Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 59.djvu/26

  268–71, iv. 62, 63, 68, 130, and Letters, ed. Cunningham, passim; Coxe's Pelham Administration, ii. 130, 238, 239; Waldegrave's Memoirs; Gent. Mag. 1763 p. 201, 1784 ii. 199, 875, 1835 ii. 316, 1859 ii. 642, 643; Evans's Cat. Engr. Portraits; Doyle's Official Baronage; Burke's Peerage; Knight's Engl. Cyclopædia, vol. v.; Stanhope's Hist. of Engl. chap. xxxiv.; authorities cited.]  WALDEGRAVE or WALGRAVE, RICHARD (d. 1402), speaker of the House of Commons, was the son of Sir Richard Waldegrave by his wife, Agnes Daubeney. He was descended from the Northamptonshire family dwelling at Walgrave. The earliest member of the family known, Warine de Walgrave, was father of John de Walgrave, sheriff of London in 1205. The elder Sir Richard, his great-grandson, crossed to France with Edward III in 1329 (, Fœdera, 1821, ii. 764), was returned to parliament in 1335 for Lincolnshire, and in 1337 received letters from Edward permitting him to accompany Henry Burghersh [q. v.], bishop of Lincoln, to Flanders (ib. pp. 967, 1027). In 1343 he received similar letters on the occasion of his accompanying Humphrey de Bohun, earl of Hereford, to France (ib. iii. 866).

His son, Sir Richard, resided at Smallbridge in Suffolk, and was returned to parliament as a knight of the shire in the parliament of February 1375–6. He was elected to the first and second parliaments of Richard II and to that of 1381. In 1381 he was elected speaker of the House of Commons, and prayed the king to discharge him from the office; the first instance, says Manning, of a speaker desiring to be excused. Richard II, however, insisted on his fulfilling his duties. During his speakership parliament was chiefly occupied with the revocation of the charters granted to the villeins by Richard during Tyler's rebellion. It was dissolved in February 1381–2. Waldegrave represented Suffolk in the two parliaments of 1382, in those of 1383, in that of 1386, in those of 1388, and in that of January 1389–90. He died at Smallbridge on 2 May 1402, and was buried on the north side of the parish church of St. Mary at Bures in Essex. He married Joan Silvester of Bures, by whom he had a son, Sir Richard Waldegrave (d. 1434), who took part in the French wars, assisting in 1402 in the capture of the town of Conquet and the island of Rhé in Bretagne. He was ancestor of Sir Edward Waldegrave [q. v.]

[Manning's Speakers of the House of Commons, 1850, p. 10; Collins's Peerage, 1779, iv. 417; Rolls of Parliament, ii. 100, 166; Calendar of Patent Rolls, 1377–85 passim.]  WALDEGRAVE, ROBERT (1554?–1604), puritan printer and publisher, born about 1554, son of Richard Waldegrave or Walgrave of Blockley, Worcestershire, was bound apprentice to William Griffith, stationer, of London, for eight years from 24 June 1568 (, Transcript, i. 372). Waldegrave doubtless took up the freedom of the Stationers' Company in the summer of 1576 (the records for that year are lost). On 17 June 1578 he obtained a license for his first publication (‘A Castell for the Soule’), beginning business in premises near Somerset House in the Strand. He removed for a short time in 1583 to a shop in Foster Lane, and in later years occasionally published books in St. Paul's Churchyard at the sign of the Crane, and in Cannon Lane at the sign of the White Horse. But during the greater part of his publishing career in London he occupied a shop in the Strand.

Waldegrave was a puritan, and from the outset his publications largely consisted of controversial works in support of puritan theology. His customers or friends soon included the puritan leaders in parliament, the church, and the press.

In April 1588 he printed and published, without giving names of author and publisher or place or date, the ‘Diotrephes’ of John Udall [q. v.] The anti-episcopal tract, which was not licensed by the Stationers' Company, was judged seditious by the Star-chamber. The puritanic temper of Waldegrave's publications had already excited the suspicion of the authorities. On 16 April his press was seized, and Udall's tract was found in the printing office with other tracts of like temper. On 13 May the Stationers' Company ordered that, in obedience to directions issued by the Star-chamber, ‘the said books shall be burnte, and the said presse, letters, and printing stuffe defaced and made unserviceable.’ Waldegrave fled from London, and was protected by Udall and by John Penry [q. v.] At the latter's persuasion Waldegrave agreed to print in secret a new and extended series of attacks on episcopacy, which were to be issued under the pseudonym of Martin Mar-Prelate. Securing, with Penry's aid, a new press and some founts of roman and italic type, he began operations at the house of a sympathiser, Mrs. Crane, at East Molesey, near Hampton Court. In June the officers of the Stationers' Company made a vain search for Waldegrave at Kingston. In July he put into type a second tract by Udall, and in November Penry's ‘Epistle,’ the earliest of the Martin Mar-Prelate publications. In this ‘Epistle’ Penry called public attention to the persecution that Waldegrave, who had to support