with that of other orders of minstrels until the name is applied only to those iterant musicians who, in most of the large towns of England, went around the principal streets at night for some time before Christmas, play and sing two or three tunes, call the hour, and then move to a suitable distance and repeat the performance.

Lee Powers Hynes, in compiling the Waite Family Heritage wrote: “In 1075 William the Conqueror gave to one of his knights, Ralf de Waiet, the Earldome, city and castle of Norwich, England, when Ralf married his sister Emma. Ricardus Le Wayte of Norwich was a descendant of Earl Ralf and Emma Waiet. The Wayte Coat of Arms was a shield with three silver bugles and the motto, “Pro Aries et Foce,” which means, “For our Homes and Altars.” This Coat of Arms of course is not a family Coat of Arms, but was for an individual as are all Coat of Arms.” If the quote is accurate, Ralf de Waiet, a Frenchman, was William the Conqueror’s brother-in-law!

Another source states that: “All the Waites of England and Wales are believed to be descendants of Ricardus Le Wayte of the County of Warwick, who was Escheater of the counties of Berkshire, Wilts, Oxford, Bedford, and Bucks in 1315. Ricardus was a direct descendant of Ralf de Waiet, whose wife was Emma, sister of Roger, Earl of Hereford, and cousin of William the Conqueror. In 1075 A.D., William presented the Earldom, city and castle of Norwich, England, to Ralf de Waiet on his marriage to Emma.”

When surnames were gradually introduced into England in the eleventh century, those who held an office in most cases added its designation to their Christian names, thus: Richard, the minstrel-watchman, became known as Richard the Wayte, which was in turn shortened to Richard Wayte. This is the earliest record so far found, and the source from whence all bearing the name of Wait seem to trace their origin. The first descendants of Ralf de Wait were pretty well scattered over England and particularly in the southern part, extending thence into North Wales.

The Protestant faith and the Orangeman fraternity in European history dating back to the House of Orange in Holland and to William of Orange in England both impact on Waite family history. Although the textbooks indicate that King Charles 1 of England, William’s maternal grandfather, was publicly beheaded for not attending to the affairs of state – the more likely reason was the fact that he took a French Catholic wife and then began practicing her religion. Charles 1 marriage to Henrietta Maria of France produced 9 children, 3 of which – Charles (later Charles 11), Mary (later Mary 11, Queen of Great Britain), and James (later James 11) – would later all struggle for the English throne following the death of their father. Parliamentarians, Protestants under the command of Oliver Cromwell, managed to wrest the reigns of governmental power from the English nobility for eleven years and were responsible for issuing a warrant of execution authorizing the beheading of the King. Charles 1 of England lost his head on the 30 January, 1649. A Thomas Waite was a member of Parliament and one of 41 judges to sign the ‘warrant of execution’ of King Charles 1. During that eleven year period two of the beheaded king’s sons – Charles and James – fled to their mother in France to escape their father’s enemies and secretly took on the Roman Catholic beliefs of their mother. Daughter Mary fled to Holland to marry William, Prince of Orange, and embrace his Protestant faith thus setting the stage for the struggle for the monarchy to regain the British throne.

Charles 11 gained the English throne after the death of Cromwell and ruled England for 25 years until his death in 1685 making way for his younger brother James – King James 11 – to rule the English monarchy. Almost immediately James signed a treaty with Louis X1V of France to Catholicise England’s army and government. When James fathered a son in 1688, England’s leading prominent Protestant statesmen, fearing the establishment of a Catholic dynasty, invited James’ sister’s (Mary’s) son William (afterwards William 111 of Orange), to England’s throne. This power struggle for the throne pitted Catholicism vs Protestantism . William of Orange, the son of Mary 1 (King Charles 1’s daughter) had earlier married Mary 11 (King James 11’s daughter), making him both a nephew and a son-in-law to the man he was destined to dethrone. William landed his army on English shores in November, 1688, promising to defend the liberties of England and Protestant religion. He marched unopposed to London since England’s King James 11 had ignominiously fled to France. In London William met with a Protestant Parliament who denounced James 11 by offering the throne jointly to William and his wife Mary. William 111 of Orange thereupon ascended the throne and immediately scuttled his father-in-law’s treaty by declaring war on France. William’s ambition was to make all of North America, including Newfoundland with it’s valuable fishery, exclusively English. King Louis of France countered by appointing Louis de Frontenac, previously first governor of New France (Quebec), as the head of France’s forces in the New World. William 111 of England came to be known as William of Orange and founder of the Orangeman fraternity. On July 1, 1690, King Billy defeated his father-in-law’s army on Irish soil at the Battle of the Boyne. William’s victory lead to the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland, and the Penal Laws, which basically disenfranchised the majority Catholic population. Since the late 1790s, the Battle of the Boyne has been celebrated by the Orange Order, a Protestant organization, on the Twelfth of July. In a most simplistic explanation, religion turned England’s royal rulers against each other and brought England into a bloody civil war.

In 1649 Thomas Wayte, a Member of Parliament, was one of the 41 judges to sign the ‘warrant of execution’ of King Charles 1. When his son Charles 11 became king; he brought to the scaffold all of those who had sentenced his father except for those who had already managed to escape the country. Tradition says that the coat of arms of the Wayte family was then taken from them; either by an act of parliament or by order of King Charles 11.

A story is told that Thomas Wayte and two of his brothers, Richard and Gamaliel – were driving cattle to one of the market places in Wales, some time in the seventeenth century, when they were suddenly set upon by a press gang working for His Majesty’s Navy, but they put up such a stubborn resistance that they were finally abandoned and, hurrying on to the market, they sold their beef, took the gains, and bought passage on the first colony-bound vessel, the “Confidence”, which sailed for Boston and landed in early 1634, and eventually found their way to the various settlements from which the American branches all descended.”

From the 1634 date – the year of the Waite exodus from England to America and 1649 – the year in which Charles 1 was beheaded – that the Thomas Wayte, the regicide, and the Thomas Wayte (and his brothers) that came to Boston, were not one and the same. Hopefully, modern day sleuthing techniques will reveal the relationships between the European Waite and the North American Waite families.