Note A — Chapter XXIV
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If Thomas Warde were sent to the Low Countries, as I think it almost certain he was sent, although I cannot prove it, belike he may have been one of those Elizabethan gentlemen Shakespeare had in mind when he wrote in the “Two Gentlemen of Verona”:
“Yet hath Sir Proteus ... Made use and fair advantage of his days: His years but young, but his experience old: His head unmellowed, but his judgment ripe; And, in a word (for far behind his worth Come all the praises that I now bestow) He is complete in feature and in mind, With all good grace, to grace a gentleman.”
It sheds some very faint corroborative light on the supposal that Thomas Ward was the “Mr. Warde” mentioned by Sir Francis Walsingham in the “Earl of Leicester’s Correspondence” (Cam. Soc), that Sir Thomas Heneage, a trusted diplomatist of Queen Elizabeth in the Low Countries, married Anne Poyntz, the daughter of Sir Nicholas Poyntz and Margaret Stanley, a daughter of Edward Stanley Earl of Derby, especially when it is recollected that the Poyntz and the Wards, of Mulwith, were related. — See “Life of Mary Ward” (Burns & Oates, 2 vols.)
Also a “Mr. Wade” mentioned, by Walsingham to Leicester in a letter dated 3rd April, 1587, may have been really “Warde.” — See Wright’s “Elizabethan Letters,” vol. ii., p. 335.
Again, “The Calendar of State Papers,” Domestic Series, 1581-90, gives, page 93, a Thomas Warde, as an examiner for the Privy Council, taking down evidence in the cause of Robert Hungate and wife v. John Hoare and John Shawe, in the year 1583.