Arthur Savage Wade, 1787 – 1845

Arthur Wade was a rare Church of England clergyman in the ranks of the Chartist movement. By his own admission Wade was ill-fitted for life in holy orders, but he was a stalwart supporter of trade unions and radical causes – albeit that he drew the line at physical force to win the Charter.

Arthur Savage Wade was born at Warwick and baptised there at St Mary’s Church on 17 September 1787. The second son of Charles Gregory Wade, an attorney and leading Tory magistrate, and of Susanna (Savage), he was educated at the town’s grammar school. He also served as a naval midshipman ‘while a mere youth’, but left after a very short period ‘as the rigid discipline of a man of war, as might naturally be expected did not at all comport with his idea, of what he used to term “natural independence”¹

Wade took up a place at St John’s College, Cambridge, graduating in 1810 and thanks to his father’s influence became vicar of St Nicholas Church in his home town in 1811. This too was hardly his profession of choice. As one obituarist noted: ‘His subsequent admission into holy orders he himself has more than once deplored – and he has oftentimes been heard to regret that he had not been reared as a civilian – a calling in life the duties of which, it must be confessed even by his greatest admirers, he was much better fitted to discharge that those appertaining to the sacred office of the Ministry.’ Even so, and despite barely visiting his parish for the final decade and a half of his life, he became a Doctor of Divinity in 1820 and retained the valuable living at St Nicholas for more than thirty years until his death.

Radical causes in Warwickshire

A political and religious liberal, the Rev Dr Arthur Savage Wade (as he was now styled) first became involved in the Warwick Civil and Religious Club as ‘a Whig of 1688’ alongside other respectable reform-minded residents of the town, meeting ‘either in secret conclave in a small room at the Black Swan, or at public meetings convened by the High Sheriff of the County, to discuss some of the great national questions which agitated the public mind at that time of day.’

Wade publicly supported the repeal of the Test and Corporations Acts under which dissenters and Roman Catholics had been barred from public office. He nominated the successful Whig parliamentary candidate for Warwick at four elections. And in April 1831 he was among the Warwickshire notables who called a county meeting to call for parliamentary reform, using his speech to contrast freedom with thraldom, cheap government with wasteful expenditure, and a representative body ‘elected by the un-bought suffrages of the people’ with ‘one obtained by corruption, bribery, perjury, subornation of perjury, and all kinds of evil practices for which the authors ought to be send to the tread-mill’. He concluded by predicting that ‘the moment Lord John Russell’s Bill is carried, there will be one universal vibration of joy thrill through the hearts of twenty millions of people from the ten-pound householder in his tenement to our beloved Monarch seated on his throne’ (Leamington Spa Courier and Warwick Borough and County  Gazette, 9 April 1831 p1). Soon after, he was elected to the council of Thomas Attwood‘s Birmingham Political Union.

London and the politics of class

Later that year, Wade moved to London where he swiftly became a fixture in radical circles, working alongside William Lovett, Henry Hetherington, John Cleave and other future Chartists in the National Union of the Working Classes on a range of radical causes, playing an important role in Robert Owen’s efforts to promote socialist and co-operative initiatives, and in October 1832 joining forces with Henry Hunt and others from the NUWC to establish a Midland Union of the Working Classes in direct opposition to the middle-class BPU. A furious BPU responded by threatening to expel Wade, who in response defended the need for working-class organisations, declaring in a letter to Thomas Attwood published in the Poor Man’s Guardian (17 November 1832 p613) that: ‘the leaders in other Unions, being men of property living upon the rental of land, the interest of money, or the profits of trade, have separate and distinct interests from the working man’.

Wade would go on to support the work of the Grand National Consolidated Trade Union and the establishment of the London Dorchester Committee, set up in 1834 to campaign on behalf of the Tolpuddle labourers, then facing the imminent threat of transportation to Van Diemen’s Land. On 21 April 1834, walking alongside Owen, Wade led a vast demonstration on their behalf, marching in full canonical dress and wearing the red badge of a Doctor of Divinity, at the head of a procession of 100,000 people that made its way from Copenhagen Fields near King’s Cross to Whitehall. Here the Home Secretary, Lord Melbourne, refused to meet a delegation or accept their petition (The True Sun, 22 April 1834). Closely watched by special constables and units of infantry, cavalry and artillery, the procession moved on over Westminster Bridge to Kennington Common.

In the years that followed, Wade was an active member of the Marylebone Radical Association, Central National Association, and London Working Men’s Association, all of which helped lay the groundwork for Chartism.  And in May 1838, it was Wade who was despatched by the LWMA to unveil the People’s Charter for the first time at a great rally on Glasgow Green. Over the summer, he addressed another huge meeting for the Charter in Birmingham, and in September he shared the platform with Feargus O’Connor and others at the meeting in Palace Yard, Westminster, where London’s Chartists elected their delegates to the First Chartist Convention.

