Edmund Plowden

Sir Edmund Plowden (1518 – 6 February 1585) was a distinguished English lawyer, legal scholar and theorist during the late Tudor period.

Plowden was born at Plowden Hall, Lydbury, Shropshire. He was the son of Humphrey Plowden (1490–1557), by his wife, Elizabeth Sturry (died 1599), widow of William Wollascot, and daughter of John Sturry, Esq., of Rossall, Shropshire. Educated at the University of Cambridge, he did not take a degree, and proceeded to the Middle Temple in 1538 to study law. Subsequent to studies at Oxford, he qualified as a surgeon and physician in 1552.

Upon the accession of the Catholic Queen Mary, Plowden was appointed one of the Council of the Marches (of Wales). In 1553, he was elected Member of Parliament for Wallingford (then in Berkshire now in Oxfordshire), followed, in the next two years, by the same office for both Reading, Berkshire and then Wootton Bassett, Wiltshire. He lived mostly at Shiplake Court in Oxfordshire and Wokefield Park in Berkshire. The unusual breadth of his religious views were shown early in his career when he, however, withdrew from the House, on 12 January 1555, because he disapproved of the proceedings there.

His Roman Catholicism prevented Plowden from further promotion under Queen Elizabeth I, and he received increasing suspicion from members of the Privy Council. At the beginning of the reign he undertook the management of the Shropshire lands of Sir Francis Englefield, an important Catholic courtier under Mary who went into exile. In 1567 he, with Edward Saunders, became joint guardian of Englefield's nephew and heir, Francis, through influence with the Earl of Pembroke.

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