David Jenkins

Early Life and Welsh Royalism

David Jenkins was born in Glamorgan and trained in law at Gray’s Inn before rising to serve as judge of the Court of Great Sessions in Wales. His outlook was shaped by the political culture of the Welsh gentry, who, as Sarah Ward Clavier observes, viewed loyalty to the king as a moral and religious duty inseparable from the defense of Protestant order and the liberty of the subject. Welsh royalism, she notes, was characterized by an almost unanimous attachment to “his Majesties person, honour & legall prerogative together with the protestant Religion, the libertie of the subject, & known priviledge of parliament” (Sarah Ward Clavier, Royalism, Religion and Revolution: Wales, 1640–1688 [Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2021], 43–45). This background helps explain why Jenkins conceived the monarchy and the law as mutually sustaining institutions—the Crown as the fountain of justice, the law as the instrument of its divine order.

Support for Charles I and Constitutional Royalism

When civil war erupted, Jenkins emerged as one of the most articulate defenders of what McElligott and Smith call “constitutional royalism,” the belief that monarchy and Parliament formed complementary parts of England’s ancient constitution. He denied that Parliament could legislate without the king’s assent and rejected any separation of civil authority from royal personhood. For Jenkins, “the King is bound by the lawes,” yet law itself depended on the monarch’s lawful presence (Jason McElligott and David L. Smith, eds., Royalists and Royalism during the English Civil Wars [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007], 140–43).

Pamphlet Writing and Imprisonment

After being captured by Parliamentarian forces in 1645, Jenkins was successively imprisoned in Oxford, Newgate, and the Tower of London. His confinement produced a remarkable body of writing, including Lex Terrae, The Cordiall of Judge Jenkins for the Good People of England, and The Vindication of Judge Jenkins Prisoner in the Tower. McElligott and Smith describe these pamphlets as a sustained legal argument that Magna Carta confirmed both the prerogatives of the Crown and the liberties of the people (McElligott and Smith, Royalists and Royalism, 143–46). In them Jenkins insisted that parliamentary sovereignty was a contradiction in terms, since law could not exist apart from the king who gave it life.

Jason McElligott’s later monograph Royalism, Print and Censorship in Revolutionary England details how Jenkins’s writings circulated despite the growing severity of parliamentary censorship. He became, McElligott writes, “one of the most visible victims of the Commonwealth’s attempt to silence royalist authors,” his case illustrating how the state’s reliance on imprisonment and harassment replaced open trials and executions to avoid creating martyrs (Jason McElligott, Royalism, Print and Censorship in Revolutionary England [Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007], 196–98). Parliamentarian Henry Marten reportedly warned that killing Jenkins would only strengthen royalist resolve, invoking the phrase “sanguis martyrum est semen ecclesiae”—“the blood of martyrs is the seed of the church” (McElligott, Royalism, Print and Censorship, 196–97).

Religious Meaning and Refusal to Yield

William White’s The Lord’s Battle situates Jenkins’s pamphlets within a wider royalist culture that fused law and divinity. His writings echoed the sermonic tone of contemporaries like Henry Ferne and Jeremy Taylor, presenting obedience to the king as a Christian virtue and portraying his own imprisonment as a test of faith. White terms this outlook “royalist providentialism,” the belief that God’s justice would vindicate the monarchy through the suffering of its defenders (William White, The Lord’s Battle: Preaching, Print and Royalism during the English Revolution [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2023], 134–36). Jenkins refused to recognize Parliament’s jurisdiction even under threat of execution in 1648, and his defiance was celebrated in royalist pulpits and pamphlets as a form of witness. White observes that his readers treated him as a “martyr of the written word,” whose persistence testified that divine law and the common law were one and the same (White, The Lord’s Battle, 136–39).

Welsh Memory and Restoration Afterlife

Clavier demonstrates that Restoration-era Wales preserved Jenkins’s example as part of a moral and political mythology of loyalty. His name joined other Welsh royalists remembered not only for their service to the Stuarts but also for their steadfastness in faith and law. Such figures became symbols of national virtue, embodying the conviction that defending monarchy was itself an act of piety (Clavier, Royalism, Religion and Revolution, 221–23).

Legacy

Freed at the Restoration, Jenkins lived quietly until his death in 1663. McElligott and Smith conclude that his “legalist royalism” bridged the lawyer’s respect for precedent with the theologian’s trust in providence; his oft-quoted maxim that “the King can doe no wrong” expressed not tyranny but the indivisibility of ruler and law (McElligott and Smith, Royalists and Royalism, 147–48). Taken together, the scholarship of McElligott, Smith, White, and Clavier presents Jenkins as both a Welsh patriot and a royalist jurist whose defiance transformed the courtroom, the prison, and the printed page into sites of moral resistance against Puritan rule.