| Relationship to me: | Great Great Great Great Great Great Great Great Great Great Great Great Grandfather | Gen -14 |  |
| Born: | c1520 | ||
| Died: | 1589 | ||
| Age | 69 | ||
| Father: | |||
| Mother: | |||
| Brothers: | 4 elder brothers | ||
| Sisters: | |||
| Married: | Mary Walsingham (sister of Sir Francis, see below) | ||
| Children: | Sir Anthony Mildmay | ???? - 1617 | |
According to information passed on to me by Ian Caldwell, in Dec 2001: "Sir Walter Mildmay, (1520?-1589) was Queen Elizabeth's Chancellor and married Mary Walsingham (the sister of Sir Francis Walsingham, Secretary of State). Sir Walter was the founder of Emanuel College, Cambridge and was one of the special commissioners in the trial of Mary Queen of Scots.
Notes from Emmanuel College website: Sir Walter Mildmay was the youngest son of a prosperous merchant of Chelmsford in Essex. Three of his brothers followed their father in commerce, but one, Thomas, found a career in the ecclesiastical revenues annexed to the Crown on Henry VIII's assumption of supremacy over the Church of England. It was against this background of new opportunities in public office and land-owning status that Walter was in 1538 sent to Christ's College in Cambridge. He did not stay long enought to take a degree - by 1540 he had joined his brother Thomas - but he acquired a lasting attachment to his college; and it must have been in these formative years that he developed his sympathy for Calvinistic puritanism.
Mildmay continued in public service, much in demand in financial affairs, throughout the reigns of Edward VI and Mary, and by 1556 was wealthy enough to acquire an estate at Apethorpe near Oundle. Under Elizabeth I he became Pivy Councillor, and was from 1566 to his death her Chancellor of the Exchequer. He frequently used his influence to protect the Puritans and to help protestant refugees from the Continent. He showed too his concern for education by benefactions in 1548 to Chelmsford Grammar School and in 1568 to Christ's College.
His intellectual and religeous interests found their fullest expression in his foundation of Emmanuel in 1584. His original statutes for the College emphasised its role as a seedbed of learned ministers, but from the first it also accepted students with other careers in view; and though critics labelled it a 'puritan' institution, both Mildmay and Chaderton (the first Master) made it clear that they were neither religeous separatists nor political dissidents.