at Paris, and frequently supplied political information to Burghley, whose ‘servant’ he is described as being (cf. Lansd. MS. 23, art. 75). 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 Sir Amias Paulet [q. v.] took Wade to Blois (Cal. State Papers, For. 1575-7 passim). During the winter of 1578-9 he was in Italy, whence he forwarded to Burghley reports on its political condition. From Venice in April 1579 he sent the lord-treasurer fifty of the rarest kinds of seeds in Italy (Cal. Hatfield MSS. ii. 254). In May he was at Florence, and in February 1579-1580 he was residing at Strasburg. In the following April he was employed on some delicate mission in Paris by Sir Henry Cobham. The suggestion in the Cal. State Papers, Venetian, that he was ambassador to Spain and Portugal in 1579 is misdated. In 1580 he received instructions as ambassador to Portugal (Sloane MS. 1442, f. 114). In 1581 he seems to have returned to England, and entered the service of Sir Francis Walsingham as secretary, and in 1583 he became one of the clerks to the privy council (Cal. State Papers, Dom., 1611-18, p.198). In April of that year he was sent to Vienna to discuss the differences between the Hanse Towns 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 (Birch, Memoirs of the Reign of Elizabeth, i. 24, 31). In January 1583-4 he was sent to Madrid to explain the expulsion from England of the Spanish ambassador, Mendoza. He arrived in March, but Philip II refused all his requests for an interview, and ordered him out of Spain, with an intimation that he was fortunate to escape free (Cotton. MS. Vesp. C. vii. f.392; Cal. State Papers, Simancas, 1580-6, pp. 516, 520-1; Birch, i. 45, 48; Froude, xi. 414, 422). He was back in England on 12 April, and with his return diplomatic relations between England and Spain ceased. In the same month Waad was sent to Mary Stuart to induce her to come to terns with Elizabeth, and his account of the interview is printed by Froude (Hist. xi. 448-51). In February 1584-5 he was appointed to accompany Nau to the court of James VI, but was stopped at the last minute (Cal. State Papers, Simancas, 1580-6, p. 533). In March Waad was despatched to Paris to demand the surrender of the conspirator Thomas Morgan (1543-1606?) [q. v.] 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 Waad and rescue Morgan on their way to the coast. Waad, however, convinced that he could not secure Morgan, contented himself with obtaining a promise that he should be detained in prison in France, but Aumale nevertheless attacked the envoy near Amiens, and inflicted on him a severe beating as an answer to his demand for the extradition of a catholic from France.
In August 1585 Waad accompanied William Davison [q. v.] to the Low Countries to negotiate an alliance with the States-General. A year later he took a prominent part in arranging the seizure of Mary Stuart’s papers which implicated her in the Babington plot. 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 cabinent, carried back a valuable collection of papers to London (ib. 1580-6, pp. 625-6; Amyas Poulet, Letter-Books, pp. 288 sqq.; Froude, xii. 160 sqq.) For this important service he was paid thirty pounds (Acts P. C. 1586-7, p. 211). In the following February he was again sent to France to explain the execution of Mary Stuart, to demand the recall of De l’Aubespine, the French ambassador, on the ground of his dependence on the league and complicity in Stafford’s plot [see Stafford, William, 1554-1612], and to justify Elizabeth’s detention of French shipping. For some time he was denied audience, the recall of the French ambassador was refused, but more success attended his endeavour to arrange the dispute about detention of French shipping in England and English shipping in France (Cal. State Papers, Venetian, 1581-91, pp. 475, 477, 483, 492, 517, 527, 533). He returned to England in June.
This was the last of Waad’s diplomatic missions. In 1588 he was returned to parliament as member for Thetford; he was also elected to the parliament of 1601 as member for Preston. He was, however, mainly occupied with his duties as clerk of the privy council, and especially in tracking treasonable practices and examining jesuits and recusants. His zeal in these pursuits gained him the reputation of being the chief persecutor of the catholics (ib. Dom. 1601-1603, p. 199; cf. Lansd, MSS. 63, 66, 145, 148, 153; Law, The Archpriest Controversy, i. 84, 85, 155, 208, 212, 215, 226; Foley,
