EDWARDES, Humphrey (aft. 1592-1658), of the College, Shrewsbury; Gray’s Inn, Mdx., and Richmond, Surr.

The Edwardes family was of Welsh origin, settled from at least early Tudor times at Cilhendre, in Dudleston, a north-west Shropshire parish on the border with Flintshire. By the mid-sixteenth century, a son of Cilhendre, Hugh Edwardes, had moved to Shrewsbury, and was prominent in securing the royal charter to found Shrewsbury school.29Vis. Salop, 1623, i. 172-3. Hugh was Humphrey Edwardes’ grandfather. The Edwardes residence in Shrewsbury was the College, acquired at the dissolution of the monasteries.30Par. Regs. St Chad’s, pp. ix, xi. The family considered themselves emphatically gentry rather than merchants or tradesmen, but Thomas Edwardes, Humphrey’s father, acted as an advisor and patron to the Shrewsbury corporation. In 1614 he was asked to lobby in chancery for its interests, and was highly enough regarded for one of his servants to be made free of the town at his request.31Salop Archives, Shrewsbury minute bks. A2/181, 230. Thomas Edwardes left doles to the Shrewsbury poor, as had his mother. Alice Edwardes had provided bounties of 20s. to poor maidens when they married, and her son not only continued this provision but also established his own charities in four Shropshire parishes.32PROB11/167/486. In September 1592 Thomas Edwardes married Ann Duckett, a recently-widowed gentlewoman of Wiltshire, but who was the daughter of a London alderman with family in Herefordshire.33Calne, Wilts. par. reg.; Vis. Salop 1623, i. 173; Robinson, Mansions and Manors, 105-7.

When Thomas Edwardes drew up his will in 1634, he identified Humphrey as his eldest son, but to judge from the interval between Thomas and Ann Edwardes’ marriage and Humphrey’s enrolment at Shrewsbury school in 1615, it seems likely that other, short-lived, children were born to them before Humphrey was. The latter was perhaps inevitably destined to attend the school his grandfather had helped found, but was subsequently enrolled at Gray’s Inn, where he did not progress far enough in legal studies to be called to the bar. There is a suggestion that Edwardes’ father was not an unequivocal Calvinist puritan of the outlook that claimed so many of those in Shropshire who were to take the side of Parliament in the civil war. He left a modest bequest to Peter Studley, an Arminian minister of Shrewsbury, and supported Richard Poole, a minister promoted to the curacy of Edwardes’ Shrewsbury parish of St Chad by allies of Studley.34PROB11/167/486; ‘Peter Studley’, Oxford DNB; B. Coulton, ‘Rivalry and Religion: the borough of Shrewsbury in the Early Stuart Period’, MH xxviii. 43. Thomas Edwardes’ will may hint at a rift between Humphrey and himself, in that the father selected his younger son, Thomas, to be his executor. This may be explained by Humphrey’s absence in London, but the bequest to Thomas and not to Humphrey of plate and jewellery suggests that the elder son’s departure from Shrewsbury was not expected to be temporary.

According to the published heraldic visitation of 1623, Edwardes had already married Hester Pope by that time. This seems doubtful in the light of the wills both of Thomas Edwardes (1634) and Roger Pope (1628), Hester’s father, neither of which mention a marriage. Whatever the date, Edwardes married the daughter of a Shrewsbury gentleman who, like his own father, was supportive of the Arminian Peter Studley.35PROB11/155/743. Four years after his admission to Gray’s Inn and two years after the death of his father, Edwardes secured a post at court, among the gentleman pensioners. It is uncertain why he was favoured in this way, but his appointment can only deepen the suspicion that the £100 a year plus £500 cash he had been left in his father’s will was all he could expect in Shropshire; and that his courtly office may perhaps have been a reward for the Edwardes family’s support for the Laudian side in the protracted Shrewsbury disputes over royal and civic patronage. The post seems to have carried a pension or salary of £100 a year.36E404/238 unfol., order of 1 Apr. 1652.

