Career
The earliest copies of the hymn all bear his signature. Born either in England or in Douai, Flanders, France, Wade fled to France after the Jacobite rising of 1745 was crushed. As a Catholic layman, he lived with exiled English Catholics in France, where he taught music and worked on church music for private use.
Professor Bennett Zon, Head of the Department of Music at Durham University, has noted that Wade"s Roman Catholic liturgical books were often decorated with Jacobite floral imagery.
He argued that the texts had coded Jacobite meanings.