[1] He was educated at Shrewsbury, where he was Dyke scholar, and matriculated from St Mary Hall, Oxford, on 26 May 1842, but left the university without graduating.
In 1855 he served for nine months at Kerch in the Crimea as first-class assistant commissary, with the rank of captain, in the Turkish contingent.
[2] In 1858, he led the Naval and Military Gazette, and from January 1860 to March 1861 The Welcome Guest, and he sent frequent contributions to the St. James Magazine and other periodicals.
8vo; reissued in 1864), is little more than a compilation of gossip, but Historic Byeways, two volumes of essays reprinted from periodicals, shows extensive reading.
Besides other stories of German, French, and Russian history is Mr. Carlyle's latest Pet, a hostile criticism of the characters drawn by that historian of Frederick William I, based upon the recently published Aus vier Jahrhunderten of Karl von Weber.
[2] Wraxall's most important historical work was The Life and Times of Caroline Matilda, Queen of Denmark and Norway (1864, 3 vols.
He claimed to have shown by original research the worthlessness of the evidence on which the queen was divorced after the Struensee affair, and published for the first time (iii.