Edward Maria Wingfield
President Edward Maria Wingfield as he
might have looked aged 57 in 1607[1]
Captain Edward Maria Wingfield, some-
times hyphenated as Edward-Maria Wing-
field, (born 1550 in Stonely, Huntingdonshire
(now Cambridgeshire), England; died
in
1631)[2] was a soldier, Member of Parlia-
ment, (1593) and English colonist in America.
He was the grandson of Richard Wingfield
and son of Thomas Maria Wingfield.
Captain John Smith wrote that Wingfield
was one of the early and prime movers and
organisers in 1602-1603 in "showing great
charge and industry"[3] in getting the Virgin-
ia Venture moving: he was one of the four in-
corporators for the London Virginia Company
in the Virginia Charter of 1606 and one of its
biggest financial backers.[4] He recruited
(with his cousin, Captain Bartholomew Gos-
nold) about 40 of the 105 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
May 13, 1607, of what became the first
successful, English-speaking colony in the
New World at Jamestown, Virginia. He chose
the site, a strong defensive position against
land or canoe attack, and supervised the con-
struction of the fort in a month and a day, a
mammoth task.
But after four months, on September 10,
because "he ever held the men to working,
watching and warding",[5] and because of
lack of food, death from disease and attack
by the "naturals" (during the worst famine
and drought for 800 years), he was made a
scapegoat,
and was deposed on petty
charges.[6] On the return of the Supply Boat
on April 10 1608, he was sent back to London
to answer the charge of being an atheist (and
one suspected of having Spanish sympath-
ies). Smith’s prime biographer, Philip L. Bar-
bour, however, wrote of the "superlative pet-
tiness of the charges...none of the accusa-
tions amounting to anything." Wingfield
cleared his reputation, was named in the Se-
cond Virginia Charter (of 1609), and was act-
iv