Although of relatively obscure origins, Edmondes claimed kinship with the Cecils through his mother, while his father administered the customs at Plymouth on behalf of Sir Francis Walsingham†. It was perhaps through the latter that Edmondes became acquainted with Henry Unton†, who took him to France as secretary on his embassy in 1591-2. Edmondes remained in post as agent after Unton’s departure, and served the next ambassador, Gilbert Talbot†, 7th earl of Shrewsbury. The latter rewarded him with an annuity of £100, in appreciation of which Edmondes named his eldest son Talbot. In 1603-4, following his return to England, Edmondes helped to arrange a match between one of Shrewsbury’s daughters and the 3rd earl of Pembroke; during which negotiations he secured a parliamentary seat at Wilton, presumably on Pembroke’s interest.
Edmondes played little recorded part in the 1604 session: he made no reported speeches, and the only important committee to which he was named was that appointed to consider the radical agenda for religious reforms proposed by Sir Edward Montagu* at the start of the session (23 March). Nevertheless, Shrewsbury later recalled that he had been ‘wont to be placed amongst the mutineers’ in the Commons, while his notoriously querulous temperament apparently led to a clash with Speaker Phelips which still rankled with him several years later, although the incident went unreported at the time. He was otherwise named to committees for two restitution bills (2, 12 Apr.), and another to prepare for a conference on religion (19 April). He was also named to attend a conference at which the king enlarged upon his initial proposals for the Union with Scotland (added 21 Apr.), and to the committee for the clerical pluralities’ bill (4 June).
In the summer of 1609 Edmondes returned to England amid rumours that Salisbury, now also lord treasurer, might delegate some of his duties as secretary of state. Edmondes hoped that he would be appointed to the new office of under-secretary on the grounds that he had ‘more reason than any other to pretend to the charge of foreign affairs, if there be any such division’. Were this to happen he would require a London residence, but during his absence in France his apartment in the Blackfriars had been let to Sir Edward Hoby*. He now rejected an alternative lodging above a shop, ‘because I may be visited by the ambassadors’. Having been nominated to succeed Sir George Carew II* as ambassador in Paris, he was finally offered the post of under-secretary in the autumn, but shortly afterwards the plan to delegate some of Salisbury’s duties was abandoned because, according to Edmondes, Salisbury was afraid that he and his colleague Sir Thomas Lake I* would thereby obtain ‘a kind of investiture into the secretary’s place’. The temporary hiatus in his career meant, however, that Edmondes was able to attend the fourth session of the Parliament.
Initially ‘an assiduous attendant in the House’, Edmondes was present at the conference at which Salisbury outlined his proposals for the Great Contract (15 February). He informed William Trumbull*, his successor in Brussels, that MPs were ‘very careful, seeing there is a necessity that they must yield to so great an enlargement, not to engage themselves in the promise thereof till His Majesty shall consent to grant some equivalent benefits on the behalf of the subjects’. Edmondes acted as teller against the Hugh Platt estate bill (10 Mar.), and was named to seven bill committees before Easter, including those concerned with the export of ordnance (16 Mar.), the import of wine (22 Mar.) and the reform of the Marshalsea Court (29 March). After Easter he became involved in diplomatic negotiations which obliged him ‘almost to forsake the Parliament’, although he found time to promote a bill to naturalize ‘all children that shall be born to men in the King’s service and pay’, including his own. Soon after he was named to the bill committee (added 14 May), he left for Paris as ambassador, whereupon Nicholas Fuller* took charge of the bill. In early June Carleton reported that the measure ‘hath been smothered in the clerk’s pocket ever since your departure’, and two weeks later the bill was still stalled during the impositions debates, ‘an order being made that all other businesses should be laid apart [sic]’. Edmondes’ bill was ‘generally’ opposed by the lawyers, and ‘laid asleep for this session’.
