[2] The boy's mother, Emily Batten, came from the southwest of the country, however, and had close family connections with Wales, which explains how the couple's eldest son came to be given the resoundingly Welsh name, "Cadwallader".
No fewer than four of his uncles had predeceased Thomas Bates, dying without direct heirs of their own, and apparently leaving their wealth to Cadwallader.
[2] He undertook with energy the "county duties" appropriate to his wealth and social status, serving as a magistrate and deputy lieutenant.
[6] The footprint Cadwallader Bates left on history is in large measure due to his work as an historian and antiquarian.
[1] In addition to secular history, he took an interest in church history, at one point becoming embroiled in a sustained investigation into the "correct" date for Easter, having regard to the writings of Saint Columba,[2] the evangelising Irish saint whose disciple-successors, more than a thousand years earlier, had expanded the Celtic church into the Kingdom of Northumbria.
[2] In 1893, while visiting what would then have been known as Austrian Poland, Cadwallader Bates was received into the Uniate (Eastern Catholic) Church.
In March 1902 Bates suffered a heart attack and died very suddenly at his Langley Castle home.