ambassador from Queen Elizabeth to the King of Spain in the delicate matter
of Mendoza, and afterwards counsellor to James I, and Lieutenant of the Tower.
This Esme was a man of dark devices. It was he who negotiated with
Mary Stuart for Elizabeth; it was he who wormed out of Cobham the evidence
against the great Raleigh. He became rich, and his sister
(the widow of Henry de Kirkhaven, Lord of Hemfleet) marrying into the family
of the Wottons, the wealth of the house was further increased
by the union of her daughter Sybil with Marmaduke Wade. Marmaduke Wade
was a Lord of the Admiralty, and a patron of Pepys, who in his
diary [July 17,1668] speaks of visiting him at Belsize. He was raised
to the peerage in 1667 by the title of Baron Bellasis and Wotton,
and married for his second wife Anne, daughter of Philip Stanhope,
second Earl of Chesterfield. Allied to this powerful house,
the family tree of Wotton Wade grew and flourished.

In 1784, Philip, third Baron, married the celebrated beauty, Miss Povey,
and had issue Armigell Esme, in whose person the family prudence seemed
to have run itself out.

The fourth Lord Bellasis combined the daring of Armigell, the adventurer,
with the evil disposition of Esme, the Lieutenant of the Tower.
No sooner had he become master of his fortune than he took to dice,
drink, and debauchery with all the extravagance of the last century.
He was foremost in every riot, most notorious of all the notorious "bloods"
of the day.

Horace Walpole, in one of his letters to Selwyn in 1785,
mentions a fact which may stand for a page of narrative. "Young Wade,"
he says, "is reported to have lost one thousand guineas last night
to that vulgarest of all the Bourbons, the Duc de Chartres, and they say