Edmondes served as ambassador in France until 1616, during which time he helped in the arrangements for Princess Elizabeth’s marriage to the Elector Palatine, and was an ardent proponent of a French Match for the king’s sons. On Salisbury’s death he became a contender for the secretaryship, the Huguenot duc de Bouillon being ‘an earnest solicitor in his behalf’, but the king chose to leave the post vacant. Edmondes concluded a marriage agreement for Prince Charles in January 1614, and hastened to England with the news, where opponents of the Match attacked him for deserting his post; he was defended by the francophile duke of Lennox. While in England he sold his clerkship of the Privy Council to Trumbull, rejecting a higher offer of £500 from Pembroke’s secretary, Edward Leech*, and he was also spoken of as a contender for the secretaryship, which went to Sir Ralph Winwood*. He remained in England throughout the Addled Parliament, but is not known to have sought election. Tipped as a possible successor to Sir Thomas Parry*, chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, who had been disgraced over the Stockbridge election dispute, Edmondes hoped at least for a seat on the Privy Council, but returned to France late in July without even obtaining full payment of the arrears of his ambassadorial expenses.
Edmondes eventually acquired the post of comptroller of the Household in December 1616, towards the end of the major redistribution of Court office which followed the rise of a new favourite, George, Lord Villiers. Edmondes’ preferment was widely noted by newsletter-writers, none of whom cited a patron however, although his new departmental chief, lord steward Lennox, doubtless welcomed his appointment. He exercised his authority as comptroller ‘with courage and authority enough; but they say he doth somewhat too much flourish and fence with his staves, whereof he hath broken two already, not at tilt, but stickling at the plays this Christmas’. Sent to France in 1617 to congratulate Louis XIII on the murder of the Maréchal d’Ancre, on Winwood’s death later the same year he was once more tipped for the secretaryship, although he told Chamberlain he would not accept it even if it was offered. Instead, he purchased the treasurership of the Household in 1618.
One of the customary functions of the treasurer of the Household was to provide official leadership in the Commons. At the start of each Parliament it fell to Edmondes to nominate the Speaker.
Edmondes’ modest estates afforded him no significant electoral influence, forcing him to look to official patronage for a seat in the Commons. In December 1620 he and Sir Julius Caesar* were rejected by the freeholders of Middlesex because ‘they could not have access to such great persons as privy councillors’, and despite a letter from the Prince’s Council and support from the corporation, he was also unsuccessful at Chester. The ambitious lawyer Sir Francis Ashley* made over his Dorchester seat to the treasurer, but Edmondes opted instead to sit for Bewdley, where he was returned on the prince’s interest.
In exchange for its generosity, the Commons expected to be allowed a free hand in proceeding against corruption and abuses of monopoly patents. James and his ministers were inclined to accept this arrangement, within certain limits, and looking back on the session, Edmondes claimed that monopolies had grown to such a height that the kingdom would have been undone but for the calling of Parliament. Thus when Sir Edward Coke reported complaints against the alehouse licensing patent on 22 Feb., Edmondes moved that those who had paid extortionate sums should be compensated. However, his attempt to exempt the favourite’s brother, Christopher Villiers, from this investigation came to nothing. On 28 Feb., during a debate on (Sir) Giles Mompesson’s* patents for inns and concealed lands, Edmondes complained that such patents served ‘merely to vex the subjects, without profit to the king’, and urged an investigation of the chief concealment hunter, William Tipper. Two days later, when the bill to prevent recusants avoiding seizure of their lands by means of fraudulent leases received its second reading, Edmondes moved for a proviso against fraud in the taking of inquisitions post mortem for Catholic landowners, whereupon a separate bill was ordered to be drafted. At the second reading of the monopolies bill on 14 Mar., it was apparently Edmondes who moved ‘that it might extend to agency whereby monopolies were countenanced’, a warning to any future sponsor of a patent. Finally, as the House prepared to adjourn for Easter, Edmondes promised that the king would take care to suppress inns licensed by Mompesson.
