Sir Edmund, a younger son of an ancient Scotch family settled in Lincolnshire. He was some time a student of Lincoln-college, Oxford; and removed from thence to the Inner Temple, where he applied himself diligently to the study of the law, and became a barrister. In the ninth of Queen Elizabeth he was both Lent and Summer reader, and in the 16th double reader. He was appointed her majesty's serjeant-at-law in the 19th year of her reign; and some time after, one of the justices of the assize. In 1582, he was made lord chief justice of the common pleas, and in the year following was knighted. He held his office to the end of his life, died in the year 1605, and was buried at Eyeworth in Bedfordshire. He was an able but punctilious lawyer; a scourge to the Puritans; and a strenuous supporter of the established church. His works are, 1. Reports of many principal cases argued and adjudged in the time of Queen Elizabeth in the common bench. Lond. 1644. fol. 2. Resolutions and judgements on the cases and matter, agitated in all courts of Westminster, in the latter end of the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Published by John Goldsborough, Esq. Lond. 1655, 4to. Besides these, there is a manuscript copy of his readings still in being.

Adam, a native of Scotland, was brother to the reverend James Anderson, D.D., editor of the Diplomata Scotiae and Royal Genealogies, many years since minister of the Scots Presbyterian church in... Anderson, in Swallow-street, Piccadilly, and well known in those days among the people of that persuasion resident in London by the name of Bishop Anderson, a learned but imprudent man, who lost a considerable part of his property in the fatal year 1720. He married, and had issue a son, and a daughter who was the wife of an officer in the army.

Adam Anderson was for 40 years a clerk in the Southsea house; and at length arrived at his acme there, being appointed chief clerk of the Stock and New Annuities, which office he retained till his death. He was appointed one of the trustees for establishing the colony of Georgia in America; and was also one of the court of assistants of the Scots corporation in London. The time of the publication of his "Historical and Chronological Deduction of Trade and Commerce," a work replete with useful information, was about the year 1762. He was twice married; by the first wife he had issue a daughter, married to one Mr Hardy, an apothecary in the Strand, who are both dead without issue; he afterwards became the third husband of the widow of Mr Caulter, formerly a wholesale linen draper in Cornhill, by whom he had no issue. She was, like him, tall and graceful; and her face has been thought to have some resemblance to that of the ever-living countess of Desmond, given in Mr Pennant's first Tour in Scotland. Mr Anderson died at his house in Red-Lion street, Clerkenwell, January 10, 1775. He had a good library of books, which were sold by his widow, who survived him several years, and died in 1781.