Thomas Edmondes

Sir Thomas Edmondes

Sir Thomas Edmonds (1563 – 20 September 1639) was a diplomat and politician.

Edmonds was the fifth son of another Thomas Edmonds, who was the Customer of the ports of Plymouth and Fowey, and of Joan daughter of Anthony Delbere of Sherborne in Dorset. He is said to have been introduced at court by another namesake, Sir Thomas Edmonds, Comptroller of the household to Queen Elizabeth, where he received the rudiments of a political education from Sir Francis Walsingham.

In 1592, the queen appointed Edmonds as her agent in France in the affairs of the king of Navarre and the Protestants, in which he continued until 1596, when the queen appointed him her secretary of the French tongue. He then returned to Paris in 1597. In 1597 he was elected as Member of Parliament for Chippenham, but the seat was occupied by a proxy, as he was abroad. In 1600, he was the queen's resident at Brussels, and one of the commissioners for the peace conference at Boulogne-sur-Mer. In 1601, he was appointed a clerk of the Privy Council, but returned to Paris as minister soon after. He was elected MP for Liskeard in 1601.

James I knighted him in 1603. In 1604, he was sent as ambassador to the Emperor. Soon after, and while abroad, he was also granted reversion to the office of Clerk of the Crown and elected as Member of Parliament for Wilton. He returned to Brussels in 1609 and was then from 1610 ambassador to France for seven years.

In 1616, he was appointed Comptroller and in 1618 Treasurer of the Royal Household, a post that he held until his death. He was elected as Member for Bewdley in 1621, for Chichester in February 1624, for Oxford University in Charles I's first Parliament in 1625 and for Penrhyn in 1628.^[1] His final diplomatic service was to return as a special ambassador to France in 1629 to ratify a treaty.

On his return he retired to the manor of Albyns in Essex, which had been inherited by his wife Magdalen, daughter and coheir of Sir John Wood, Clerk of the Signet. He employed Inigo Jones to build him a mansion there. He had one son, Sir Henry Edmonds, K.B. and three daughters, of whom Isabella married Henry, Lord De La Warr and Frances married Robert Mildmay, an ancestor of the Lords FitzWalter.

References

• J. Palmer, A Biographical History of England (1824), 86-7.
• M. Greengrass, ‘Edmonds, Sir Thomas (d. 1639)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 , accessed 12 Jan 2009