Edmund Dudley (c. 1462 – August 17, 1510), minister of Henry VII of England, was a grandson of John Sutton, 1st Baron Dudley.

After studying at Oxford and at Gray's Inn, Dudley came under the notice of Henry VII, and is said to have been made a privy councillor at the early age of twenty-three. In 1492 he helped to negotiate the Peace of Etaples with France and soon became prominent in assisting the king to check the lawlessness of the barons. He and his colleague Sir Richard Empson were promintent councillors of the Council Learned in the Law, a special tribunal of Henry VII's reign, where they collected debts owed to the king, etc.

Dudley was speaker of the House of Commons in 1504.

In addition to collecting money for Henry, Dudley amassed a great amount of wealth for himself, and possessed large estates in Sussex, Dorset and Lincolnshire. When Henry VII died in April 1509, Dudley was imprisoned and charged with the crime of constructive treason. Dudley's nominal crime was that during the last illness of Henry VII he had ordered his friends to assemble in arms in case the king died, but the real reason for his charge was doubtless his unpopularity stemming from his position in the Council Learned. He was attainted and after having made a futile attempt to escape from prison, he was executed on the 17th or 18th of August 1510.

During his imprisonment Dudley sought to gain the favour of King Henry VIII by writing a treatise in support of absolute monarchy called The Tree of Commonwealth. However, this may never have reached Henry VIII as it was not published until 1859, when it was printed privately in Manchester.

Edmund Dudley married Anne Windsor, sister of Andrews Windsor, 1st Baron Windsor with whom he had one daughter:

Elizabeth, married William Stourton, 7th Baron Stourton

His second wife was Elizabeth Grey, daughter of Edward Grey, 1st Viscount Lisle with whom he had five children:

John Dudley, 1st Duke of Northumberland
Sir Andrew Dudley
Jerome Dudley
Simon Dudley
Elizabeth Dudley

Life

Descent and family
His grandfather was a Knight of the Garter and Steward to King Henry V; his mother was Elizabeth, suo jure Baroness Lisle, great-great-great-granddaughter of Richard de Beauchamp, 13th Earl of Warwick. John was the eldest of Edmund Dudley’s sons. Jerome, Oliver, William, and Andrew Dudley were his brothers.


Early life
When Edmund Dudley was executed, Sir Edward Guilford—a partner in many of Edmund's ‘profitable outrages’—acquired the ward-ship of John Dudley when the boy was nine (and apparently also of one of his brothers, possibly Andrew, who was later made Admiral of the North Sea), who were then taken into the home of Sir Richard Guilford. Within two years, in 1512, he was able to persuade King Henry VIII to repeal Edmund's attainder. In order to prosper under his new-found liberty, as a young man Dudley married Edward's daughter Jane Guilford in 1520 and took part as Guilford's lieutenant in the campaign of 1523 in France under the king’s brother-in-law, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, and won a knighthood on the field for gallantry after his valour at the crossing of the Somme. He was soon to gain prominence in the mock warfare of the royal court and as a protégé of Thomas Cardinal Wolsey, and so joined the group whose task it was to amuse the king. He went to France with Wolsey in 1527, and again with Wolsey and the king in 1532.

It is at about the time of the birth of his fifth son, Robert, in 1532/1533 that Sir John Dudley was appointed Master of the Armoury in the Tower of London. To it he brought the reputation of being the ablest commander both by land and sea that had then been of service to the Tudors. This helped rehabilitate the name of Dudley. At the coronation of Anne Boleyn in 1533 he was invited to be a cup-bearer, and he would lead the procession at the christening of the Princess Elizabeth.


Inheritance from Edward Guilford
Edward then died in 1534. As he was without a will and without male issue, the Guilford estate was to be the cause of a dispute between Dudley (claiming through Jane Guilford, Edward's daughter and only child, whom he had married in 1520) and Guilford's nephew. Dudley claimed the manor of Halden, and other lands in Kent and Sussex, despite John Guilford's assertion that his uncle had intended him to inherit. Five years later Dudley sold the manor with others to Thomas Cromwell, whose protégé he became after Wolsey's fall - both he and Wolsey recognised his extraordinary abilities.


Under Henry VIII
From 1536 he appears to have encountered some difficulties that led him to part with much of his inheritance in favour of the Midlands estate of his cousin, John Sutton, 3rd Lord Dudley; he exchanged his reversionary interest in the lands left to him by his mother to Sir Richard for life. He then made extensive purchases, especially in Staffordshire and the Welsh marches. In addition, he was given several manors by the King, including the extensive estates of Halesowen Abbey on the Dissolution of the Monasteries, so that his land base shifted to the central and west Midlands. He was elected sheriff of Staffordshire in 1536 after helping to put down the northern rebellion. In 1537 Dudley was sent on a mission to Spain and also began the connection with the Admiralty which, with his military commands from 1542, was to bring him to the fore during the closing years of Henry's reign. In January 1542 he resumed his seat in the Commons as one of the knights for Staffordshire, and upon his stepfather's death was created Viscount Lisle (derived from his mother) and made Lord Admiral for life, entering the Lords the following day to sit in regular attendance for the rest of the session.

Exercising his new prerogative, Dudley dispatched the French from the English Channel and stormed Boulogne-sur-Mer, for which he was to become a Knight of the Garter and was on the April 23, 1543, admitted as a member of the Privy Council. As Lord Adm

Born in 1545, Mary, the youngest of the Grey sisters, was nine years old when she lost her father and sister. In 1553, when her sisters had been married, Mary was betrothed to her cousin, Lord Arthur Grey. The betrothal was later dissolved. Mary, four foot tall and hunchbacked, did not learn from her sister, Katherine's mistakes. In 1565, Mary married secretly, without seeking the Queen's permission. Her husband, Thomas Keyes, was a gatekeeper in the Royal Household. Elizabeth was furious when she discovered Mary's indiscretion, saying her generosity had been abused and she wanted no 'little bastard Keyes.' Less than two weeks after their wedding the couple were arrested. Mary spent the rest of her life under house arrest while Thomas was sent to Fleet Prison. They never met again. Mary wrote numerous letters to the Queen, begging to be allowed to take care of Thomas's children by another marriage. Thomas died in 1572. Mary was released from private custody and went, destitute, to live with her step-father, Adrian Stokes. Elizabeth allowed Mary to attend Court on a number of occasions, however, Mary disliked pomp and preferred the quiet life. Mary died, aged thirty three on 20 April 1578, seven years after her husband.