Edmund was educated at a private school at Gloucester, at Winchester College (1634), and then at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, where he matriculated on 22 January 1636, learnt little and got into debt and into disgrace with his tutor, Henry Wilkinson.
Thence he was removed to the care of Mr. Crowther, rector of Newton Blossomville, formerly his elder brother Ralph's Oxford tutor, who found him "devoid of the first grounds of logicke or other University learning", but "willing and capable".
With the first money he earned he paid off his Oxford creditors, and, when the First Bishops' War with Scotland was over, joined the army of the states in Flanders in Sir Thomas Culpepper's company.
[1] Verney sided with the king in the civil war, and suffered heavily for his loyalty; his pay as well as that of his men was constantly in arrears; the grief of his father's death at the Battle of Edgehill was embittered by the sorrow and indignation he felt that his eldest brother, Ralph, should support the Parliamentary cause; his portion invested in the aulnage was practically forfeited, and he suffered most of all from the mistakes he witnessed daily in the conduct of his own leaders.
After the surrender of Chester, Sir Edmund rejoined Ormonde, to whom he was devotedly attached; and their portraits were painted in Paris by Justus van Egmont in 1648.