This is the story of the life of an able, versatile, and learned man, neglected, and his “unregarded age in corners thrown.”

He was born 4 March, 1743, at Downhouse, in the parish of Tavistock, of respectable parents. They moved whilst he was still an infant to a farm belonging to them, Knighton, in the parish of Hennock. As a child he was fond of mechanics, and amused himself with contriving various pieces of machinery. When aged eight years he watched the construction of a mill, and imitated it in small in wood, thoroughly grasping all the points in the mechanism. After a while the workmen engaged on the mill came to a difficulty, and the mill stopped, nor could they rectify the fault. Little Will Davy pointed out the defects; they saw that he was right, remedied the defects, and the mill ran “suently.”

He was educated at the Exeter Grammar School, and at the age of eighteen matriculated at Balliol College, Oxford. Whilst there the idea came into his head to produce a great work of divinity, a compendium of evidence of the origin of the Christian Faith; but the idea lay dormant for a few years.

On leaving college he was ordained to the curacy of Moreton Hampstead, and married Sarah, daughter of a Mr. Gilbert, of Longabrook, near Kingsbridge. When settled into his curacy he began to reduce to order the plan he had devised of writing a General System of Theology, and wrote twelve volumes of MS. on the subject.

Then he shifted to Drewsteignton. His preaching was complained of to the Bishop of Exeter, who sent for him. He took his twelve volumes of MS. with him and showed them to the Bishop, and bade him look through them and mark any lapse from orthodoxy.

This was more than the Bishop was disposed to do; he ran his fingers through the pages, he could do no more. “What the parishioners objected to,” said Davy, “was not that I taught false doctrine, but that I rebuke vicious habits that prevail.” Actually, doubtless, it was his long-winded discourses on the evidence for a God, and for the immortality of the soul, that the people objected to. They, simple souls, no more needed these evidences than they did that they themselves lived and talked and listened.

The Bishop was courteous, and promised Davy that he would give him any living that fell vacant, and asked him if he had a preference for one. Davy humbly replied that there was a certain benefice likely to be vacated very shortly that would suit him exactly. The Bishop promised to remember this, and of course forgot, and appointed some one else, one more of a toady, or better connected.

Davy continued his mechanical work and executed several ingenious pieces of machinery.

Then he was appointed to the curacy of Lustleigh at £40 per annum; but from that sum was deducted £5 for the rent of the rectory in which he had to live, the incumbent being non-resident.

Whilst at Lustleigh he published by subscription six volumes of sermons and lost £100 by the transaction, as many of the subscribers failed to pay for the books sent to them.

Then he took to farming, but he had no experience and lost money by it, and had to abandon the farm.

The ambition of his life was to publish his System of Divinity, which would utterly refute atheism, deism, and every ism under the sun, and establish the doctrine of the Church on a sound basis. But no publisher or printer would undertake the mighty work unless sure of payment; and the price asked was far beyond the means of Davy. Determined to bring his great work before the world, he constructed his own printing press, and bought type, but could not afford to purchase more than would enable him to set up four pages of his book at a time.

Accordingly he did this, struck off forty copies, broke up the type and printed four more, and so on. He taught his servant, Mary Hole, to compose type, and these two worked together, and at last completed the work in twenty-six volumes, each of nearly five hundred pages. When the first volume was completed he sent copies to the Bishop, the Dean and Chapter, the Archdeacon, the Universities, and other persons of repute for learning. But he received no encouragement. Some of those to whom he sent his book did not trouble to acknowledge having received it. When the vast work was complete in twenty-six volumes, he sent a copy to his diocesan, Dr. Fisher, who ungraciously said to Davy, when he called at the Palace, “I cannot be supposed to be able to notice every trifle that appears in print.” To this Davy replied, “If your Lordship considers twenty-six volumes 8vo, the labour of fifty years in collecting, compiling, and printing, to be a trifle, I most certainly cannot allow myself to expect from your Lordship either approbation or encouragement.”

At last he retired from the parsonage of Lustleigh, discountenanced and discouraged, to a small farm of his own, called Willmead. His curacy was now advanced to £60, and he had not to keep up the large rectory. At Willmead he amused his leisure hours with gardening. He moved the granite boulders, arranged terraces among the rocks, and formed a herbaceous garden, in which he took the liveliest interest. Whilst here he invented a diving-bell, and prepared his contrivance for use to raise the guns and other property lost in the Royal George (1782), but he had not the means to cause a model of his machine to be made, and his idea was taken up and carried out by others. But Davy was by no means the first inventor of the diving-bell, Dr. Halley had made one in or about 1720; it was of wood covered with lead, and air was supplied through barrels attached to it. But the plan proposed by Davy was far in advance of this, and was, in fact, practically that of the diving-bell as now in use. It was not till 1817 that the Royal George was surveyed by means of a diving-bell, and portions of the cargo, the guns, etc., were not raised till 1839–42. At length, at the age of eighty-two, Davy was presented in 1825 to the vicarage of Winkleigh, and that not by either the Bishop or the Dean and Chapter.

But this preferment coming so late in life was rather a cruelty to him than a favour granted. It removed him from his garden, in which he had spent such happy hours, and which was crowded with his collections of rare plants procured with difficulty and from distances, from all his little contrivances, and from the comforts of his own residence. He had to shift quarters in December, caught a chill in the raw damp vicarage to which he removed, and after holding the benefice for five months, expired there on 13 June, 1826, and was laid in the chancel of Winkleigh.

After his death three volumes of extracts from his System of Divinity were published, together with a Memoir, by the Rev. C. Davy, Exeter, 1827, and fell as flat as had the twenty-six volumes from which these withered arguments were culled, and no man—not a theologian even—would think it worth his while now to read a dozen pages of the work. But the intention was good—he was persistent in carrying it out, he had the honour and glory of God before his eyes, and he worked for that, and certainly will receive the commendation, “Well done, good and faithful servant, enter thou into the joy of thy Lord,” though bishops and deans and archdeacons and the well-beneficed clergy, “bene nati, bene vestiti et moderate docti,” showed him the cold shoulder here below.

But one cannot fail to regret that, placed where he had been, at Moreton, at Drewsteignton, at Lustleigh, his active mind had not been turned to more profitable pursuits. What might he not have gleaned, then, among the traditions of the people! What stores of ballads might he not have collected! What careful plans and descriptions he might have made of the prehistoric relics that then abounded around him, then almost intact, now to such a large extent wrecked and swept away.

At Drewsteignton there was a most remarkable collection of stone circles and avenues and menhirs, and all have gone, not one is now left, only the dolmen of Shilstone remains. One accurate plan drawn by Davy, and draw and plan he could, would have been worth all his twenty-six volumes of System of Divinity.