. x. 322). His name was in the Act of Attainder passed at the Restoration.
Danvers married a third time at Chelsea, on 6 Jan. 1648-9, his wife being Grace Hewett, and he had by her a son, John (b. 10 Aug. 1650). His family by his second wife consisted of Henry (b. 5 Dec. 1633), who inherited much of his uncle Henry's property, and died before his father in November 1654, when Thomas Fuller is stated to have preached the funeral sermon; Charles, who died in infancy; Elizabeth (b. 1 May 1629), who married Robert Wright, alias Villiers, alias Danvers, Viscount Purbeck [see Danvers, Robert]; and Mary, who died in infancy. The son Henry bequeathed 'the whole of the great estate in his power' to his niece Ann (his sister Elizabeth's daughter), who married Sir Henry Lee of Ditchley in 1655, and had a daughter, Eleanor, wife of the first Earl of Abingdon (Notes and Queries, 2nd ser. ix. 88-9). Lord Abingdon thus ultimately came into possession of the property at Chelsea.
Echard makes the remarkable statement (p. 647), not elsewhere confirmed, that Danvers 'was a professed papist, and so continued to the day of his death, as his own daughter has sufficiently attested.' Clarendon, who describes Danvers as a 'proud, formal man,' writes of his career thus: 'Between being seduced and a seducer, he became so far involved in their [i.e. the parliamentarian] councils that he suffered himself to be applied to their worst offices, taking it to be a high honour to sit upon the same bench with Cromwell, who employed and contemned him at once. Nor did that party of miscreants look upon any two men in the kingdom with that scorn and detestation as they did upon Danvers and Mildmay.' Aubrey's gossip about Danvers gives the impression that he was a man of refinement and geneality. Bate, the royalist biographer of the regicides, was of opinion that Danvers's intimacy with Fuller, who frequently preached in his presence at Chelsea church, led him to repent of his political action before his death.
[Noble's Regicides, i. 163-70; Notes and Queries, 2nd ser. iii. 495, viii. 309, 3rd ser. vi. 148, 318, 334, 4th ser. iii. 225; Clarendon's Hist., iv. 536 (ed. 1849); Bate's Lives (1661); Aubrey's Lives of Eminent Persons; Faulkner's Chelsea, i. 171-4; J. E. Bailey's Life of Thomas Fuller; Aubrey's Natural Hist. of Wiltshire, ed. Britton, p. 93, where Danvers's garden at Lavington is fully described. In Aubrey's manuscript of this volume at the Bodleian is also a long account of the Chelsea garden which has never been printed.]
DANVERS, alias Villiers, alias Wright, ROBERT, called Viscount Purbeck (1621?–1674), was illegitimate son of Frances, daughter of Sir Edward Coke, the lord chief justice of England. This lady was the first wife of Sir John Villiers (created Viscount Purbeck in 1619), the Duke of Buckingham's brother, and eloped from him in 1621, with Sir Robert Howard. Subsequently, being cited in the high commission court for adultery, she was condemned, fined 500l., and committed to prison in the Gatehouse, from which she made her escape. Her own version of these circumstances is given in her petition to the king on 8 Feb. 1640–1 (Harl. MS. 4746). After her misconduct Lady Purbeck assumed the name of Wright, and gave birth privately to a son, who also bore that surname, but his father's identity is doubtful. Robert Wright was brought up in the catholic religion, but renounced it. For some time he commanded a regiment of dragoons in the army of Charles I. Having married Elizabeth, daughter and heiress of Sir John Danvers [q. v.], one of the regicide judges, he changed his political principles, and obtained from Cromwell a patent authorising him to assume the surname of his wife in lieu of that of Villiers, although he had no legal title to that designation, because the latter name and family were so closely identified with hostility to the Commonwealth. He was returned as one of the members for Westbury, Wiltshire, to the parliament summoned by Richard Cromwell, which met at Westminster 27 Jan. 1658–9, but on the 12th of the following month he was expelled from the House of Commons for delinquency (Willis, Notitia Parliamentaria, vol. iii. pt.
