William Wade (English politician)

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For other people named William Wade, see William Wade (disambiguation).

Sir William Wadd late Lieutenant of the Tower, 18th-century engraving after an original portrait

Sir William Wade (or Waad, or Wadd; 1546 – 21 October 1623) was an English statesman and diplomat, and Lieutenant of the Tower of London.

Early life and education

Wade was the eldest son of Armagil Wade, the traveller, who sailed with a party of adventurers for North America in 1536, later, one of the clerks of the privy council in London and a member of parliament,[1] and his first wife, Lady Alice Patten.[2]

Both his parents died in 1568, and Wade succeeded to the family property, his father's sons by his first wife having predeceased him. In 1571 he was admitted a student of Gray's Inn, and a few years later, doubtless with a view to entering the service of the government, he began travelling on the continent.

Career

In July 1576 Wade was living in Paris and frequently supplied political information to

Sir Henry Cobham
.

Among appointments in London, Wade undertook a number of ambassadorial missions, in 1580 to Portugal;[6] then in 1581 he became secretary to Sir Francis Walsingham and in 1583 he was appointed as one of the clerks of the Privy Council.[1][7] In April of that year he was sent to Vienna to discuss the differences between the Hanseatic League and English merchants abroad, and in July he accompanied Lord Willoughby on his embassy to Denmark to invest the king with the insignia of the Garter, and to negotiate an agreement on mercantile affairs.[8]

In January 1583–4 he was sent to Madrid

King James VI of Scotland, but his appointment was cancelled at the last minute.[15]

In March 1585 Wade was despatched to Paris

States-General of the Netherlands
.

A year later he took a prominent part in arranging the seizure of Mary Stuart's papers, which implicated her in the

Chartley in August 1586, and, while Mary was decoyed away on a hunting expedition, arrested her secretaries Nau and Curle, and having ransacked her cabinet, carried back a valuable collection of papers to London.[17][18][19] For this important service he was paid thirty pounds.[20]

In 1587 Wade was again in France. During the remainder of the reign of

Elizabeth I of England, he was much occupied in searching for Jesuits and in discovering plots against the life of the queen.[1]

James I, who knighted him in 1603. employed him in similar ways, and he was occupied that year in unravelling the Bye Plot and Main Plot. Wade was Lieutenant of the Tower of London at the time of the Gunpowder Plot and questioned Guy Fawkes. For some time Wade was a member of the Parliament of England, elected as MP for Aldborough (1584), Thetford (1589), Preston (1601) and West Looe
(1604).

Wade sent observations about the behaviour of the lion cubs in the Tower to the

Earl of Salisbury.[21] In September 1607, a breeding pair, Henry and Anne, had a cub, or "lion whelp".[22] There was plague in London in September 1608 and Wade noted that life at the Tower was made inconvenient by tenements and housing built at the gate and barbican. As these houses were infected, he was reluctant to go in and out on the land side, and could only use the Thames.[23]

Later life

He retired from public life in 1613, at the instigation of

Robert Carr
.

Wade had allowed

Polity, and to his charge Gruter's Inscriptions.[24]

A wall tablet within the church of St Mary the Virgin at Manuden in Essex commemorates Wade (named Waad on the tablet). He lived at Battles Hall in the village during his retirement.[25] Wade died on 21 October 1623 and is buried in the church. He had been a shareholder in the Virginia Company, and the Wades of Virginia claim descent from his father.[1]

Notes

  1. ^ a b c d Chisholm 1911.
  2. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/28364. (Subscription or UK public library membership
    required.)
  3. ^ Lansdowne MS 23, art. 75
  4. ^ Cal. State Papers, For. 1575-7
  5. ^ Cal. Hatfield MSS. ii. 254
  6. ^ Sloane MS 1442, f. 114 – Instructions to, as Ambassador to Portugal, [1580]
  7. ^ Cal. State Papers Domestic, 1611–18, p.198
  8. ^ Birch 24, 31
  9. ^ Sloane MS 2442, f.128. – Instructions to, as Ambassador to Spain, 1583/4.
  10. ^ Cotton. MS. Vesp. C. vii. f.392
  11. ^ Cal. State Papers, Simancas, 1580-6, pp. 516, 520–1
  12. ^ Birch 45, 48
  13. ^ Froude 414, 422
  14. ^ Froude, 448-51
  15. ^ Cal. State Papers, Simancas, 1580-6, pp. 533
  16. ^ Sloane MS 2442. ff. 63, 65 b. – Instructions to, as Ambassador to France, 1584/5. 1586/7.
  17. ^ Cal. State Papers, Simancas, 1580-6 pp. 625–6
  18. ^ Paulet pp. 288 sqq
  19. ^ Froude xii. 160 sqq
  20. ^ Acts P. C. 1586-7, p. 211
  21. ^ HMC Salisbury Hatfield, vol. 17 (London, 1938), pp. 376, 378, 385, 397.
  22. ^ M. S. Guiseppi & D. McN. Lockie, HMC Salisbury Hatfield, 19 (London, 1965), p. 258.
  23. ^ HMC Salisbury Hatfield, vol. 20 (London, 1968), p. 234-5.
  24. ^ James Granger, A biographical history of England from Egbert the Great to the Revolution (3rd edition, 1779), p. 402
  25. ^ Manuden and Berden History Society, Guide to St Mary the Virgin church Manuden (1993)

References

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