Edmund Walsingham

Sir Edmund Walsingham (c. 1480 – 10 February 1550) was a soldier, Member of Parliament, and Lieutenant of the Tower of London during the reign of King Henry VIII.

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:

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, 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".