a Roman Catholic, and he advised the new king with regard to affairs in Oxford, being partly responsible for the tactless conduct of James in forcing a quarrel with the fellows of Magdalen College. Mass was said in his residence, and later a chapel was opened in the college for the worship of the Roman Church; he and others received a royal licence to absent themselves from the services of the English Church, and he obtained another to supervise the printing of Roman Catholic books. In spite of growing unpopularity he remained loyal to James, and when the king fled from England Walker left Oxford, doubtless intending to join his master abroad. But in December 1688 he was arrested at Sittingbourne and was imprisoned; then, having lost his mastership, he was charged at the bar of the House of Commons with changing his religion and with other offences. Early in 1690 he was released from his confinement, and after subsisting for some years largely on the charity of his friend and former pupil, Dr John Radcliffe, he died on the 21st of January 1699.
Walker's principal writings are: Of education, especially of young gentlemen (Oxford, 1673, and six other editions); Ars rationis ad mentem nominalium libri tres (Oxford, 1673); and Greek and Roman History illustrated by Coins and Medals (London, 1692).
WALKER, ROBERT (d. c. 1658), British painter, was a contemporary and to a slight extent a follower of Van Dyck. The date of his birth is uncertain, and no details are known of his early life. Although influenced by Van Dyck's art, he had still a considerable degree of individuality and developed a sound style of his own which was more severe and restrained than that of the greater master. His greatest vogue was at the time of the Commonwealth, for in addition to several portraits of Cromwell he painted other portraits of Lambert, Ireton, Fleetwood, and many more members of the Parliamentarian party. In 1652 he was given rooms in Arundel House in the Strand, London, where he resided for the rest of his life. He died either in 1658 or in 1660, the authority for the earlier date being an inscription on an engraved portrait by Lombart. His work had much merit; it was vigorous and showed sound study of character. Several of his paintings, among them the portrait of William Faithorne the elder, are in the National Portrait Gallery, and there are others of notable importance at Hampton Court and in the University Galleries at Oxford. One of his portraits of Cromwell is in the Pitti Palace, where it is ascribed to Lely; it was bought in the artist's lifetime, but after the Protector's death, by the grand duke Ferdinand II. of Tuscany. Another is at Warwick Castle.
Walker painted also Robert Cromwell and his wife Elizabeth Steward, parents of the Protector. The portrait of the latter, attended by a page who is fastening his sash at the waist (now in the National Portrait Gallery, transferred from the British Museum, to which it was bequeathed by Sir Robert Rich, Bart., descendant of Cromwell's friend, Nathaniel Rich) was called by Walpole “Cromwell and Lambert”; but it is now certain that the page represents Cromwell's son Richard. Elizabeth Cromwell, afterwards Mrs Claypole, the Protector's daughter, also sat to him. As no complete account of Walker's work is in existence (that of Walpole being very incomplete, while Cunningham passes him over entirely), it may be added that the artist twice painted John Evelyn, in different sizes, as well as Bradshaw, John Hampden, Colonel Thomas Sanders, Cornet Joyce, and Speaker Lenthall, as well as Sir William and Lady Waller, Mrs Thomas Knight, and General George Monk, duke of Albemarle, and Sir Thomas Fairfax (engraved by Faithorne). A portrait of Secretary Thurlow, which was in the Lord Northwick Collection, was attributed to him. As Walker was in the camp of the Parliamentarians and Dobson was the court painter at Oxford, few aristocratic persons sat to the former. Exceptions are Mary Capel, duchess of Beaufort (engraved by J. Nutting), Aubrey, last earl of Oxford, and James Graham, marquess of Montrose; even a portrait of Charles I. in armour, with his hand on his helmet, is credited to Walker. Two versions, of a like size, of his own portrait exist, one at the National Portrait Gallery and the other at Oxford, engraved by Peter Lombart, and again, later, by T. Chambars. The Cromwell in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery is a copy. Walker's copy of Titian's famous “Venus at her Toilet,” highly esteemed by Charles I., is considered a work of great merit.
