in dealing a direct blow at the plot and the credibility of its sponsors, and at the same time in freeing the queen from an odious suspicion. On the day following the trial the Portuguese ambassador called and thanked Scroggs. Five days later Wakeman entertained several of his friends at supper. The next day ‘he went to Windsor to see her Majesty, and (they say) kissed the king's hand, but is now gone beyond sea to avoid being brought again into trouble’ (Hist. MSS. Comm. 7th Rep. App. i. 477). The verdict was supported in a pamphlet of ‘Some Observations on the late Trials by Tom Ticklefoot;’ but this was answered in a similar production, entitled ‘The Tickler Tickled,’ and there is little doubt that the verdict was unpopular. It was openly said that Scroggs had been bribed, while Bedloe and Oates complained bitterly of the treatment they had received in the summing-up. Scroggs was ridiculed in ‘A Letter from Paris from Sir George Wakeman to his Friend Sir W. S.’ (1681). The jury was termed an ‘ungodly’ one, and the people, says Luttrell, ‘murmur very much.’ It is noteworthy that in the course of evidence given at subsequent trials Oates entirely ignored the verdict, and continued to speak of the bribe offered to and accepted by the queen's physician. Wakeman was back in London before 1685, when he was seen by Evelyn at Lady Tuke's; and he had the satisfaction of giving evidence against Titus Oates on 8 May 1685, on the occasion of his first trial for perjury. Nothing is known of his further career.
A William Wakeman, who was most probably a connection of the physician's family, was an active shipping and intelligence agent of the government at Barnstaple during Charles II's reign (Cal. State Papers, Dom. passim).
[The Tryals of Sir George Wakeman, W. Marshall, W. Rumley … for High Treason, 1678, fol.; Burnet's Own Times, 1823, ii. 221; Howell's State Trials, vii. 591–687; Willis Bund's Selections from State Trials, ii. 816–918; Luttrell's Brief Hist. Relation, i. 17, 29, 50, 74, 342; Eachard's Hist. of England, 1718, iii. 459, 561, 738; Burke's Landed Gentry, 1847, ii. 1484; Lingard's Hist. of England, 1849, ix. 441–442; Ranke's Hist. of England, iv. 88; Evelyn's Diary, ii. 221; Bramston's Autobiography (Camd. Soc.), p. 181; Twelve Bad Men, ed. Seccombe, pp. 168–76; Strickland's Queens of England, v. 638, 655; Irving's Life of Judge Jeffreys, 1898; Brit. Mus. Cat.]
WAKEMAN alias WICHE, JOHN (d. 1549), first bishop of Gloucester, was, according to a pedigree in the British Museum (Harl. MS. 6185), the second son of William Wakeman of Drayton, Worcestershire. Anthony Wood, in whose first edition he is confounded with Robert Wakeman, fellow of All Souls' in 1516, says that he was ‘a Worcestershire man born,’ without citing any authority. It is certain that he became a Benedictine, and it is possibly from this datum that Anthony Wood infers that he was educated at Gloucester Hall, the Benedictine foundation at Oxford. If the identification made in the entry, ‘abbot of Tewkesbury,’ be correct, he supplicated in the name of John Wyche, Benedictine, for the degree of B.D. on 3 Feb. 1511 (Boase, Reg. Univ. Oxon. i. 174), and this is confirmed by Wood's guarded statement, based upon a manuscript in the College of Arms, that when consecrated bishop he was of that degree. It is not improbable that he is the John Wiche of the Benedictine house of Evesham, who on 22 Dec. 1513 was a petitioner for a congé d'élire on the death of Thomas Newbold, abbot of Evesham (Letters and Papers of Henry VIII, i. 4614). On this occasion Clement Lichfield, alias Wych, prior of Evesham, became abbot, being elected on 28 Dec. 1513 (Dugdale, Monast. ii. 8). The name not only suggests relationship, probably on the maternal side, but strengthens the presumption of a Worcestershire origin. Nothing further is known of Wiche for an interval of thirty-two years. On 19 March 1534 a congé d'élire issued for the election of an abbot of the Benedictine monastery of Tewkesbury in the room of Henry Beeley, deceased (Letters and Papers, vii. 419). On 27 April 1534 the royal assent was given to the election of John Wiche, late prior, as abbot (ib. 761). The temporalities were restored on 10 June (ib. 922). Wiche had secured his own appointment by obtaining the interest of Sir William Kingston [q. v.] and of Cromwell, and by then persuading his brethren to refer the election to the king's pleasure. At the end of July 1535 both Cromwell and the king were staying at the monastery, and in October Wiche sent Cromwell a gelding and 5l. to buy him a saddle, conveying a hint of future gratifications. He himself supplied information to the government of the disaffection of one of his priors (ib. XIV. i. 942), and it is not surprising that on 9 Jan. 1539 he surrendered his monastery, receiving an annuity of four hundred marks, or 266l. 13s. 4d. (Dugdale, Monast. ii. 57). He then seems to have taken the name Wakeman, by which he was afterwards known. Upon his nomination to the newly erected see of Gloucester in September 1541 this pension was vacated. The
