[1] Born in Portsmouth, he was the son of William John Madden (1757–1833), a captain in the Royal Marines of Irish origin, and his wife Sarah Carter (1759–1833).
His minor contributions to antiquarian research were numerous: the best known, perhaps, was his dissertation on the spelling of Shakespeare's name, which, mainly on the strength of a signature found in John Florio's copy of the work of Montaigne, he contended should be "Shakspere".
[4] On his death at his home in St Stephen's Square, London, he bequeathed his journals and other private papers to the Bodleian Library, where they were to remain unopened until 1920.
He edited for the Roxburghe Club Havelok the Dane (1828), discovered by himself among the Laudian manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, William and the Werwolf (1832) and the old English versions of the Gesta Romanorum (1838).
In 1850 the magnificent edition, in parallel columns, of what are known as the "Wycliffite" versions of the Bible, from the original manuscripts, upon which he and his coadjutor, Josiah Forshall, had been engaged for twenty years, was published by the University of Oxford.
In 1833 he wrote the text of Henry Shaw's Illuminated Ornaments of the Middle Ages; and in 1850 he edited the English translation of Joseph Balthazar Silvestre's Paléographie universelle.