Edwardes was apparently involved in one of the most notorious episodes in the months before civil war. On 4 January 1642 he was said to have accompanied Charles I to Westminster in his abortive attempt to arrest the Five Members.37The Case between Clement Walker Esq. and Humphrey Edwards Truely Stated (1650, 669.f.15.38). The source is a hostile one, but it seems perfectly plausible that a minor courtier with at this stage no obvious quarrel with his royal master should have been part of the king’s ill-assorted retinue on that occasion. By November of that year, however, Edwardes had apparently changed sides, and contributed horses worth £35 to the parliamentary cause.38CCAM 38. His motives in this defection are hard to fathom, particularly since his younger brother, Thomas Edwardes, was named a commissioner of array for the king in July 1642, and was later fined for his delinquency.39Northants. RO, FH133, unfol.; CCC 1456. One possible explanation lies in Gray’s Inn, where Humphrey Mackworth I* was a continuing presence when not locked in conflict with the anti-puritan faction in Shrewsbury led by Peter Studley. Another is a family association with Thomas Mytton*, kinsman of Edwardes’ wife.40PROB11/176/92. A third is his shared, mutually-reinforcing experience of life at court with Sir Gregory Norton*, Edwardes’ fellow defector. In July 1644, Edwardes and Norton together petitioned Parliament for compensation for privations they had suffered through loss of courtly office. Very soon afterwards both were added to the Middlesex committee for sequestrations, while Edwardes worked with John Corbett* to underpin the finances of Thomas Mytton’s force in Shropshire.41LJ vi. 643b, 664b; CJ iii. 580a.

From the summer of 1644 Edwardes was named to the Shropshire county committee, but his name is found more often on military and tax commissions relating to Middlesex and other home counties. In 1645, with Mytton’s help, he was awarded the sequestered estates in Shropshire of his brother, as settlement of his continuing claims for compensation.42LJ vii. 583b, 588b, 592a, 595a. It was Mytton who helped Edwardes to the seat for Shropshire in 1646. The background was not quite the often-encountered one in which the county committee successfully promoted its own candidates. Mytton, at this time serving as sheriff of Shropshire, had fallen out with elements of the committee, and the election of Edwardes (27 Aug. 1646) seems to have been an act of revenge, in which Mytton secured Edwardes’ election only by moving the venue from Oswestry to Alberbury and by ignoring the assembled freeholders’ evident preference for Andrew Lloyd*.43NLW, Aston Hall Deeds, 2462. Edwardes was in the House within ten days, sitting on a committee to raise £200,000 from the City.44CJ iv. 663a.

In his first few years in the House, Edwardes is potentially difficult to distinguish from two others with his surname, Richard Edwards and (from December 1646) William Edwardes, especially where the clerk recorded no forename in the Journal record. But it was probably he who sat on 11 September on the committee for electing a burgess for Newcastle-upon-Tyne. There were a number of Members from the marcher counties on this committee, and in April 1647 it became, minus Edwardes, a vehicle for examining the Shropshire election of the previous August.45CJ iv. 666b; v. 134b; NLW, Aston Hall Deeds, 2467. As an ally, if not a client, of Major-general Mytton’s, Edwardes naturally enough took an interest in military affairs. He was named to a committee to consider the commissions of the major generals (10 Oct.) and to another on the future of the London militia (2 Apr. 1647), and was included among those who sat on the Committee for Indemnity – the executive body for considering the cases of soldiers prosecuted for their wartime activities.46CJ iv. 689b; iv. 132b, 174a. But there was nothing to suggest in his early months in the House any close association with the New Model army, to which Mytton had never been named. Edwardes took the Covenant on 9 December 1646, and was named to a number of committees in which the taking of sides by Presbyterians and Independents is visible: those on the governance of Oxford University (13 Jan. 1647), on the committing of the great seal to commissioners (18 Mar.) and the examination of Members who had fought against Parliament (10 June) being examples.47CJ v. 7b, 51b, 117b, 205a.

