Edward was the younger son of John Badeley M.D. and his wife, Charlotte née Brackenbury of Chelmsford. He graduated from Brasenose College, Oxford in 1823, took his MA in 1828 and was called to the bar by the Inner Temple in 1841. He started to practise on the home circuit but was attracted by ecclesiastical law. Badeley had met John Henry Newman in 1837 and become a follower soon after. He soon became associated with fellow Anglo-Catholic lawyers James Hope-Scott and Edward Bellasis in defending "Tractarianism".