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. 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
Phillip II refused all his requests for an interview and ordered him out of Spain, with an intimation that he was fortunate to escape to liberty. He was back in England on 12 April, and with his return diplomatic relations between England and Spain ceased. In the same month Wade was sent to
Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, to induce her to come to terms with Elizabeth. Wade witnessed a discussion with a French envoy about her dowry income, and Mary took the opportunity to complain about her treatment in England and her declining health. In February 1585, he was appointed to accompany
Claude Nau to the court of
King James VI of Scotland, but his appointment was cancelled at the last minute. In March 1585 Wade was despatched to Paris to demand the surrender of the conspirator
Thomas Morgan.
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 Wade and rescue Morgan on their way to the coast. Wade, however, convinced that he could not secure Morgan, contented himself with obtaining a promise that Morgan 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 Roman Catholic from France. In August, Wade accompanied
William Davison to the Low Countries to negotiate an alliance with the
States-General of the Netherlands. 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 cabinet, carried back a valuable collection of papers to London. For this important service he was paid thirty pounds. In 1587 Wade was again in France. During the remainder of the reign of
Elizabeth I of England, he was much occupied in searching for
Jesuits and in discovering plots against the life of the queen.
James I, who knighted him in 1603. employed him in similar ways, and he was occupied that year in unravelling the
Bye Plot and
Main Plot. Wade was
Lieutenant of the Tower of London at the time of the
Gunpowder Plot and questioned
Guy Fawkes. For some time Wade was a member of the
Parliament of England, elected as MP for
Aldborough (1584),
Thetford (1589),
Preston (1601) and
West Looe (1604). Wade sent observations about the behaviour of the lion cubs in the Tower to the
Earl of Salisbury. In September 1607, a breeding pair, Henry and Anne, had a cub, or "lion whelp". There was plague in London in September 1608 and Wade noted that life at the Tower was made inconvenient by tenements and housing built at the gate and barbican. As these houses were infected, he was reluctant to go in and out on the land side, and could only use the
Thames. ==Later life==