William Wade (English politician)

In July 1576 Wade was living in Paris and frequently supplied political information to William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, whose "servant" he is described as being.

[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.

[14] Wade witnessed a discussion with a French envoy about her dowry income, and Mary took the opportunity to complain about her treatment in England and her declining health.

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 Wade and rescue Morgan on their way to the coast.

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.

[23] There was plague in London in September 1608 and Wade noted that life at the Tower was made inconvenient by tenements and housing built at the gate and barbican.

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 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.