Edward Littleton (died 1629)

Sir Edward Littleton (c. 1577 – 25 July 1629) was a politician from the extended Littleton/Lyttelton family and an important Staffordshire landowner of the Jacobean era and the early Caroline era. Although loyal to the monarchy, he seems to have been of Puritan sympathies and was a close ally of Robert Devereux, 3rd Earl of Essex. He represented Staffordshire in the English parliament of 1624.

Littleton's parents were Sir Edward Littleton (died 1610) of Pillaton Hall, near Penkridge, Staffordshire, and Margaret Devereux, the daughter of Sir William Devereux of Merevale Hall, Warwickshire .

The elder Sir Edward Littleton was an important and politically active member of the Staffordshire landed gentry. He was a partisan of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex in the turbulent final decade of Elizabeth I. Margaret Devereux was Essex's first cousin, once removed. Sir Edward was the earl's agent in his home county of Staffordshire and played a part – tangential, he claimed – in the Essex Rebellion of 1601. He was lucky to escape with his life but his fortunes recovered quickly, especially after the accession of James I. He represented his county in Parliament from 1604 until a month before his death.

Littleton was admitted to Balliol College, Oxford in 1594, aged 17 – evidence for his birth date. He left after a year for a year of legal training – a common practice in the period, when the Inns of Court were often used as finishing schools for the landed gentry – at the Inner Temple, his father's Inn of Court. He was admitted on 23 November 1595, free of charge, on the orders of the parliament of that year, at the instance of Thomas Coventree, Autumn Reader for 1594. This Thomas Coventry was an important judge, father of Thomas Coventry, 1st Baron Coventry, and an ally of Edward Coke, the leading jurist of his day and another Inner Temple man. These connections with some of the key figures in the Elizabethan state can only have helped when the elder Littleton was embroiled in the Essex rebellion, as Coke was one of those who conducted his interrogation.

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