Edmund Walsingham

Family

Although the Walsingham pedigree is said to date to the thirteenth century, the family is first recorded in Kent in 1424, when Thomas Walsingham (died 7 March 1456) and his wife, Margaret, purchased the manor of Scadbury in Chislehurst, to which additional land was added in 1433. Their son, Thomas Walsingham (1436–1467), married Constance Dryland (died 14 November 1476), the daughter of James Dryland, of Davington, by whom he had a son, James Walsingham (1462 – 10 December 1540). After the death of Thomas Walsingham (1436–1467), his widow, Constance, married John Green, who in 1476 was Sheriff of Kent in right of his wife.

James Walsingham married Eleanor Writtle (born before 1465, died after 1540), the daughter of Walter Writtle of Bobbingworth, Essex, by whom, according to a monumental brass formerly in the church at Scadbury, he had four sons and seven daughters, including:

Career

Walsingham entered the service of Thomas Howard, then Earl of Surrey, and was knighted by him on 13 September 1513, four days after the Battle of Flodden. In 1520 he was in attendance on Henry VIII at the Field of the Cloth of Gold in Calais in June, and at the King's meeting with the Emperor Charles V at Gravelines in July.

In 1521 he was appointed a sewer in the royal household, was made a freeman of the Mercers' Company, was on the jury which tried and convicted Edward Stafford, 3rd Duke of Buckingham, and succeeded Sir Richard Cholmley as Lieutenant of the Tower of London at a salary of £100 a year. He held the office until Henry VIII's death in 1547, residing in a house at the Tower, and taking personal charge of prisoners of state, among them Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, Catherine Howard, the Marquess of Exeter, Lord Montagu, the Duchess of Norfolk, Viscount Lisle, Anne Boleyn, John Fisher and Sir Thomas More. It was to Walsingham that More made his ironic jest on ascending the scaffold, "I pray you, Master Lieutenant, see me safe up, and for my coming down, let me shift for myself".

In the 1530s Walsingham acquired long-term leases of the manors of Tyting in Surrey and Stanground in Huntingdonshire, and in 1543 purchased the manors of Swanton Court, West Peckham and Yokes near Scadbury from Sir Robert Southwell. In 1539 the king granted him nine houses in London that had formerly belonged to dissolved abbeys.

In 1544 he became vice-chamberlain to Henry VIII's sixth wife, Katherine Parr. He was elected to Parliament as a Knight of the Shire for Surrey in 1545.

Walsingham died 9 February 1550, and was buried in "a table tomb, richly ornamented with roses, acorns and foliage gilt" in the Scadbury chapel in the church of St Nicholas at Chislehurst. His son and heir, Thomas Walsingham, erected a monument to his memory in 1581; the inscription begins:

His will, dated 8 February 1550, was proved 8 November of that year.

Marriages and issue

Walsingham married firstly Katherine Gounter or Gunter (before 1495 – c. 1526), widow of Henry Morgan of Pencoed, Monmouthshire, and daughter of John Gounter of Chilworth, Surrey, by his wife Elizabeth, the daughter and heiress of William Attworth or Utworth, by whom he had four sons and four daughters:

Walsingham married secondly, Anne (née Jerningham), daughter of Sir Edward Jerningham (died 6 January 1515) of Somerleyton, Suffolk, by Margaret Bedingfield (died 24 March 1504). At the time of her marriage to Sir Edmund Walsingham, Anne (née Jerningham) was the widow of three husbands: Lord Edward Grey (died before 1517), eldest son and heir of Thomas Grey, 1st Marquess of Dorset, and grandson of King Edward IV's wife, Elizabeth Woodville; Henry Barley (died 12 November 1529) of Albury, Hertfordshire; and Sir Robert Drury, Speaker of the House of Commons.