OSBORNE, Edward (1572-1625), of Inner Temple, London and Northill, Beds.

The Sudbury municipal records refer to the Member elected alongside Brampton Gurdon in 1621 as ‘[blank] Osborne of Sudbury’, which would suggest he was a local man, possibly a member of the same family as Peter Osborne, a pewterer who served as bailiff in 1592-3 before his death in 1605. E. Stokes and L. Redstone, ‘Cal. of the Muns. of the Bor. of Sudbury’, Suff. Inst. Arch. Procs. xiii. 285, 291; Suff. RO (Bury St. Edmunds), Sudbury bor. ct. bk. 4, pp. 200, 218. The return identifies him as ‘Edward Osborne esquire’, and also gives a Sudbury address, but no local man with that first name has been traced. Moreover, in the return, although not in the borough records, he was given precedence over Gurdon, a member of an important local gentry family who would be expected to outrank a townsman. OR. It is therefore more likely that the Member was Edward Osborne, an Inner Temple lawyer and younger son of Sir Edward Osborne, a London alderman, rather than a resident of the borough.

Osborne probably owed his election to Gurdon. He was a prominent lawyer, who purchased the rectory manor in Northill, Bedfordshire, in 1610, which became his country residence, and lands in Lincolnshire worth £395 p.a. VCH Beds. iii. 244; Waters, 235; PROB 11/154, f. 344. As a bencher of the Inner Temple he may well have come into contact with Gurdon’s younger son Robert, who had been admitted to that inn in 1617 and was subsequently called to the bar. Robert certainly married Osborne’s sister-in-law, Joyce Harvey, although the date of the wedding is unknown. I. Temple database of admiss.; Vis. Eng. and Wales Notes ed. Crisp, ix. 109. Osborne played no known part in the third Jacobean Parliament and is not known to have sought re-election. His will, dated 2 May 1625, was witnessed by Richard Taylor*, among others, and, besides property in Bedfordshire and Lincolnshire, mentions stock in the East India Company. He died on 23 Nov. and was buried at Northill. No later member of this branch of the family entered Parliament, although his nephew, Sir Edward Osborne, was returned for East Retford in 1628. PROB 11/154, ff. 343v-4v; Blaydes, 214.