Edward, eleventh baron Zouche (d. 1625). The license for Edmondes's marriage to this lady, who was sixty years old, is dated 11 Sept. 1626 (Foster, Marriage Licenses, p. 441; Burke, Peerage, s. v. ‘Huntingdon’). Through his first wife Edmondes acquired the manor of Albyns, Romford, Essex, where Inigo Jones built a mansion for him. He had one son and three daughters by his first marriage. The son, Henry, was born in July 1602, is said to have become knight of the Bath, and died in 1635, an inveterate drunkard. The Earl of Shrewsbury and Sir Robert Cecil were his godfathers (Chamberlain, p. 146). The eldest daughter, Isabella, whose godmother was the Archduchess of Austria, was born at Brussels in November 1607, and married, about March 1624–5, Henry, lord Delawarr; Mary, the second daughter, married Robert Mildmay, by whom she had, among other children, a son, Benjamin, who became Baron Fitzwalter; Louisa, the youngest child, was baptised 15 Sept. 1611, her godfather being Louis XIII, and her godmother the queen-regent. In March 1635–6 she married one of her father's servants.
Edmondes was very short in stature, and was known to his contemporaries as the ‘little man.’ His reputation as a diplomatist was very great. Sir Robert Cecil described him as ‘very trusty and sufficient,’ and the enemies of England never concealed their fear of him. The style of his despatches is clear and pointed, and all his letters, whether on private or public topics, are eminently readable. A very valuable collection of Edmondes's correspondence, in twelve folio volumes, is now among the Stowe MSS. (707) in the British Museum. It has been successively in the possession of Secretary Thurloe, Lord-chancellor Somers, the Hon. Philip Yorke, the Marquis of Buckingham, and the Earl of Ashburnham. Nearly fifteen hundred letters from and to Edmondes are here extant, and all political persons of note of the time are represented. A portrait in oils was at one time prefixed to the first volume, but this unhappily is now missing.
[Much of Edmondes's official correspondence was printed by Dr. Thomas Birch in his Historical View of the Negotiations between the Courts of England, France, and Brussels from the year 1572 to 1617, Lond. 1749, and in his Memoirs of Queen Elizabeth, Lond. 1754. Lodge's Illustrations of British History, 1791, and Winwood's Memorials, 1725, also contain many of Edmondes's despatches. See also Biog. Brit., ed. Kippis; Gardiner's Hist.; Forster's Sir John Eliot, vols. i. ii.; Chamberlain's Letters, temp. Eliz. (Camd. Soc.); Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1590–1639; Lloyd's State Worthies.]
EDMONDS, RICHARD (1801–1886), scientific writer, eldest son of Richard Edmonds, town clerk and solicitor of Penzance, was born on 18 Sept. 1801, and educated at Penzance. He had some poetical tastes, afterwards manifested in forty-four hymns contributed to a volume of ‘Hymns for Festivals of the Church’ (1857). In 1828 he contributed to the ‘Cornish Magazine.’ The Royal Geological Society of Cornwall, founded at Penzance in 1814, stimulated Edmonds to geological observations in Mount's Bay, especially on the sandbanks between Penzance and Marazion and the submerged forests of that shore, and he communicated his results to that society. In 1843 the Penzance Natural History and Antiquarian Society was established. It began to publish in 1846, and communications from Edmonds were revised and collected in a volume entitled ‘The Land's End District: its Antiquities, Natural History, Natural Phenomena, and Scenery’ (1862). In 1832 Edmonds sent papers ‘On Meteors observed in Cornwall’ and ‘On the Ancient Church discovered in Perranzabuloe’ to the ‘Literary Gazette’ and the ‘London and Edinburgh Philosophical Magazine,’ and subsequently from time to time he contributed to these journals on antiquarian and geological subjects. Edmonds was corresponding secretary for Cornwall of the Cambrian Archæological Society. He became a diligent inquirer after the evidences of Phœnician commerce, of Roman rule, and Celtic possession in the western peninsula of Cornwall. He collected many interesting facts, but was wanting in the critical faculty necessary for useful investigation.
On 5 July 1843 a remarkable disturbance of the sea was observed in Mount's Bay. Edmonds recorded with much care the phenomena as observed by him at Penzance. He collected accounts of analogous phenomena on the Cornish coast, and in subsequent years several examples of similar alternate ebbings and flowings of the sea were recorded by Edmonds and others, and rather hastily attributed by him to submarine earthquakes. Edmonds thus gained the title of a seismologist, to which he certainly can make no claim. He was singularly modest and timid, even to the point of confusion in stating his views. Notwithstanding this he collected with much labour all the remarkable facts connected with earthquakes, and induces his readers to believe that he traces some connection between the abnormal tides of the Atlantic and the small earthquake shocks sometimes felt in Cornwall. He had never received any scientific training, and failed to attribute the oscillations to their true cause, the formation