After Easter some MPs began using corruption charges as a pretext to settle private scores, while official spokesmen tried vainly to bring the session to a swift conclusion. Inquiries into the patentees broadened to include their chief patron, Villiers, now marquess of Buckingham, which the king halted on 30 Apr., advising the House against investigating the favourite’s role in the Irish administration. Edmondes reinforced this warning: ‘seeing the king hath already begun this business, fit to leave it all to the king’. On the following day Members censured the Catholic barrister Edward Floyd for insulting Princess Elizabeth. James challenged the Commons’ claim to jurisdiction in this case, but on 4 May he left the House to decide whether to punish him or whether to join with the Lords in an impeachment. Edmondes and other privy councillors present moved to leave the punishment to the king, but the Commons stood their ground; speaking to this issue several times thereafter, Edmondes consistently aimed to bring the dispute to a swift conclusion.
When the session reconvened in November, Edmondes tabled a bill for the naturalization of the daughters of Sir Horatio Vere, commander of English forces in the Palatinate. Amid a crowded agenda, he claimed this private bill was ‘for one so worthily deserving ... that it deserves the reading’, and after waiving his own fees as clerk of the crown he urged the Speaker to do likewise; the bill was committed, and reported by Edmondes later the same day (24 November). With Habsburg forces now occupying much of the Palatinate, supply took centre stage, yet many advocated a potentially lucrative naval war against Spain in preference to a costly land war in Germany. On 27 Nov., the second day of the debate, Edmondes opened for the government:
I will not be so uncharitable as to think that those which moved that there should be a suspending of our resolutions for the present succouring of the Palatinate had any purpose thereby to divert the question, but ... if we should admit of delays, let us consider in what desperate state we shall leave things there, by suffering that brave army to perish for want of relief.
He advised those who sought a breach with Spain to wait ‘till he shall see how the king of Spain, who professeth such inward friendship to him, will avow these last proceedings of the Emperor’, and assured the House that further supply would ensure a favourable reception for both legislation and grievances. Despite similar assurances from other official spokesmen, the House could only be persuaded to grant a single subsidy. Six days later, the Commons’ petition for a Protestant bride for Prince Charles drew an angry response from the king, who, having been warned of its contents by the prince, refused to read it.
Prince Charles and Buckingham (now a duke) pressed for another Parliament in 1624 to secure supply for war in order to persuade a reluctant James to break off the Spanish Match. Edmondes was unsuccessfully recommended for seats at Coventry and St. Albans by the Prince’s Council, but Pembroke’s brother-in-law Thomas, earl of Arundel, used his position as corporation high steward to find Edmondes a seat at Chichester. On 19 Feb., after nominating Thomas Crewe as Speaker, Edmondes set an optimistic tone, ‘remembering our grief for our last parting thence, and congratulating for the joy in our now meeting’. Four days later, when the Lords sent to arrange the conference at which Buckingham made his keynote address on the failure of the Spanish Match, Edmondes brushed aside those who attempted to delay the meeting. On 1 Mar. the Commons voted unanimously for a breach with Spain; Edmondes was one of those appointed to manage a conference with the Lords about how to carry this motion into effect (2 Mar.), and when this was reported on 4 Mar., he was among those who stoked anti-Spanish feeling by recalling how Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador, had boasted to him that Spain ‘matched not for to amend their blood nor any other respect, but only to advance the Catholic cause’.
Edmondes attended the conference of 11 Mar. at which Prince Charles delivered his narrative of the failure of the Spanish Match, and on the following morning he opened the debate with a paean of praise to the prince, moving to give Charles ‘a more particular assurance of our tenderness’, although Sir Robert Phelips quashed any suggestion that this might involve an immediate decision on supply. The resulting vote of thanks to the prince, which Edmondes helped to draft (12 Mar.), reflected the optimistic tone of his speech, but the king dampened this euphoria by setting his price for war at six subsidies and 12 fifteenths, about £780,000.
