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David Lewis was born in 1616 at Abergavenny in Monmouthshire, Wales, the son of Morgan Lewis, a Protestant headmaster of King Henry VIII Grammar School, and Margaret Pritchard, a Catholic from a recusant family. Raised in his father's Protestant faith, he received a grammar-school education and as a young man was sent to London to study law. In the 1630s, while traveling on the Continent, he converted to Catholicism. He then entered the English College in Rome, completed his ecclesiastical studies, and was ordained a priest in 1642. In 1645 he entered the Society of Jesus.

After Jesuit formation he was assigned to the English mission and returned to his native Wales. For more than three decades he ministered to recusant Catholics in Monmouthshire and the Welsh Marches, often under the alias Charles Baker in order to evade the penal laws that made the presence of a priest ordained abroad a capital offense. He became known in Welsh as Tad y Tlodion, Father of the Poor, for his charity. Lewis was closely associated with the Jesuit college at Cwm in Llanrothal, which served as a missionary base, a house of study, and a center for Catholic books; he served for a time as its superior.

In November 1678, during the anti-Catholic panic generated by Titus Oates's fabricated Popish Plot, Lewis was arrested. He was imprisoned at Monmouth and later at Usk. In March 1679 he was tried at the Monmouth Assizes and convicted of high treason solely for being a Catholic priest who had exercised his ministry in the realm. On 27 August 1679 he was hanged, drawn, and quartered at Usk. Contemporary accounts record that local sympathy was strong enough that he was allowed to hang until dead before the remainder of the sentence was carried out. On the scaffold he professed the Catholic faith, denied any plot against the king, and prayed for Charles II. He was buried in the churchyard of the Priory Church of St Mary at Usk.

Lewis was beatified by Pope Pius XI on 15 December 1929 and canonized by Pope Paul VI on 25 October 1970 as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales. His individual feast is kept on 27 August, the anniversary of his martyrdom, and he is also commemorated with the other Forty Martyrs. The burial site at Usk became a place of pilgrimage, and he remains one of the principal saints of Welsh Catholicism.

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