The First Chartist Convention and after

Wade himself was elected to represent Nottingham at the Convention, opening its first session on 4 February 1839 with a prayer which the Northern Star declared had ‘an impressive effect upon the meeting’ (NS, 9 February 1839, p4). Over the coming weeks, however, Wade found himself at odds with the support for physical force measures proposed by the London Democratic Association and its allies. On 28 March, after narrowly escaping censure by the Convention when he declared in the non-Chartist Morning Chronicle that ‘the cry of arms … would only cause misery, blood and ruin’ (19 March 1839), he resigned his post; three leading members of the Birmingham Political Union left the Convention on the same day.

Though Wade now found himself outside the mainstream of Chartism, he remained committed to the People’s Charter. In April 1842, he participated in the founding conference of the Complete Suffrage Union, presided over by the leading middle-class reformer Joseph Sturge. He also served as a delegate to a conference in December that year ostensibly called to unite the working-class National Charter Association with the middle-class CSU. The attempt at unity proved unsuccessful, with Wade joining William Lovett and others in opposing Sturge’s bid to drop the name ‘Chartist’ and some elements of the Charter from a common programme. The CSU did not long survive their defection and its defeat.

Wade also offered his support to William Lovett’s National Association of the United Kingdom for Promoting the Political and Social Improvement of the People, and Francis Place’s Metropolitan Parliamentary Reform Association, neither of which proved to be serious rivals to the NCA. His last significant political contribution was, in February 1845, to chair a testimonial dinner organised by London’s Chartists and trade unionists on behalf of the radical MP Thomas Slingsby Duncombe.

Death in Regent Street

Wade’s death on 17 November 1845 was widely reported in the London and provincial press. Then living at 9 Clarence Place, Pentonville, he had been visiting his tailor, Nicol & Co, at 114 Regent Street, to be measured for a new dress coat when he slipped while collecting his hat and stick, and would have fallen had a shop assistant not gone to his aid. ‘He immediately exclaimed, “Oh! I have lost the use of one side”,’ but was unable to say anything more. A surgeon, Mr Brett, was called, who recognising Wade and ‘knowing his singular manner, that he would avoid medical treatment if possible, assumed a little harshness with him’, and bled Wade to stem his spreading paralysis. Brett moved him to an address in Silver-street, but despite his ministrations Wade died that afternoon. An inquest agreed with Brett’s testimony that Wade had ‘died from apoplexy’.

Arthur Savage Wade was interred in the catacombs of Highgate Cemetery west on 24 November 1845.

Arthur Wade’s legacy

There appears to be no surviving portrait of Wade – though the entrepreneurial John Cleave had one on sale for 3d at the time of the Copenhagen Fields meeting. Descriptions tend to agree that he was ‘a short thick-set man, and walked rather lame’. His obituarist in the Warwickshire Standard commented that he was ‘a great lover of literature and science’, noting that he belonged to many of the most distinguished literary establishments in the metropolis’. He added: ‘From Dr Wade’s varied intellectual acquirements, pleasing address, and gentlemanly deportment, it is thought by those who best knew him, that, he was better fitted to adorn any other profession than that in which it was, unfortunately, his lot to be cast; nature certainly never intended him for the theologian; his peculiar mercurial temperament of mind, presenting an insuperable barrier to his proper discharge of the functions of such a character.’

Wade certainly did not die a poor man. Along with a lucrative income from his living at Warwick he enjoyed an annual income from private sources of some £2,000. His will, which was as widely reported as his death, left ‘all my property and effects, and moneys in hand and due to me, and all my shares in Cornish mines, money in annuity offices or banks, also church stipends and fees, and all other effects of what kind soever’ to Miss Mary Anne Crafer. She, however, is something of a mystery: twelve years Wade’s junior and born at East Dereham in 1799, she was the third daughter of Thomas Crafer, a Norfolk farmer and master butcher, who had died in 1824, and his wife Sarah Syer, who predeceased him. Nothing more is known of her, and Wade took the secret of his connection with Miss Crafer to his grave.

Unlike many radicals of the era, Wade was not forgotten. In 1934, marking the centenary of the campaign on behalf of the Tolpuddle labourers, Wade’s efforts on their behalf were marked by a ceremony at his former church of St Nicholas (Birmingham Gazette, 26 November 1934, p3). A service was attended by trade unionists, they planted a memorial tree in the churchyard, and unveiled a commemorative stone and tablet in his memory.

Notes and sources

1. ‘Death of the Rev. Dr. Wade’, Warwickshire Standard, (supplement to The Royal Leamington Spa Courier), 22 November 1845, p7. This and all other newspaper reports cited in the text above are taken from the British Newspaper Archive.

2. Wade, Arthur Savage (bap. 1787, d. 1845), by Malcolm Chase, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004; updated 2009). Available here (subscription required).

3. Arthur Wade’s story is threaded through numerous accounts of Chartism, from R.G. Gammage’s History of the Chartist Movement (1854) to Malcolm Chase’s Chartism: A New History (2007). There is also a page for Arthur Wade on Richard Brown’s excellent Looking at History website.