A few days before the 1625 Parliament convened, the French ambassador in London, describing Edmondes as ‘tout Français’, advised Louis XIII to support the treasurer of the Household in pursuit of an English peerage. However, nothing came of this advice, nor was there any truth in later rumours of his ennoblement. Edmondes was returned for Oxford University on the nomination of Pembroke, the university’s chancellor, who recommended ‘his very good friend’ to convocation as ‘a personage of worth and quality’. While Edmondes was not himself a university man, Pembroke admitted, he had demonstrated ‘his particular affection unto the university of Oxford by disposing his only son to receive his education from thence’. The session opened with a conspicuous failure of management on 30 June, when Sir Francis Seymour initiated a supply debate in the absence of the privy councillors, which produced a grant of two subsidies, a hopelessly inadequate sum for a war against Spain. Edmondes played no recorded part in (Sir) John Coke’s attempt to secure an increase in this sum on 8 July, either because he shared the disapproval of the plan voiced by (Sir) Humphrey May*, chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, or because he had not been briefed about an initiative which had been arranged at the last moment by Buckingham. He was almost certainly present in the House, however, as he was later sent to deliver the recusancy petition to the king.
By the time Parliament reconvened at Oxford, unity of purpose had been restored among the government’s chief spokesmen. On 1 Aug., when Sir Edward Giles raised a complaint about pardons granted to Catholic priests, Edmondes explained that these had been allowed as a courtesy to the French ambassadors who had come over with Henrietta Maria, and that the reprieve was conditional upon the priests’ going into exile. On 5 August, following official overtures for further supply, chancellor May broached the subject in the Commons; Edmondes backed him, reminding the House of Charles’s efforts to secure a breach with Spain in 1624, and passing ‘from the general to a particular, by moving for the addition of two subsidies and two fifteenths’. Despite additional support from the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Richard Weston, this overture produced no response. On 8 Aug. the king offered a strict enforcement of the recusancy laws in return for cash, and once this had been reported to the Commons the following morning, Edmondes, ‘drawing his suasory from the answer in religion’, moved ‘to descend speedily to a supply, not of His Majesty’s own wants but those of the kingdom’; the eventual rejection of this offer brought about a swift dissolution.
In 1626 Pembroke once again recommended Edmondes to the Oxford University Convocation, and was supported by Archbishop Abbot, who recalled Edmondes’ services ‘in the petitioning of His Majesty for those timber trees which were graciously given to the advancement of your waterworks, for the opening of the Thames, and in such other good offices’. Despite these endorsements, there were misgivings about the re-election of a man with no personal connection to the university: Sir Francis Stewart*, another Pembroke adherent, was put up to provoke a contest; and Edmondes was only returned amid vociferous protests. The opening weeks of the session were dominated by the developing attack on Buckingham, to which Pembroke was giving covert encouragement: Edmondes, beholden to the earl but required to defend the Privy Council’s actions, which had been guided by the duke, was thus placed in an awkward position.
On 22 Feb. there were calls to suspend of Sir Henry Marten* as judge of the Admiralty Court over his detention of a French ship, the St. Peter of Le Havre, although the real target of the investigation was Buckingham. Edmondes exonerated Marten and urged that the Privy Council be allowed to see the dispute through to a conclusion, something the duke’s enemies were determined should not happen. The Commons over-reached themselves with a summons to Buckingham to answer for his actions, whereupon Edmondes was one of those ordered to redraft the request in a more conciliatory form (4 March). Four days later, a petition was received from French merchants whose goods had been seized by the English fleet in an escalation of this dispute. Edmondes explained the circumstances of these seizures, and as they provided no obvious angle of attack against Buckingham, the issue was referred to the committee for grievances.
One of the privy councillors who privately regretted the necessity for the Forced Loan, Edmondes’s extensive knowledge of French affairs makes him the likely author of a speech at the Council board which observed that the English Crown’s revenues came to less than those of the French province of Normandy, but warned that attempts at reform would be ill-advised ‘without either the consent of a Parliament, or the hope of gaining the conformity and submission of the people thereunto’. However, he joined the Council delegations sent to promote the implementation of the loan in Berkshire and Norfolk. When a fresh Parliament was summoned in January 1628, Edmondes and (Sir) Thomas Fanshawe I gained custody of the election writ for Essex and had the county court convened at Stratford, away from its usual location but conveniently close to their own estates; ‘but the country, having intelligence from London, came in so fast that they durst not trust them, and so were dismissed without doing anything’. Edmondes may have sought a nomination at Tavistock, but was eventually returned at Penryn on the Killigrew interest.
