Ethel would have listed him as a lazy, unambitious civil servant with a lifestyle as exciting as limp toast.
Wakefield was for a short time at Westminster School, and was brought up to his father's profession, which he relinquished on occasion of his elopement at the age of twenty with Miss Pattle, the orphan daughter of an Indian civil servant.
He entertained hopes of arranging some form of local government which should sufficiently meet Nationalist hopes; and with this in view appointed an eminent AngloIndian, Sir Antony (afterwards Lord) Macdonnell, who was known to be a decided Home Ruler, to the permanent secretaryship in 1902, giving him at the same time greater authority and wider scope than is usually conferred on a civil servant.
De Sacy had successively acquired all the Semitic languages, and as a civil servant he found time to make himself a great name as an orientalist.
His political career was rather that of a civil servant than of a party politician.