SAUNDERS, Edmund (Edward) (c.1601-1661/2), of Sanders Place, Charlwood, Surr.

The Saunders, Saunder or Sander family had been established at Charlwood, seven miles south of Reigate, since at least the early fourteenth century but had improved their fortunes significantly through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries through good marriages and, latterly, the legal profession.17R. Sewill and E. Lane, The Free Men of Charlwood (1951), 46. Saunders’ great-grandfather, Sir Thomas Saunders†, was a lawyer who became a remembrancer of the exchequer under Henry VIII and who first sat in Parliament, for Gatton, in 1542, before serving as a knight of the shire in 1552 and 1558.18HP Commons 1509-1558. Saunders’ grandfather, Edmund Sanders†, another lawyer, held various local offices and sat twice for Reigate.19HP Commons 1558-1603. However, although Saunders’ father, Thomas, served as a justice of the peace, he was less prominent than his forebears or members of other branches of the family in the county, notably Sir Nicholas Saunders† of Ewell. Saunders himself continued this pattern: much about his life is obscure and there has been some confusion about whether his first name was Edmund or Edward.20e.g. Vis. Surr. (Harl. Soc. xliii), 18; cf. Manning, Bray, Surr. ii. 190-1.

It was as Edmund that he was admitted to Gray’s Inn in May 1621 and recorded in the 1623 heralds’ visitation. The death of his father that year perhaps prompted Edmund to interrupt his education at the inn and retire to Surrey, although the necessity to provide for his step-mother Elizabeth (née Hopkins), a short-lived half-brother and up to six sisters argues otherwise.21Vis. Surr. (Harl. Soc. xliii), 18. In 1628 and 1630 he settled land in Charlwood and Horsley on members of the Cropley family as trustees and in May 1629 acquired with Edward Cropley the advowson of the parish church.22LMA, E/BER/S/T/A/DD/002; Coventry Docquets, 536, 601. He may have been the ‘Edmond Sanders’ who married Elizabeth Lampoe at St Botolph, Bishopsgate, London, on 25 August 1631 and he was certainly married by 10 March 1636, when he, his wife and two others were granted a licence to eat flesh in Lent.23St Botolph Bishopsgate, par. reg.; Coventry Docquets, 171. He was placed on the commission of the peace before 16 May 1637, when he and others were instructed by the privy council as to measures to deal with an outbreak of the plague at Reigate; as ‘Edward’ he was remembered sitting in session there in January 1638.24SP16/356, f. 122; Cases in the Court of Chivalry (Harl. Soc. n.s. xv), 133. On 30 June 1637 he and Edward Cropley presented Thomas Mulcaster to the rectory of Charlwood, and at some point Mulcaster, the son of local gentleman William Mulcaster of Shiremark, married Saunders’ half-sister Philippa (bap. 1612).25LPL, AA/V/H/2/4/1-2; Sewill and Lane, Free Men of Charlwood, 112-13, 117; Vis. Surr. (Harl Soc lx), 85.

Saunders’ relations with his neighbours were not universally harmonious. In 1638 simmering rivalry with the lord of the manor, Edmund Jordan of Gatwick, ‘came to a head’ in a dispute over rights in the church. Arbitration by Sir Robert Whitfield and Sir Robert Heath upheld Saunders’ right to sit and to bury family members in the [lady] chapel, with the proviso that Jordan too should have limited seating there, and ordered that Jordan present in Grays Inn hall a written withdrawal of ‘scandalous words’ that Saunders was ‘a perjured justice of the peace’ who had published a counterfeit lease to his great-grandfather.26Sewill and Lane, Free Men of Charlwood, 105-7.

It is not known who advanced Saunders’ candidature for Gatton in the parliamentary elections of spring 1640. A listing of those returned named him as ‘Edward’.27Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iii. 1085-1149. He made no recorded contribution to proceedings. Given that he was admitted to the Artillery Company in August, it is possible that he was a supporter of the war in Scotland or committed to the king’s campaign in the north.28Raikes, Ancient Vellum Book, 58.

Whatever the truth of this, he did not succeed in securing re-election in the autumn. Although, following a double return, the committee for privileges recommended his confirmation, on the ground of having a greater number of votes than his rival, Thomas Sands*, the Commons decided otherwise. Saunders’ supporters were largely non-resident freeholders, and MPs deemed that their right was inferior to those of Sands’s town-dwellers (3 Nov. 1641).29CJ ii. 303b.

Saunders did not sit in Parliament again. In 1642 both the king and Parliament called on his services, the former as a commissioner of array, the latter (as ‘Edward’) to act in his capacity of justice of the peace in the assizes which had been adjourned to Dorking (12 Aug.).30Northants. RO, FH133; CJ ii. 717a. HHH At least initially, he seems to have chosen to respond to Parliament, since he was probably appointed (as ‘Edward Sanders’) to the Surrey sequestrations committee (27 March 1643) and certainly named (‘Edward Sanders’ and ‘Edmund Saunders’ both given) as an assessment commissioner (3 Aug.).31A. and O.

Subsequent events are hazy. Either during the war or shortly after his residence at Sanders Place was destroyed or damaged and his brother-in-law Thomas Mulcaster was ejected from the rectory in 1644.32Sewill and Lane, Free Men of Charlwood, opp. p. 48, 117; Walker Revised, 352. This may have encouraged him to retreat to London. Despite the passing of nearly 30 years since his admission, he became on 20 May 1650 an ‘ancient’ of Gray’s Inn, allowing him to practise at the bar without further training – unless, that is, the MP was in fact dead and this namesake was a son of an early marriage.33GI Pension Bk, i. 376. If not the MP himself, it must have been a very close relation. Between 1653 and 1655 Edmund Saunder or Saunders of Gray’s Inn was involved with Clement Farnham, also of Gray’s Inn, and Robert Atkyns*, in land transactions in Middlesex to do with Elizabeth Saunder or Saunders, once the wife of Edward Nowell of Edmonton and now living in Cheshunt, Hertfordshire, where Farnham and Atkyns had connections. In one mortgage she was apparently described as Saunders’ wife, but other evidence suggests more readily either that she was his step-mother or, because no Nowell connection appears on pedigrees and admitting the possibility that a generation had slipped, even the MP’s daughter-in-law.34LMA, ACC/1376/60-63. On 27 June 1661 ‘Edward’ Saunders of Charlwood, according to the copy made by the probate court scribe, drew up a will, ‘weak in body’, leaving his estate to his sister, Elizabeth Bradshaw, with a £500 bequest to his niece, Priscilla Clapthorne, daughter of his sister – or, since she is absent from visitations, sister-in-law – also of that name. The will was witnessed by William Saunders, Elizabeth Saunders and Thomas Mulcaster, now restored to the rectory, and was proved on 27 February 1662.35PROB11/307/368. Two days before this probate was granted, Elizabeth Saunders of Edmonton made a will mentioning her friends the Atkyns and her daughter Bradshaw, with Clement Farnham as her executor.36PROB11/321/454. The same year Elizabeth Bradshaw sold Charlwood to a kinsman, Sir William Throckmorton, terminating the Saunders’ connection with the area.37VCH Surr. iii. 185.