commanded the Montagu, one of the fleet sent to North America and the St. Lawrence under Sir Hovenden Walker [q. v.], and in December 1712 was ordered to act as commander-in-chief at Portsmouth.
Early in January 1717–18 he was appointed to the Defiance, from which he was shortly afterwards moved to the Canterbury; in her he went out to the Mediterranean with Sir George Byng (afterwards Viscount Torrington) [q. v.], and had a rather singular share in the action off Cape Passaro on 31 July 1718, being sent in command of a detached squadron in pursuit of a division of the Spanish fleet which separated from their admiral and sought safety inshore. Walton took or destroyed the whole of them, as he wrote to Byng from off Syracuse on 5 Aug. in a letter which, in a garbled form, has given his name a peculiar celebrity. His report was stated to be comprised in a score of words: ‘Sir, we have taken and destroyed all the Spanish ships which were upon the coast: the number as per margin’ (see Gent. Mag. 1739, p. 606; Mahon, Hist. of England, 1839, i. 473). Thomas Corbett [q. v.], who either invented the story, or, by repeating what he knew to be false, gave it currency, says truly enough that Walton's ‘natural talents were fitter for achieving a gallant action than describing one;’ but the sentence which he quotes as the whole of the letter was in reality only the conclusion of it. As Corbett was Byng's secretary at the time, and was afterwards secretary of the admiralty, he knew perfectly well that the quotation was incorrect (a certified copy of the letter is in Home Office Records, Admiralty, vol. xlviii.)
In April 1721 Walton was appointed to the Nassau; in the following year he was knighted; and on 16 Feb. 1722–3 was promoted to be rear-admiral of the blue squadron. In 1726 he was second in command of the fleet in the Baltic under Sir Charles Wager [q. v.], and in 1727 was again with Wager in the fleet off Cadiz and Gibraltar. In January 1727–8 he was promoted to be vice-admiral of the blue, and in 1729 was with Wager in the fleet in the Channel; in 1731 he commanded in chief at Spithead; on 26 Feb. 1733–4 he was promoted to be admiral of the blue; in the summer of 1734 he was commander-in-chief at the Nore; and in 1736 retired on a pension of 600l. a year. He died on 21 Nov. 1739, aged 74 (Gent. Mag. 1739, p. 605).
[Charnock's Biogr. Nav. iii. 117; Campbell's Admirals, iv. 428; Commission and Warrant books, List-books, Captains' Letters, and other official docs. in Publ. Rec. Office.]
WALTON, IZAAK (1593–1683), author of ‘The Compleat Angler,’ was born in the parish of St. Mary, Stafford, on 9 Aug. 1593, and baptised on 21 Sept. of that year. He came of a family of Staffordshire yeomen. His father was Jervis Walton (d. 1597) of Stafford, who is presumed to have been the second son of George Walton, sometime ‘bailie of Yoxhall,’ a neighbouring village. After a few years' schooling, probably at Stafford, Izaak was apprenticed in London to Thomas Grinsell, connected, if not identical, with the Thomas Grinsell of Paddington (d. 1645), a member of the Ironmongers' Company, who married Walton's sister Anne (cf. Nicholl, The Ironmongers' Company, 1866, pp. 548, 553). The tradition that Walton followed the trade of a sempster or haberdasher in Whitechapel is unsupported by recent research. He was made free of the Ironmongers' Company on 12 Nov. 1618 (ib. p. 185), and in 1626, in his marriage license, was styled an ironmonger. By 1614 a deed shows that Walton was in possession of ‘half a shop’ two doors west of Chancery Lane, in Fleet Street. This house was pulled down in 1799, but it had been drawn and engraved by J. T. Smith in 1794, and has been reproduced in most of the illustrated editions of Walton. The vicar of the neighbouring church of St. Dunstan's was Dr. John Donne [q. v.], and their proximity of residence was probably the cause of Donne's acquaintance with Walton. Shortly before his death Donne presented a bloodstone seal to Walton which the latter invariably used; with it he sealed his will in October 1683 (cf. Notes and Queries, 8th ser. ix. 41). Donne may have introduced him to Dr. Hales of Eton, Sir Henry Wotton, Dr. Henry King, and other eminent persons, especially divines, with whom he was intimate in early life. Walton speaks of Drayton as his honest old friend, and from a letter that he wrote to Aubrey in answer to a request for information in 1680 it appears that he was at one time very well acquainted with Ben Jonson (Aubrey, Brief Lives, 1898, ii. 15).
Walton was first noticed in print in 1619. In that year a poet, ‘S. P.’ (probably Samuel Page [q. v.], vicar of Deptford, whose verse is commended by Meres), dedicated in two stanzas to ‘Iz. Wa., his approved and much respected friend,’ the 1619 edition of his poem, ‘The Loue of Amos and Lavra’ (the first edition of ‘S. P.'s’ poem of 1613, which is imperfect in the only known copy, does not contain the dedication). It appears from ‘S. P.'s’ dedication that, by 1619, Walton had already practised verse. On the publication of Donne's poems (two years after
