ii. p. 294; Burton, Diary, iii. 241–53). To the Convention parliament, which assembled at Westminster 25 April 1660, he was returned as member for Malmesbury, Wiltshire (Parliamentary Hist. of England, ed. 1763, xxii. 222). At the Restoration he seems to have taken his seat among the peers, although he had no legal right to a place there, but in July 1660 he was expelled from the House of Lords and committed to prison for having said that rather than Charles I should want one to cut off his head, he would do it himself, and that Bradshaw was a gallant man, and the preserver of our liberties (ib. xxii. 360–3, 382–4; Gent. Mag. ccxix. 357).
At the court held at Whitehall 20 Sept. 1660, it was represented to the king in council that Robert Villiers, alias Danvers, desired to surrender to his majesty the title of Viscount Purbeck. It was thereupon ordered that he should proceed to surrender it by levying a fine in due course of law. Danvers, who eventually became a Fifth-monarchy man, was in confinement in the Tower in 1663–4 (Bayley, Tower of London, ed. 1830, p. 590). Pepys in his ‘Diary,’ under date 5 Aug. 1665, says: ‘I am told by the great ryott upon Thursday last in Cheapside, Colonel Danvers, a delinquent, having been taken, and in his way to the Tower, was rescued from the captain of the guard and carried away; only one of the rescuers being taken.’ He fled to France, where he died, being buried at Calais in 1674 (Aubrey and Aubrey, Wiltshire, p. 217).
His widow, on her return to England, resumed the titles of Baroness of Stoke and Viscountess Purbeck, thinking this would advance the interest of her son Robert, on whose behalf a claim to the titles was formally made. The question was argued in June 1678, when the peers came to the celebrated resolution ‘that no fine now levied, nor at any time hereafter to be levied to the king, can bar such title of honour, or the right of any person claiming such title under him that levied, or shall levy such fine,’ thus confirming a similar decision in the case of the claim to the barony of Grey de Ruthyn in 1646 (Collins, Proceedings on Claims concerning Baronies by Writ, with manuscript notes by Oldys and Hargrave, pp. 293–306). It was also decided that the claimant had no right to the titles because his father was illegitimate. These titles were afterwards claimed by the Rev. George Villiers, son of Edward, a younger son of Robert Wright, alias Danvers; but no proceedings were adopted, and on the death of his son George in 1774 without issue, the male line became extinct (Burke, Extinct Peerages, ed. 1846, pp. 457–8; Courthope, Historic Peerage, p. 391).
[Aubrey and Jackson's Wiltshire, 189, 218; Blomefield's Norfolk (1807), vi. 428, vii. 326, ix. 479, x. 305; Commons' Journals, iv. 460, 508, 534, 605, vii. 602, 603; Dugdale's Baronage, ii. 432; Calendars of State Papers (Dom. Charles II); Lords' Journals, x. 360, xi. 58, 64–6, 75, 76, 91, 93, 94, 103, 107, 166, 167, 337, xii. 673; Noble's Regicides, i. 169; Parliamentary History (1763), xxii. 360–3, 382–4; Tanner MS. lx. f. 493, lxxiii. f. 514.]
D'ARBLAY, FRANCES. [See Arblay, Frances (Burnet) d'.]
DARBY, ABRAHAM (1677–1717), iron manufacturer, was born in 1677, probably at Wren's Nest, near Dudley, Worcestershire, where his father occupied a farm. After serving his apprenticeship to a malt-mill maker in Birmingham, in 1698 he started in that business on his own account. About 1704 he visited Holland, and bringing back with him some Dutch brassfounders he established at Bristol the Baptist Mills Brass Works with capital furnished him by four associates, who left him the management of the concern. Believing that cast iron might be substituted for brass in some manufactures, he tried with his Dutch workmen to make iron castings in moulds of sand. The experiment failed, but proved successful when he adopted a suggestion made by a boy in his employment, named John Thomas, who consequently rose in his service, and whose descendants were for something like a century trusted agents of Darby's descendants (Percy, p. 887; cf. Smiles, p. 81). In April 1708 he took out a patent for ‘a new way of casting iron pots and other iron-bellied ware in sand, only, without loam or clay,’ a process which cheapened utensils much used by the poorer classes and then largely imported from abroad. But his associates refusing to risk more money in the new venture Darby dissolved his connection with them, and drawing out his share of the capital took a lease of an old furnace in Coalbrookdale, Shropshire, removing to Madely Court in 1709. Here he prospered until his death, 8 March 1717. At his death his eldest son, the second Abraham Darby (1711–1763), born 12 March 1711, was only six years old, and did not enter until about 1730 on the management of the Coalbrookdale Ironworks. In Dr. Percy's interesting sketch of the Darby family, from information furnished by its then (1864) representative, there is a circumstantial account of the second Abraham Darby's successful efforts to smelt iron ore by the use of coke instead of charcoal, a process sometimes supposed to have
