William Wade (English politician)

Sir William Wade (or Waad, or Wadd; 1546 – 21 October 1623) was an English statesman and diplomat, and Lieutenant of the Tower of London.

Wade was the eldest son of Armagil Wade, the traveller, who sailed with a party of adventurers for North America in 1536, later, one of the clerks of the privy council in London and a member of parliament, and his first wife, Alice Patten.

Both his parents died in 1568, and Wade succeeded to the family property, his father’s sons by his first wife having predeceased him. In 1571 he was admitted a student of Gray’s Inn, and a few years later, doubtless with a view to entering the service of the government, he began travelling on the continent.

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. He claimed "familiar acquaintance" with the celebrated French publicist Jean Bodin, from whom he seems to have derived some of the news he forwarded to Burghley. In the autumn of 1576 Amias Paulet took Wade to Blois. During the winter of 1578–79 he was in Italy, from where he forwarded to Burghley reports on its political condition. From Venice in April 1579 he sent Burghley fifty of the rarest kinds of seeds in Italy. In May he was in Florence, and in February 1579/80 he was living in Strasbourg. In the following April he was employed on a delicate mission in Paris by Sir Henry Cobham.

Among appointments in London, Wade undertook a number of ambassadorial missions, in 1580 to Portugal; then in 1581 he became secretary to Sir Francis Walsingham and in 1583 he was appointed as one of the clerks of the Privy Council. 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.

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