Family and Education

bap. 12 Feb. 1604,1 2nd but 1st surv. s. of Sir Thomas Edmondes* (d.1639) and Magdalen, da. of Sir John Wood, clerk of the signet, of Albyns, Essex. educ. Christ Church, Oxf. 1620, BA 1623. unm. cr. KB 1 Feb. 1626.2 bur. on or bef. 1 Sept. 1635.

Offices Held

Biography

Edmondes grew up as heir-apparent to Sir Thomas Edmondes, treasurer of the Household, following the death in childhood of his elder brother Talbot. His mother was one of Anne of Denmark’s ladies-in-waiting.3 At an early age he was granted an interest in his father’s reversion to the office of clerk of the Crown in Chancery.4 In 1623 he took his degree at Oxford, and at the coronation of Charles I was dubbed a knight of the Bath. It was presumably through his father’s influence with Sir Miles Fleetwood* that in 1625 Edmondes was elected for Newton in Lancashire, a borough controlled by the Fleetwoods of Penwortham. He was named to a single committee, to consider the naturalization bill of Sir Daniel Deligne on 11 Aug., the day before the dissolution.5 He was re-elected for Newton in 1626, but left no trace on the parliamentary records. He was not returned again in 1628, which may reflect his father’s own difficulty in finding a seat.

Edmondes died, unmarried and intestate, in the summer of 1635. Had he lived it is unlikely that he would have amounted to anything. On 1 Sept. George Garrard* related that ‘Sir Thomas Edmondes [has] buried his son ... in whom he was most unfortunate. ... For, of all young men that I ever heard of, he was the most given to drunkenness, no counsel, no advice able to recall him from that filthy beastly sin.’6 William Catherens likewise reported that the treasurer was relieved ‘to be delivered of so unworthy a child’.7

Ref Volumes: 1604-1629

Authors: Alan Davidson / Rosemary Sgroi

Notes

• 1. Stapleford Tawney, Essex par. reg. transcript at Soc. Gen. p. 10.
• 2. Shaw, Knights of Eng. i. 162.
• 3. HMC Hatfield, xxiv. 67.
• 4. CSP Dom. 1603-10, p. 615.
• 5. CJ, i. 815a.
• 6. Strafforde Letters (1739) ed. W. Knowler, i. 463; CSP Dom. 1635, pp. 384-5.
• 7. Add. 29974, f. 240v.