Page:A catalogue of notable Middle Templars, with brief biographical notices.djvu/272

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.
252
Wade — Walford.
WADE, NATHANIEL.
Politician.
d. 1718.

Admitted 15 June, 1681.

Third son of John Wade of The Wicke, Arlingham, Gloucestershire. He entered the Middle Temple from New Inn, and was called to the Bar 26 May, 1682. He soon became involved in the political controversies of the time. Being suspected of complicity in the Rye House Plot, he fled to Holland and joined the partizans of the Duke of Monmouth (q.v.) with whom he landed at Lyme Regis in 1685. He fought bravely at Sedgemoor, but was seized endeavouring to make his escape and committed to Newgate. On his trial he turned king's evidence, and was pardoned. He subsequently became Town Clerk of Bristol, where he died 14 March, 1717-8, and where a street is named after him.


WAKE, Sir ISAAC.
Diplomatist.
About 1580-1632.

Admitted 14 February, 1604-5.

Second son of Arthur Wake of Oxford (a canon of Christ's Church, and a kinsman of Archbishop Wake). He was educated at Oxford, where he graduated B.A. in 1597 and became a Fellow of Merton in 1598. In the year of his admission to the Inn he was elected Public Orator at Oxford. In 1609 he became Secretary to Sir Dudley Carleton, Ambassador at Venice, and subsequently was English representative in Savoy and Switzerland, for which services he was knighted by James I. in 1619. He died in Paris in 1632, and his body was brought to England and interred with great honour in the chapel of Dover Castle.

Wake published some of his orations and some discourses on the Cantons of Switzerland and affairs in Italy and Sweden; but his best known work is one entitled Rex Platonicus, a description in Latin of King James I.'s entertainment at Oxford in 1605, and remarkable for containing a passage from which is supposed to have suggested the plot of Macbeth to the author of that Play.


WALCOT, Sir THOMAS.
Judge.
1629—1685.

Admitted 12 November, 1647.

Second son of Humphrey Walcot of Walcot, Salop. He was born at Lydbury 6 Aug. 1629. He was called to the Bar on 25 Nov. 1653, to the Bench on 11 Nov. 1671, and appointed Lent Reader in 1677. He was elected Recorder of Bewdley in 1671 and called to the degree of the Coif in 1679. Entering Parliament for Ludlow in the same year, he was knighted in 1681, and in Oct. 1683 raised to a seat on the King's Bench. This dignity, however, he enjoyed but for two years, dying in the first year of James II.


WALFORD, CORNELIUS.
Actuary and Statistician.
1827—1885.

Admitted 8 January, 1858.

Eldest son of Cornelius Walford, naturalist, of Witham, Essex. He was called to the Bar 16 Nov. 1860. He joined the Parliamentary Bar, but soon became connected with the Accidental Death Insurance and other Companies, and in 1870 brought out his Insurance Yearbook. His great literary labour, however, was an Encyclopædia of Insurance, an ambitious work intended to fill ten volumes, only five of which were completed. In 1875 he became a member of the Historical Society, and read before it Papers forming