man for the pleasures of ladies,’ and his family was said by the king to be ‘the model he would propose to gentlemen.’ In parliament ‘his dislike of Laudian practices had led both him and his eldest son, Sir Ralph, to vote steadily as members of the House of Commons in opposition to Charles's wishes’ (Gardiner, Hist. Civil War, i. 4), and greatly against his personal interest, as his younger sons found when they wanted promotion in the army. Much as he disapproved of the king's arbitrary measures, his personal loyalty was unshaken; he accompanied him to the Scottish war in 1639, having made his will. When the army was disbanded a quarrel ensued between Lord Newcastle and Lord Holland; the former chose Sir Edmund as his second, but the duel was prevented.
When the civil war broke out, Sir Edmund and his eldest son, Ralph, found themselves on opposite sides. The royal standard was committed at Nottingham to Sir Edmund's keeping on 22 Aug. 1642; he said, as he accepted the charge, ‘that by the grace of God (his word always) they that would wrest that standard from his hand must first wrest his soul from his body.’ He entered the war with a heavy heart. ‘You,’ he said to Hyde, in explaining the motives by which he had been influenced, ‘have satisfaction in your conscience that you are in the right, that the king ought not to grant what is required of him. … But for my part I do not like the quarrel, and do heartily wish that the king would yield and consent to what they desire, so that my conscience is only concerned in honour and in gratitude to follow my master. I have eaten his bread and served him near thirty years, and will not do so base a thing as to forsake him; and choose rather to lose my life—which I am sure to do—to preserve and defend those things, which are against my conscience to preserve and defend: for I will deal freely with you—I have no reverence for bishops for whom this quarrel subsists’ (Gardiner, Great Civil War, i. 4).
On the morning before Edgehill (23 Oct. 1642) Sir Edmund attended the king for the last time at breakfast in a solitary little inn overlooking the field. The struggle round the standard during the battle was furious ‘in the extream,’ according to Lloyd; ‘Sir Edmund adventured with it’ among the enemy in order that ‘the soldiers might be engaged to follow him. He was offered his life by a throng of his enemies, if he would deliver the standard; he answered that his life was his own, but the standard was his and their sovereign's, and he would not deliver it while he lived, and he hoped it would be rescued when he was dead, selling it and his life at the rate of sixteen gentlemen which fell that day by his sword;’ ‘he broke the point of his standard at push of pike before he fell,’ writes Sir Edward Sydenham in sending the news to Sir Ralph. The hand, faithful in death, was found still grasping the standard, but the body was never recovered.
A portrait in oils, painted in Spain, and another in oils by Van Dyck, are at Claydon House; a marble bust is on a monument in Middle Claydon church.
Verney married, in 1612, Margaret, daughter of Sir Thomas Denton of Hillesden, by whom he had six sons, of whom Sir Ralph (1613–1696) [q. v.] and Sir Edmund (1616–1649) [q. v.] are separately noticed, and six daughters. She died in 1641, and was buried at Claydon.
[Gardiner's Hist. of England and Hist. of the Great Civil War; Verney Memoirs by F. P. and M. M. Verney, vols. i. and ii.; Verney Papers, ed. Bruce (Camd. Soc.); Lloyd's Memorials; Clarendon's Hist. of the Great Rebellion and Clarendon's Life; manuscripts at Claydon House.]
VERNEY, Sir EDMUND (1616–1649), soldier, born in 1616, was third son of Sir Edmund Verney (1590–1642) [q. v.] and his wife, Margaret Denton. Sir Ralph Verney (1613–1696) [q. v.] was his eldest brother. Edmund was educated at a private school at Gloucester, at Winchester College (1634), and then at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, where he matriculated on 22 Jan. 1635–6, learnt little and got into debt and into disgrace with his tutor, Henry Wilkinson (d. 1675) [q. v.] Thence he was removed to the care of Mr. Crowther, rector of Newton Blossomville, formerly his eldest brother's Oxford tutor, who found him ‘devoid of the first grounds of logicke or other University learning,’ but ‘willing and capable.’ He entered the army as a volunteer in 1639, joined his father in the king's army on the Scottish border, and from that time proved himself a first-rate soldier, enduring hardships cheerfully, and winning the confidence of his men. With the first money he earned he paid off his Oxford creditors, and, when the war with Scotland was over, joined the army of the states in Flanders in Sir Thomas Culpepper's company. In winter quarters at Utrecht he studied Latin, French, and history seven or eight hours a day at the university, and did much to repair the time wasted at Oxford. He had many disappointments about promotion, though Elizabeth, queen of Bohemia, did her best to help him. In 1640 he served again in the English army against the Scots.
