SCOTT, Edmund.

This Member has not been conclusively identified. Cited as ‘Edmund Scott esquire’ on the 1624 election return, the loss of the Beverley corporation minutes for 1614-21 means that no local evidence survives as to his election.C219/38/277; Yorks. ERRO, BC/II/7/4/1. As he is not mentioned in either the minute book or the borough accounts, he was almost certainly an outsider. He may have been the Member returned for Wareham, Dorset in 1601, who has tentatively been identified as Edmund Scott of Bromley, Kent. HP Commons 1558-1603, iii. 354. This man, or a namesake, was knighted in 1630, was an official of the Court of Arches and clerk of the faculties to Archbishop Laud at his death nine years later. Shaw, Knights of Eng. ii. 197; PROB 11/179, f. 265.

Scott has not been connected with any of the town’s known electoral patrons, although he clearly had an influential backer, as the elections of 1621 and 1624 are known to have been contested. BEVERLEY. His most likely advocate was Sir John Crompton*, whose tenure as steward of the Crown manor of Beverley coincides almost exactly with the elections at which Scott was returned. Crompton died in December 1623, but could have made a nomination for the election which took place in the following month. The stewardship then passed to Sir Robert Yaxley*, a relative of Crompton’s wife who acted as trustee for Crompton’s eldest son, then a minor. Yaxley was in no position to make any nomination at the next election in April 1625, having been shipwrecked while on his way to Ireland. CSP Dom. 1625-6, p. 41; PROB 11/155, f. 13.

Scott made little impact on the parliaments in which he sat. He is not known to have spoken, and was named to only two committees, one to confirm a Chancery decree (18 May 1614), the other to clarify the tenurial difficulties arising from the 1547 Chantries’ Act (22 Mar. 1621). CJ, i. 489a, 568b.