In these committees, Edwardes evidently took the side of the Independents, for when the Presbyterians attempted a coup against their opponents late in July 1647, he signed the engagement of the Members who fled to the protection of the army, even if one commentator missed his name.48LJ ix. 385b; HMC Egmont, i. 440. He was certainly on one committee, and probably on at least two others, which investigated the failed forcing of the Houses when the army quickly restored the Independents.49CJ v. 265a, 269a, 273a. His nomination to the commission for the militia of Westminster and Middlesex in September was recognition of his partisanship in the internal wrangles of the political factions, as probably was his inclusion among those investigating absences by MPs at the call of the House.50CJ v. 299a, 329a. Despite the discouraging response by the king on 9 September to the recycled Newcastle Propositions, Parliament persisted in tinkering with them, and Edwardes was named to a committee on 18 October in response to amendments from the Lords.51CJ v. 336a. He was named to a further eight committees between then and the end of 1647, among them committees on the welfare of injured soldiers (11 Nov.), on the escape of the king from Hampton Court (12 Nov.) and a joint delegation with the Lords to the City to impress upon the aldermen the importance of paying the soldiers their arrears (20 Nov.). In the light of the summer’s events, when Parliament had faced violence from the London crowd, this must have been a highly politically-charged mission.52CJ v. 356a, 357a, 365a.

Edwardes’ profile in the Commons in 1648 was lower than it had been the previous year, and some of this must be attributable to his emergence as a member of executive committees. The direction of military matters took up a significant amount of his committee time in the House, including efforts to reorganize the London militia (12 Apr., 10 July), introduce discipline to musters (20 Apr.) and rewarding Colonel Thomas Mytton (19 Apr.).53CJ v. 527b, 537b, 538a, 630b. The background to this was of course the second civil war, which necessarily involved attention to local forces as well as to the main national field army, and the award to Mytton of £5,000 was the result of deliberations by a number of the Shropshire Members, and was intended to lay to rest the antagonisms which had marred Mytton’s relations with the Shropshire committee. Edwardes was given leave of absence twice during the year, and was away from the House between mid-July and mid-December.54CJ v. 630a, 49a. He returned only after the army’s purge of Parliament early in December, but he must have been supportive of the coup. He was named to a committee (13 Dec.) which gathered evidence from towns throughout the country about the membership of corporations, with a view to expelling those who had recently supported the Scots in their war against Parliament.55CJ vi. 96a. This was a highly partisan committee, indicating how close Edwardes was to the Independent leadership, and it was followed during the next three weeks by his nomination to a clutch of important executive committees: the Derby House Committee, the Committee for Revenue, the Committee at Goldsmiths’ Hall, the Committee for the Army, the Committee for Indemnity (again) and the Committee for Advance of Money.56CJ vi. 98a, 99a, 99b, 101b, 107b, 109a, 110a, 112a, 113b.

Edwardes took the dissent against negotiations with the king on 20 December.57PA, Ms CJ xxxiii, pp. 473-4; [W. Prynne], A Full Declaration of the True State of the Secluded Members Case (1660), 21 (E.1013.22). He was in favour of the trial of Charles I, and sat first on a committee to consider the legalities of judicial proceedings against the sovereign (23 Dec.), and then on another to draft the ordinance to try him. The same day he took charge of moves to pay the forces in Lancashire, which had borne the brunt of recent action against the incursive Scots, which taken with his earlier appointment on flushing out pro-Scots activists suggests that dislike of the Scots may have been an important motivating force in Edwardes’ political outlook at this time.58CJ vi. 103a, 103b, 106a, 110b. He was named as a commissioner to try the king, attended every sitting of the court and signed the king’s death warrant. Along with two others who had once been servants of Charles I, Sir Henry Mildmay* and Cornelius Holland*, he was assigned the task of attending to the king’s accommodation and sustenance during the trial.59Muddiman, Trial, 76, 89, 96, 105, 195-6, 202-207, 209-10, 222, 224-8. He was included in the committee chaired by Henry Marten on the funeral arrangements after the execution.60CJ vi. 127a. While the trial was proceeding, he also found time to examine William Prynne* about his recent published attacks on the parliamentary junto which had collaborated with the army in Pride’s Purge. As a result of Edwardes’ enquiries, a writ was issued to bring Prynne to the bar of the House to answer for his offences.61CJ vi. 111b, 112b, 115b. On 6 January 1649, Edwardes was added to several more leading committees, the Committee for Plundered Ministers and the Committee for Sequestrations, in what was clearly a deliberate bolstering of these bodies in the wake of the purge and the likely absenteeism by those for whom the regicide was unacceptable.62CJ vi. 112b, 113b.

