Edward Maria Wingfield

Edward Maria Wingfield, sometimes hyphenated as Edward-Maria Wingfield (1550 in Stonely Priory, near Kimbolton - 1631 ) was a soldier, Member of Parliament, (1593) and English colonist in America. He was the son of Thomas Maria Wingfield, and the grandson of Richard Wingfield. Captain John Smith wrote that from 1602 to 1603 Wingfield was one of the early and prime movers and organisers in "showing great charge and industry" in getting the Virginia Venture moving: he was one of the four incorporators for the London Virginia Company in the Virginia Charter of 1606 and one of its biggest financial backers. He recruited (with his cousin, Captain Bartholomew Gosnold) about forty of the 104 would-be colonists, and was the only shareholder to sail. In the first election in the New World, he was elected by his peers as the President of the governing council for one year beginning 13 May 1607, of what became the first successful, English-speaking colony in the New World at Jamestown, Virginia. After four months, on 10 September, because "he ever held the men to working, watching and warding", and because of lack of food, death from disease and attack by the "naturals" (during the worst famine and drought for 800 years), Wingfield was made a scapegoat and was deposed on petty charges. On the return of the Supply Boat on 10 April 1608, Wingfield was sent back to London to answer the charge of being an atheist, and one suspected of having Spanish sympathies. Smith's prime biographer, Philip L. Barbour, however, wrote of the "superlative pettiness of the charges... none of the accusations amounting to anything." Wingfield cleared his reputation, was named in the Second Virginia Charter, 1609, and was active in the Virginia Company until 1620, when he was 70 years old. He died in England in 1631, ten weeks before fellow Jamestown settler John Smith, and was buried on 13 April at St Andrew's Parish Church, Kimbolton.