Montagu, Sir Edward (1480s–1557), judge, the second son of Thomas Montagu (d. 1517), of Hemington, Northamptonshire, and Agnes, daughter of William Dudley of Clopton, near Oundle, was born in the royal manor house of Brigstock. His father, an attorney representing Northamptonshire clients in the common pleas from the 1470s until at least 1505, had prospered sufficiently to acquire the manors of Hemington and Hanging Houghton. Edward is said to have spent some time at Cambridge before 1506, when he was admitted to the Middle Temple, an inn with a strong Northamptonshire presence perhaps attributable to the benchership of Richard Empson. Little is known of his early career, save that he is mentioned as an attorney in the court of requests from 1519 and was a justice of the peace for his native county from 1523. A tradition that he was speaker of the Commons in 1523 has not been corroborated by any contemporary source, though it is possible that he was a member of parliament that year.
In 1524 Montagu became a bencher of the Middle Temple and delivered his first reading in the autumn. He was the second most junior serjeant at the call of November 1531, and as the junior serjeant-elect from his inn gave a second reading in that capacity. One of his principal arguments at the bar as a serjeant was made on behalf of Lord Dacre in the great case of 1535 which led to the Statute of Uses. In the same year he was counsel for Sir John Melton in another case of high importance, concerning the earl of Northumberland and the Lucy inheritance, a case that incidentally helped to establish the validity of contingent remainders. On the eve of the dissolution of the monasteries Montagu was steward for several houses, including the abbey of Peterborough, which had retained his father. He profited largely by the dissolution, receiving among other properties the numerous estates held in Northamptonshire by the abbey of Bury St Edmunds. On the outbreak of the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536 Montagu acted as commissioner to the royal forces in Northamptonshire, and the following year Audley recommended him to the king as an honest and learned man fit to become king's serjeant, an office that he was granted on 16 October1537 with a knighthood two days afterwards. He was assigned as an assize commissioner to the Oxford circuit, transferring to the Norfolk in 1540. On 22 January 1539 Montagu received his writ of appointment as chief justice of the king's bench, and presided over the court at a time when its fortunes revived markedly and its commercial jurisdiction began to flourish. The speech that he made to the call of serjeants in 1540, on the text Diligite justiciam qui judicatis terram, is an eloquent argument that law without justice is inadequate. Just as good conscience without knowledge of the law did not equip a lawyer for practice, so much learning without good conscience could easily lead him astray. Montagu drew from the Bible and the classics to demonstrate that ‘great encreace had chaunced to empires and realmes for embracinge of justice’, and utter destruction to those that had disregarded it, such as Sodom and Gomorrah or more recent examples: ‘Who so listethe to marke contreis adjacent unto us, where is more povertie and miserye then where misrule is? An example of the wilde Yrishe and such other which livethe more like beastes then men, and all for lacke of good rule and justice’ (BL, Harley MS 361, fol. 80). On 6 November 1545 Montagu was transferred to the less onerous but more lucrative post of chief justice of the common pleas. He is credited with having tried to bring some of the king's bench innovations with him, and the court certainly enjoyed a similar boom during his presidency. Although he did not stay long enough to convert the common pleas from its conservative mood, it seems in his time to have accepted some innovations, such as the wider use of special verdicts and the awakening of the dormant action of ejectment, both of which bore fruit in later periods. Montagu was a member of the council of regency appointed by Henry VIII's will to carry on the government during the minority of Edward VI. In the council he acted with the party adverse to Somerset, whose patent as protector he refused to attest, and in October 1549 he concurred in his deposition. On 12 June1553, in the council at Greenwich, he was apprised of the duke of Northumberland's scheme for altering the succession in favour of Lady Jane Grey and asked to draft the necessary clauses for insertion in the king's will. He objected that they