When on 8 February 1649 Edwardes was added to the Committee of Navy and Customs, he had become a member of nearly every important executive committee of the Rump Parliament.63CJ vi. 134a. That being so, it is remarkable how often his name continued to appear on lists of ad hoc committees compiled in the House, his monthly tally reaching a peak in May 1649 when he was named to 13.64CJ vi. It is impossible to discern any degree of specialisation in Edwardes’ committee appointments, which covered the whole range of parliamentary business. In May, for example, he was involved in committees working on legislation affecting the draining of the fens and the public accounts (8 May), the militia (10 May), the excise (11 May), appointments to clerical benefices (21 May) and indemnity for soldiers (25 May).65CJ vi. 204b, 206b, 207b, 213a, 217a. He rarely led these committees or played any other prominent part in proceedings, but in 1649 he was a teller against a motion to accept a reduced delinquency fine from Lord Poulett (Sir John Poulett*) (5 Mar.), and took charge of a committee to reward an army officer who had attended the king in his last days (10 May).66CJ vi. 156a, 207a.

As for Edwardes’ profile on the major executive committees, the evidence is very imperfect but suggests that some claimed much more of his time than others. A sampling of orders made by the Committee for Plundered Ministers, for example, suggests that Edwardes contributed only occasionally to its work.67Mins. of the Cttee. for the Relief of Plundered Ministers … Lancashire and Cheshire, 1643-1660 ed. W.A. Shaw (2 vols, Rec. Soc. of Lancs. and Cheshire, 1893, 1896) i, p. xi. He was apparently more active on the Committee for Plundered Ministers’ partner in settling a godly ministry, the committee for regulating the universities, which evolved in May 1649 from a committee that Edwardes had been added to in April for regulating Oxford University.68CJ vi. 187a, 200b; LPL, Sion L40.2/E16, passim. A snapshot of attendances at the Committee of Navy and Customs in February 1649 reveals him to have been among the least frequent attenders.69Bodl. Rawl. A.224. In June 1649, he was appointed to the committee for removing obstructions, a body charged with speeding up sales of former episcopal estates, but the order book shows that he attended only once, in August 1650.70LPL, Comm. Add. 1. By contrast, the Revenue Committee saw much of him. He went regularly to meetings of that body, which supervised the former royal revenues, from 1649 until the dismissal of the Parliament by Oliver Cromwell in 1653, and made three appearances in May and June that year, even after the demise of the Rump. His busiest years on this committee were 1652, when he is recorded as having attended 44 times, and 1649, 32 times.71E404/236-238, unfol.; Add. 21482; Add. 21506; Add. 32476; SP28/269.

Edwardes was never reluctant to pursue opportunities to recover what he thought was owed to him. From March 1647 he received £25 arrears of wages as a gentleman pensioner, although he had waited for it for nearly four years.72SC6/Chas I/1665. Other instalments followed, and he was still receiving the odd tranche of arrears for this post three years after the regicide.73E404/236, unfol.; E404/238, unfol.; SC6/Chas I/1665, m. 23; 1666, m. 17. These payments all passed the Revenue Committee, on which he sat when some were made. He was said to have used the same committee to enrich himself in the case of the post of chief usher of the exchequer. This post had belonged by patrimony to Clement Walker*, the anti-Independent author of The History of Independency. He and his wife used their publishing skills to advertise how Edwardes had first used his influence at Goldsmiths’ Hall to have Walker’s property sequestered for delinquency, and when that strategy failed, manipulated the Revenue Committee into giving him the office while Walker was conveniently incarcerated in the Tower. Walker published an account of how Edwardes had attended the king on his way to arrest the Five Members in January 1642, and denounced him as ‘a half-faced cavalier, changing his party for his profit’.74Case between Clement Walker and Humphrey Edwards; The Case of Mrs Mary Walker (1650, 669.f.15.39). The Walkers provide a vivid account of Edwardes’ conduct at their house, describing how the MP

demanded an entrance, and being denied, cursed and swore like a madman, calling the said deputy, rogue and many other opprobrious terms, fit only for the mouth of such a fellow, whose conversation with his own aunt [‘aunt’ deleted] stinks all the town over.75Case between Clement Walker and Humphrey Edwards.

The deletion in Thomason’s copy of the word aunt, presumably by the printer, might suggest a misprint, but the use of the word conversation to mean sexual intimacy was well established at the time, and so historians have taken this as an allegation of incest.76Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 222. The libel seems beyond further investigation.

