Wylde family

Major General William Wylde, (1788-1877), served in Spain and Portugal in the 1830s, later serving briefly as Prince Albert's Equerry and subsequently Groom of the Bed Chamber in 1846. The papers in this collection relate to his career from this time onwards, when he was employed by the British government in Portugal during the tumultuous years during and surrounding the Portuguese civil war of 1846-47. During this service in Portugal, General Wylde was accompanied by two of his sons, the eldest, William Henry Wylde, and S. Robert Wylde, both of whom acted as their father's assistants. Of Robert's subsequent career, we know very little. General Wylde's daughter, Sophia, married Durham colliery owner and magistrate William Stobart in 1851.

His eldest son was William Henry Wylde (1819-1909), to whom most of this collection relates. His papers, mainly letters and despatches, accumulated and retained during some fifty years' service at the British Foreign Office, thirty of those at senior level, cover a vast and varied range of places, personalities and subjects. As head of the Commercial, Consular and Slave Trade Departments of the F.O. from 1869, Wylde received correspondence (and clearly corresponded with) consuls, ambassadors, travellers and diplomats the length and breadth of the globe. But it is the West and East Coasts of Africa and in particular the battle to defeat the slave trade and establish legitimate trade in these areas, which dominate both Wylde's own career, and thus the scope of these papers.

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