Charles Wager - Obituaries

Obituaries

When Wager died Horace Walpole, first observed that he had “left the fairest character”, a judgement supported by all of the surviving evidence. A remembrance recorded many years later by Arthur Onslow, the respected speaker of the Commons, remains highly instructive:” He was of the most gentle and humane disposition I ever knew, and spent almost the whole he got in generous acts of charity and compassion. I had a long and intimate acquaintance with him, and have seen where his temper has been tried by much provocation, but I never saw him discomposed. He had a very good understanding, great plainness of manners, and a steadiness of courage that no danger could daunt, with the same calmness in it that he shewed in the most ordinary acts of his life. He was indeed a person of most extraordinary worth, and the world bore him a respect that was due to it. His father was a captain of a man of war before the restoration, and very likely after that: but dying when this son was young, and the mother marrying a Quaker, he was bred up among that people; by which he acquired the simplicity of his manners, and had much of their fashion in his speech as well as carriage. And all this, with his particular roughness of countenance, made the softness of his nature still more pleasing, because unexpected at first.”