With some understatement, Edmondes’s nomination of the Speaker on 17 Mar. 1628 referred to ‘the misfortunes which have fallen out upon the unhappy dissolution of the last Parliament’. Throughout the session, the Crown’s spokesmen in the Commons faced a hostile audience composed of Members who were determined not to provide an Exchequer on the edge of bankruptcy with a penny until they had received adequate confirmation of the liberties denied them during the collection of the Forced Loan. Ominously, on 22 Mar. the question of supply was broached not by the Crown’s spokesmen, but by Robert Goodwin and Sir Francis Seymour, who complained loudly about billeting and the Forced Loan. Edmondes stepped into the breach with a remarkably emollient speech:
we have had too much experience of late miserable distraction of parliaments ... Here let us bury all former ill passages ... and offer such a present to His Majesty as may invite him to meet us half way. The sympathies are yet good; let not doubts arise, for as this Parliament succeeds all our allies are either blessed or broken.
Sir Humphrey May seconded him in similar vein, but Eliot returned to Seymour’s themes, and it was only then that Sir Benjamin Rudyard, who normally opened supply debates, rose to speak; unsurprisingly, nothing was achieved. Three days later Secretary Coke delivered a plea from the king for speedy supply, but a phalanx of speakers demanded that supply and grievances go hand in hand; Edmondes, attempting to retrieve something from the disaster, persuaded the House to begin the substantive debate, but this dealt only with grievances.
Having helped to secure the keenly desired vote of supply, Edmondes faded from the records of debate for the remainder of the session. This was doubtless partly because he lacked the necessary legal expertise to comment extensively on the Petition of Right, but perhaps also because he was not prepared to argue for the prerogative at the expense of the subjects’ liberties. When the use of martial law commissions was raised on 11 Apr., Edmondes, who had attended the Council when these were discussed, insisted ‘they were only and solely granted at the request of the gentlemen of the country’ to be used as a last resort in case of disorder; he also denied that the Council had sent letters forbidding justices of the peace to exercise jurisdiction over soldiers, save for ‘one letter which was only that justices should not meddle with billeting of soldiers’. Other than this, his remaining concern was to expedite the subsidy bill: on 11 Apr. he and May supported Secretary Coke’s successful motion for the House to sit over Easter; five days later, when the king called for progress on the subsidy bill to enable the fleet to sail, he reminded the House ‘it is not the particular ends of the king, but the pressing occasions of the state’ which were at stake. When the Commons debated their response to the Lords’ proposal to add a saving clause for the prerogative to the Petition of Right on 23 May, Edmondes growled that ‘the Lords expected us yesterday. Much time is already spent’. The Commons had no intention of allowing the subsidy bill to complete even its first reading before receiving a satisfactory answer to the Petition, to which end they staged a protracted filibuster on the precedency of Oxford and Cambridge Universities on 31 May; when Sir Nathaniel Rich led the Cambridge men out of the House, Edmondes, his patience exhausted, snapped ‘I think he deserves reprehension, for there is no man that purposely ought to avoid a question’.
The 1629 session was dominated by disputes over the customs and religion, two areas in which Edmondes had no particular expertise, and he played a relatively modest part in its proceedings. On 28 Jan. he regretted that the House had ‘given occasion of so many messages from His Majesty about Tunnage and Poundage’, and warned of the danger of alienating the king’s heart from Parliament. He subsequently urged the House not to use the Petition of Right ‘to an excessive liberty’ in the case of John Rolle*: pressed to explain this inflammatory phrase by Sir John Stanhope II, he said that he meant ‘the unnecessary stirring of this question’. During the debâcle of 2 Mar. he was one of the councillors who tried to free Speaker Finch from his enforced restraint in the chair.
After one last diplomatic mission to France in 1629-30, Edmondes sold his Chancery post to provide portions for his two unmarried daughters. The sale price was £6,000, but he discovered his lawyer, John Wright, clerk of the Commons, had cheated him of part of this sum. His sons both predeceased him without heirs, and his youngest daughter subsequently eloped with a servant; he therefore settled his estates on her eldest sister, the widow of Henry, 4th Lord de la Warr. He remained treasurer of the Household until his death in September 1639; no will or administration has been found.