WALKER, ROBERT JAMES (1801-1869), American political leader and economist, was born in Northumberland, Pennsylvania, on the 23rd of July 1801. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1819 and practised law in Pittsburg from 1822 to 1826, when he removed to Mississippi. Though living in a slave state he was consistently opposed to slavery, but he favoured gradual rather than immediate emancipation, and in 1838 he freed his own slaves. He became prominent, politically, during the nullification excitement of 1832-1833, as a vigorous opponent of nullification, and from 1836 to 1845 he sat in the United States Senate as a Unionist Democrat. Being an ardent expansionist, he voted for the recognition of the independence of Texas in 1837 and for the joint annexation resolution of 1845, and advocated the nomination and election of James K. Polk in 1844. He was secretary of the treasury throughout the Polk administration (1845-1849) and was generally recognized as the most influential member of the cabinet. He financed the war with Mexico and drafted the bill (1849) for the establishment of the department of the interior, but his greatest work was the preparation of the famous treasury report of the 3rd of December 1845. Although inferior in intellectual quality to Alexander Hamilton's Report on Manufactures, presenting the case against free trade, it is regarded as the most powerful attack upon the protection system which has ever been made in an American state paper. The “Walker Tariff” of 1846 was based upon its principles and was in fact largely the secretary's own work. Walker at first opposed the Compromise of 1850, but was won over later by the arguments of Stephen A. Douglas. He was appointed territorial governor of Kansas in the spring of 1857 by President Buchanan, but in November of the same year resigned in disgust, owing to his opposition to the Lecompton Constitution. He did not, however, break with his party immediately, and favoured the so-called English Bill (see Kansas); in fact it was partly due to his influence that a sufficient number of anti-Lecompton Democrats were induced to vote for that measure to secure its passage. He adhered to the Union cause during the Civil War and in 1863-1864 as financial agent of the United States did much to create confidence in Europe in the financial resources of the United States, and was instrumental in securing a loan of $250,000,000 in Germany. He practised law in Washington, D.C., from 1864 until his death there on the 11th of November 1869. Both during and after the Civil War he was a contributor to the Continental Monthly, which for a short time he also, with James R. Gilmore, conducted.
For the tariff report see F. W. Taussig, State Papers and Speeches on the Tariff (Cambridge, Mass., 1892).
WALKER, SEARS COOK (1805–1853), American astronomer, was born at Wilmington, Massachusetts, on the 28th of March 1805. Graduating at Harvard in 1825, he was a teacher till 1835, was an actuary in 1835-1845, and then became assistant at the Washington observatory. In 1847 he took charge of the longitude department of the United States Coast Survey, where he was among the first to make use of the electric telegraph for the purpose of determining the difference of longitude between two stations, and he introduced the method of registering transit observations electrically by means of a chronograph. He also investigated the orbit of the newly discovered planet Neptune. He died near Cincinnati on the 30th of January 1853. His brother Timothy (1802-1856) was a leader of the Ohio bar.
See Memoirs of the Roy. Astr. Soc. vol. xxiii.
WALKER, THOMAS (1784-1836), English police magistrate, best known as author of The Original, was born on the 10th of October 1784 at Charlton-cum-Hardy, near Manchester, where his father was a prosperous cotton merchant and an active Whig politician. He was educated at Cambridge and called to the bar, and after devoting some years mainly to the study of the Poor Law was made police magistrate in Lambeth in 1829. In 1835 he started his weekly publication The Original, containing his reflections on various social subjects and especially on eating and drinking; and it is in the history of gastronomy, and the art of dining, that this curious and amusing work is famous. The weekly numbers continued for six months, and subsequently were republished, after Walker's death on the 20th of January 1836, in an American selection (1837), in editions by W. B. Jerrold (with memoir) (1874), W. A. Guy (1875), and Henry Morley (1887), and in another selection of Sir Henry Cole (“Felix Summerley”), called Aristology (1881).
