Edmund Venables

Edmund Venables (5 July 1819 – 5 March 1895) was an English cleric and antiquarian.

Life Born at 17 Queenhithe, London on 5 July 1819, he was third son of William Venables (d. 1840), paper-maker and stationer at 17 Queenhithe, who was Lord Mayor of London in 1826, and M.P. for the City of London 1831–2; his mother, Ann Ruth Fromow, was of Huguenot descent. He was educated at Merchant Taylors' school from July 1830, and in 1838 matriculated at Pembroke College, Cambridge, becoming a scholar (29 May 1839). In 1842 he graduated B.A., as third wrangler. In 1845 he proceeded M.A., and he was admitted ad eundem at Oxford on 17 December 1856. As an undergraduate he was one of the founders of the Cambridge Camden Society.

Venables was ordained deacon by Ashurst Gilbert, the bishop of Chichester in 1844, as curate to Archdeacon Julius Hare, rector of Hurstmonceux in Sussex, and remained there until 1853. In 1846 he was ordained priest by Edward Stanley, the bishop of Norwich. From 1853 to 1855 he was curate at Bonchurch in the Isle of Wight, and for some years after 1855 he remained there, taking pupils. John Kitto's Biblical Encyclopædia, and the Dictionary of National Biography. He was a frequent writer in the Saturday Review, The Athenæum, The Guardian, and Good Words.

Family Venables married at St Michael's Church, Highgate on 8 September 1847, Caroline Mary, daughter of Henry Tebbs, proctor of Doctors' Commons. She died the day after his own death, and both were buried on 9 March in the same grave in the cloisters of Lincoln Cathedral. They had one son and six daughters.