There were many opportunities open to him to purchase confiscated property, not least because of his ready access to the committees which oversaw such sales. He did not purchase bishops’ lands, even though he was at least nominally a member of the committee that sped up the marketing of these assets.77Bodl. Rawl. B.239; LPL, MS 951 no. 11, ff. 48-9. He bought an interest in West Ham manor in Essex, a property of the queen, which was restored to the crown in 1660, after Edwardes’ death.78LJ xi. 78b; VCH Essex, vi. 68. He sought a lease of Caversham Park, Oxfordshire, one of the many properties of William Craven, 1st Baron Craven, but seems not to proceeded to buy anything from the extensive inventory of Craven lands.79CCC 1618. More conclusively, Edwardes bought property in St Martin-in-the-Fields, and in Green’s Norton, Northamptonshire.80E320/F12, ZZ16. He also bought the royal mews at St James’s Palace, the valuation price of which was £2,246.81S.J. Madge, Domesday of Crown Lands (1938), 389. Clement Walker singled him out as a perfect example of the profiteering in which debentures were bought cheaply from impoverished soldiers and then exchanged for lands at their full value.82C. Walker, Anarchia Anglicana (1649), 207-8 (E.570.4). Possibly ironically, possibly cynically even, he was among those who on 4 July 1649 deliberated on the plight of those who had lost money on public faith bills, the government’s favoured IOU for placating the state’s creditors.83CJ vi. 250a.

Edwardes was named to the committee which in February 1650 produced the act for propagating the gospel in Wales, and in June that year was also included among those given responsibility for drafting a parallel act for the north of England, but he did not become a commissioner under these statutes.84CJ vi. 352a, 420b. As a knight of a marcher shire, he would have seemed an appropriate appointment to the high court of justice set up to try those involved in the south Wales revolt of 1651.85CJ vi. 591b. Beyond the fact that he legislated on religious matters, along with probably every other Rumper, and recommended at least one minister to a Shropshire living, his religious views are opaque. It is not clear whether his acquisition of the tithes of Diddleston and Ellesmere in Shropshire in November 1650 from a royalist were in trust for religious purposes or simply for himself and his co-grantee.86NLW, Plas Iolyn Deeds 11. Walker’s comments on his language and conduct may or may not be revealing. Edwardes was censorious or orthodox enough to be included in moves to clamp down on the Ranters (14 June 1650) but after that none of his committee appointments were concerned with religious affairs.87CJ vi. 423b. Property confiscations, including those of the late royal family, perhaps figured most strongly in the miscellaneous pattern of his committees. There were nominations to enquiries into crown property sales on 14 March 1650, 3 April and 21 May 1651, 27 November 1652 and 25 January 1653; and on 24 January 1651 he was named in one of the committees required to work on clauses in the bill for sale of delinquents’ estates.88CJ vi. 382a, 528a, 556a, 576b; vii. 222b, 250b. He was on a committee to handle a petition from contractors for the sales of bishops’ lands (6 Apr. 1652).89CJ vi. 115a.

Edwardes was on hand to assist with balloting procedures in the House on two occasions. The first was on 4 July 1651, when with three other Members he selected names from a glass for positions as trustees of delinquents’ estates, before they were sold. On 24 November that year, he was a teller in elections for the council of state, but on no occasion did he command sufficient standing or popularity among his colleagues to be voted on to the council himself.90CJ vi. 598a; vii. 41b, 42a. He was evidently committed to the Rump, however, as his career in national politics came to an abrupt halt after the Parliament had been dismissed. He was not appointed to any major public bodies under the Nominated Assembly or the Cromwellian protectorate, unlike the most significant military politician in Shropshire, Humphrey Mackworth I. Edwardes had grown distant from his Shropshire roots, in fact, and seems not to have invested in property there. It was through his friend Sir Gregory Norton* that he acquired an interest in Richmond, Surrey, and died there in the summer of 1658.91Oxford DNB. William Prynne, whom Edwardes had pursued during the king’s trial for his attacks on the purgers of Parliament, took a list to the Lords on 18 May 1660 of regicides, including Edwardes, whose persons and property should be seized. Edwardes was not alive to be tried and executed, but as an attainted person all his property was forfeit to the crown.92LJ xi. 32b, 78b, 101b, 102a.