William Wade (English politician)

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

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

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 Waad was living in Paris and frequently supplied political information to William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, whose "servant" he is described as being.[3] He claimed "familiar acquaintance" with the celebrated French publicist Jean Bodin, from whom he seems to have derived some of the news he forwarded to Burghley. In the autumn of 1576 Amias Paulet took Wade to Blois.[4] During the winter of 1578–79 he was in Italy, from where he forwarded to Burghley reports on its political condition. From Venice in April 1579 he sent Burghley fifty of the rarest kinds of seeds in Italy.[5] In May he was in Florence, and in February 1579/80 he was living in Strasbourg. In the following April he was employed on a delicate mission in Paris by Sir Henry Cobham.

Among appointments in London, Waad 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[9] to explain the expulsion from England of the Spanish ambassador, Mendoza. He arrived in March, but Phillip II refused all his requests for an interview and ordered him out of Spain, with an intimation that he was fortunate to escape to liberty.[10][11][12][13] He was back in England on 12 April, and with his return diplomatic relations between England and Spain ceased. In the same month Waad was sent to Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, to induce her to come to terms with Elizabeth, and his account of the interview is printed by Froude.[14] In February 1584-5 he was appointed to accompany Nau to the court of King James VI of Scotland, but his appointment was cancelled at the last minute.[15]

In March 1585 Waad was despatched to Paris[16] to demand the surrender of the conspirator Thomas Morgan. Henry III was willing to consider the request, but the Catholic League and the Guises were violently opposed to it and even instructed the Duc d'Aumale to waylay Waad and rescue Morgan on their way to the coast. Waad, however, convinced that he could not secure Morgan, contented himself with obtaining a promise that Morgan should be detained in prison in France, but Aumale nevertheless attacked the envoy near Amiens and inflicted on him a severe beating as an answer to his demand for the extradition of a Roman Catholic from France. In August, Waad accompanied William Davison to the Low Countries to negotiate an alliance with the 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 Babington Plot. He himself went down to 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 Waad 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. Waad was Lieutenant of the Tower of London at the time of the Gunpowder Plot and questioned Guy Fawkes. For some time Waad was a member of the Parliament of England, elected as MP for Aldborough (1584), Thetford (1589), Preston (1601) and West Looe (1604).

Later life

He retired from public life in 1613, at the instigation of Frances Howard, Countess of Essex. She wanted Wade replaced with a less honest Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir Gervase Helwys, as part of her scheme to murder the prisoner Thomas Overbury, who was opposed to her affair with Robert Carr.

Wade had allowed Lady Arbella Stuart a key to her quarters in the Tower, and this was made the pretext for his replacement by Helwys. Wade was later praised by Lloyd, who claimed that "to his directions we owe Rider's Dictionary, to his encouragement Hooker's Polity, and to his charge Gruter's Inscriptions.[21]

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.[22] 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. Chisholm 1911.
  2. https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-28364?rskey=009X6y&result=1
  3. Lansd. 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. James Granger, A biographical history of England from Egbert the Great to the Revolution (3rd edition, 1779), p. 402
  22. Manuden and Berden History Society, Guide to St Mary the Virgin church Manuden (1993)

References
  •  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Wade, Sir William". Encyclopædia Britannica. 28 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 228.
  •  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Pollard, Albert Frederick (1899). "Waad, William". In Lee, Sidney (ed.). Dictionary of National Biography. 58. London: Smith, Elder & Co. pp. 401–404.
  • Birch, Thomas (1754). Memoirs of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth from the Year 1581 till her Death. In which the secret intrigues of her Court, And the conduct of her favourite, Robert Earl of Essex, both at Home and Aboard are particularly illustrated. I.
  • "Calendar of State Papers, Domestic. Edward VI, Mary, Elizabeth, and James I". Internet Archive. 1856. Retrieved 21 August 2008. Records assembled by the State Paper Office, including papers of the Secretaries of State up to 1782
  • Dasent, John Roche (1890). Acts of the Privy Council of England. London: Eyre and Spottis- woode.
  • Froude, James Anthony (1893). History of England from the fall of Wolsey to the defeat of the Spanish Armada. 11. London: Longmans, Green.
  • Froude, James Anthony (1893). History of England from the fall of Wolsey to the defeat of the Spanish Armada. 12. London: Longmans, Green.
  • Hume, Martin Andrew Sharp. Calendar of letters and state papers relating to English affairs : preserved principally in the Archives of Simancas. 3 Elizabeth, 1580–1586. London: H.M.S.O. Retrieved 27 August 2008.
  • Paulet, Amias (1874). Morris, John (ed.). The letter-books of Sir Amias Poulet, keeper of Mary Queen of Scots. Retrieved 27 August 2008.
  • Scott, Edward J. L. (1904). Index to the Sloane Manuscripts in the British Museum (pdf). London: British Museum. p. 555. Retrieved 27 August 2008.
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