After spending a number of years on the European continent, he returned to England, where he and a group of fellow pursuivants found and delivered suspected Roman Catholics to the authorities for trial and punishment.
Wadsworth's hope of permanent employment in the Infanta's suite failed with the breaking of the match; but her influence procured to him and his brother the payment of their father's pension at least for a time after his death.
He made for England (December 1625), professed himself a convert from Catholicism, and offered his services to the Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury as a mole inside the underground ranks of English Catholics.
Upon his release, by his mother's means, he passed as a Spaniard to Calais, where he was denounced by his old schoolfellow, George Gage, as a spy for the Duke of Buckingham, and thrown into prison for ten months.
[6] From about 1629 time until about 1648, or later, Wadsworth was actively engaged as an anti-Catholic priest hunter and a spy against the High Church Anglican followers of Laudianism, even testifying against Archbishop William Laud on his trial.
[8] The last heard of him is Sanderson's account in Life of James I,[9] "Mr. Waddesworth, a renegade, proselyte, Turncote of any religion, and every trade … is now living, 1655, a common Hackney to the basest Catchpole Bayliffs" in Westminster.