would be void, as contravening the act of parliament settling the succession, and obtained leave to consult his colleagues. The judges met at Ely House, and after a day in conference resolved that the project was treasonable. This resolution Montagu communicated to the council on 14 June, but was answered that the sanction of parliament would be obtained and peremptorily ordered to draft the clauses. He still hesitated, but his scruples were removed by a commission under the great seal and the promise of a general pardon. He not only drafted the clauses, but appended his signature to the will as one of its guarantors. On the accession of Mary he was committed to the Tower, on 26 July, but was discharged on 6 September with a fine of £1000 and the forfeiture of some of his estates. Although he apologized for his conduct and declared in favour of Mary, she declined to reappoint him as chief justice and he retired to the manor of Boughton, Northamptonshire, which he had bought in 1528. A supporter of the queen branded him avarus judex (‘a covetous judge’) , but conceded that he possessed a powerful reputation among commoners and nobility alike (MacCulloch, 200). Montagu married three times: first Cicely (or Elizabeth), daughter of William Lane of Orlingbury, Northamptonshire; second, following Cicely's death, Agnes, daughter of George Kirkham (d. 1527) of Warmington in the same county, a chancery clerk and member of parliament for Stamford in 1515; and third, after the death of Agnes, Eleanor (or Helen), daughter of John Roper (d. 1524), chief clerk of the king's bench and attorney-general to Henry VIII, who was the widow of John Moreton. With his third wife he had at least five sons and six daughters; in his petition to Mary I of 1553, in which he disassociated himself from the attempt to place Lady Jane Grey on the throne, he said he was the father of seventeen children, six sons and eleven daughters. The eldest, Sir Edward Montagu (d. 1602), was father of Edward Montagu, first Baron Montagu (1562/3–1644), of James Montagu (1568–1618), bishop of Winchester, of Henry Montagu, first earl of Manchester (c.1564–1642), chief justice of the king's bench, and of Sidney Montagu (d. 1644), bencher of the Middle Temple and master of requests. Montagu died at Boughton on 10 February 1557 and was buried on 5 March with much pomp (including a ‘hearse of wax’) in the neighbouring church of St Mary, Weekley, where there is an altar tomb with his full-length effigy in robes and collar of SS and the motto ‘Pour unge pleasoir mille dolours’ (‘For every pleasure, a thousand sorrows’) . There exists also a portrait in private dress by a follower of Eworth, formerly attributed to Holbein. His widow married Sir John Digby as her third husband and died in May 1563. J. H. Baker Sources TNA: PRO, CP 40/1133, m. ix · Baker, Serjeants, 168, 294–304, 527 · C. H. Hopwood, ed., Middle Temple records, 1: 1501–1603 (1904) · J. H. Baker and S. F. C. Milsom, eds., Sources of English legal history: private law to 1750 (1986), 82–3, 108–10, 244, 450 · introduction, The reports of Sir John Spelman, ed. J. H. Baker, 2, SeldS, 94 (1978) · The diary of Henry Machyn, citizen and merchant-taylor of London, from AD 1550 to AD 1563, ed. J. G. Nichols, CS, 42 (1848), 35, 128 · Report on the manuscripts of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, HMC, 53 (1900), 4–5 · L. Abbott, ‘Public office and private profit: the legal establishment in the reign of Mary Tudor’, The mid-Tudor polity, c.1540–1560, ed. J. Loach and R. Tittler (1980), 137–58, esp. 137–40 · W. K. Jordan, Edward VI, 2: The threshold of power (1970), 516–20, 527 · J. Caley and J. Hunter, eds., Valor ecclesiasticus temp. Henrici VIII, 6 vols., RC (1810–34), vol. 4, pp. 274, 282, 283, 288, 295; vol. 5, p.13 · D. MacCulloch, ‘The Vita Mariae Angliae Reginae of Robert Wingfield of Brantham’, Camden miscellany, XXVIII, CS, 4th ser., 29 (1984), 181–301, esp. 200 · TNA: PRO, REQ 1/4, fol. 156 · N. H. Nicolas, ed., Testamenta vetusta: being illustrations from wills, 2 (1826), 743 · will, TNA: PRO, PROB 11/39, fols. 40v–43 · LP Henry VIII, 12/2, no. 805 · Sainty, Judges, 9, 48 · C. Wise, The Montagus of Boughton (1888) · HoP, Commons, 1558–1603, 3.68–71 Likenesses oils, 1539, Middle Temple, London · effigy on monument, c.1557, Weekley church, Northamptonshire · J. Van der Eyden, oils, 17th cent., Boughton House, Northamptonshire; [Buccleuch estates, Selkirk, Scotland] · oils, 17th cent., Boughton House, Northamptonshire · oils, 17th cent., Peterborough City Museum · oils, Boughton House, Northamptonshire
