It has been thought that Edwin Sandys II, the second son of Archbishop Sandys of York and a celebrated leader of the early Stuart House of Commons, began his parliamentary career by sitting for Andover in 1586. It is fairly certain, however, that the burgess for Andover was the eldest son of the archbishop’s brother, Miles Sandys, for Edwin, son of Miles Sandys, married the daughter of William, 3rd Lord Sandys, a great Hampshire landlord with election patronage, less than five months before the opening of the 1586 Parliament. The Hampshire family and the family of the archbishop and Miles Sandys do not seem to have been related before the marriage of 1586.
It was to be expected that Edwin, eldest son of Miles Sandys, would be returned to Parliament at the first opportunity. Yet he seems to have lacked his father’s enthusiasm for the affairs of London and the Commons. He spent several years at the Middle Temple, to which he and at least some of the archbishop’s seven sons were admitted without fee by favour of Miles Sandys, treasurer of the Inn, but he did not pursue his career in the law after his father’s retirement in 1596.
Perhaps Sandys was more interested in a military career, for it was in Ireland that he was knighted in 1599. At home, he resided at Eaton Bray, since his mother, who outlived him, kept her husband’s main estate at Latimer, Buckinghamshire. Sandys died 15 Mar. 1608. In his will, he recorded that Bishop Chadderton of Lincoln had promised him £1,800 for the marriage arranged between his son and Chadderton’s granddaughter, Elizabeth Brooke of Buckden, Huntingdonshire. The Vyne, with the barony of Sandys, was inherited by Sandys’s widow in 1629, after which it descended in the line of Colonel Henry Sandys, Sandys’s youngest son, and the only one to leave children, who was killed fighting for the King in 1643.