WINGATE, Edmond (1594-1656), of Ampthill, Beds. and Gray’s Inn, Mdx.

The Wingates had originated in Buckinghamshire and, through marriage, acquired property at Sharpenhoe in Bedfordshire during the reign of Henry IV. By the seventeenth century they were seated both at Sharpenhoe and at Flamborough, Yorkshire. Despite the frequently repeated claim that Edmond was born in Yorkshire in 1596, the future MP seems to have been born at Streatley in Bedfordshire in 1594.20Blundell, ‘Wingate’, 173; Al. Ox. He studied at Queen’s College, Oxford, between 1610 and 1614, before moving to London to begin his legal studies at Gray’s Inn. Admitted on 24 May 1614, Wingate still had a chamber there in 1622.21Bodl. Tanner 283, f. 67. During this time in London, Wingate developed a strong interest in mathematics, teaching himself the principles of the discipline by attending lectures at Gresham College.22E.G.R. Taylor, Mathematical Practitioners of Tudor and Stuart England (1954), 205, 225-6. He specialised in algorithms, then at the cutting edge of mathematical theory, and, in his own work, he was able to build on the ideas of John Napier and of two of the Gresham professors, Henry Briggs and Edmund Gunter. He evidently retained his connections with the scholars of Gresham College into the 1650s, editing for posthumous publication the papers of his old friend, Samuel Foster, another Gresham professor, who died in 1652.23S. Foster, Postuma Fosteri, ed. E. Wingate (1652); S. Foster, Elliptical, or Azimuthal Horologiography, ed. J. Twysden and E. Wingate (1654).

On 27 May 1623, the privy council issued a pass for Wingate to travel abroad for four months in the company of Cornelius Fairmeadow and John Stonehouse.24APC 1621-23, p. 504. This brief excursion abroad was followed by a more extended stay the following year, with the council then authorising Wingate, Fairmeadow and Stonehouse to travel for three years.25APC 1623-25, p. 222. While abroad, Wingate became tutor in the English language to the then Princess Henrietta Maria (future wife of Charles I).26Ath. Ox. iii. 424; Aubrey, Brief Lives, ii. 302. In Paris, he was in contact with the leading French mathematicians of the day, and was credited with introducing to Parisian intellectual circles knowledge of the logarithmic scale rule which recently been developed in England by Gunter. A hastily prepared account of Gunter’s ‘rule of proportion’ was published by Wingate in Paris in 1624.27Edmund Wingate, L’usage de la règle de proportion en arithmétique (Paris, 1624); J. Ward, The Lives of the Professors of Gresham College (1740), 79. Despite this publicity, the scale rule (which made multiplication and division much easier) did not become popular in France until later in the century when Joseph Sauveur invented his own version.28A.J. Turner, ‘“Utile pour les calculs”: the logarithmic scale rule in France and England during the seventeenth century’, Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Sciences, xxxviii. 252-70.

This was merely the first of the numerous books produced by Wingate over the next three decades. These covered his two main interests – mathematics and law – although, whichever he was writing about, his role remained primarily that of a writer who was producing popular guides for a wide audience. The scale of his output, with the same basic information being reworked into new titles, suggests that he was a full-time author who was writing for money. When his friend, John Pell, wrote to him in June 1631 to suggest improvements to Wingate’s Of Natural and Artificial Arithmetic (1630), he flattering him as a man who had deserved well ‘of all those that have anything to do with mathematical studies’.29Add. 4280, f. 223. His Arithmetique Made Easy of 1630 was issued with a dedication to Thomas Howard, 21st earl of Arundel.30Edmond Wingate, Arithmetique Made Easy (1630), esp. ded.

Wingate was back in England by the summer of 1628 when he married the daughter of one of his Bedfordshire neighbours. They seem to have settled first at Wootton and later at Ampthill.31Genealogia Bedfordiensis, 2, 3, 196, 204, 329-30, 337. In time his wife inherited her father’s estates at Wootton, although by 1650 Wingate was forced to mortgage them to raise money.32Beds. RO, CH 803; VCH Beds. iii. 331, 335. Wingate was not on the commission of the peace for Bedfordshire during the 1630s and he seems to have played little part in the government of the locality. He may however have been the ‘Mr Wingate’ who was appointed by the privy council in May 1638 to a commission to investigate what damage would be done to the freeholders of Caddington as a result of enclosure.33CSP Dom. 1637-38, p. 448. It is unclear whether it was in a professional capacity as a lawyer or as a family friend that he acted as a trustee for the settlement for the second marriage of his neighbour Henry Chester* in 1643.34Beds. RO, CH 567-8, CH 851, CH 861.

At Ampthill Wingate gained first-hand experience of religious tensions of the sort which contributed to the outbreak of the civil war. In this particular case they centred on the local rector, Hugh Reeve. Following the opening of the Long Parliament in November 1640, Benjamin Rhodes, the steward of Thomas Bruce, 1st earl of Elgin, petitioned the House of Lords denouncing Reeve as a ‘papist at heart’. The Lords responded by ordering on 16 January 1641 that Reeve be deprived of his living and made to recant his ‘popish doctrines’ (including support for transubstantiation and for the tenet that salvation was not assured). However, Reeve was allowed an annuity of £10 out of the revenues of the parish.35Underwood, ‘Case’, 72-84; LJ iv. 170b; v. 34a. Fifteen months later Wingate submitted a second petition to the Lords complaining that Reeve had failed to comply with the previous order. This petition, read on 30 April, claimed that Reeve continued to hold popish tenets, that he conversed with papists more than ever, and that he had refused to give up his possession of the vicarage house.36Underwood, ‘Case’, 81-2. The Lords accepted Wingate’s allegations and ordered Reeve to vacate his house. They also authorised Elgin (who was the major landowner at Ampthill) to dispose of the £10 annuity as he thought fit.37LJ v. 34a. This made little difference. Reeve was still in situ when he died in 1646.38Underwood, ‘Case’, 73.

There is some evidence that Wingate played a small part in local administration later in the 1640s. In 1646 and 1647 he was acting on behalf of the Bedfordshire county committee to protect the interests of the ten children of one of his neighbours, Richard Conquest of Houghton Conquest, a Catholic who had been a close friend of Hugh Reeve.39Underwood, ‘Case’, 77; CCC 1821. One of Conquest’s servants was ordered to pay to Wingate and Dorothy Conquest the one-fifth share of the revenues from his estates which had been assigned to the children.40P. Bell, ‘Mins. of the Beds. cttee. for sequestrations 1646-7’, Miscellanea (Beds. Hist. Recs. Soc. xlix), 87, 98-9, 120. This did not mean that Wingate sympathised with Conquest, for the likelihood is that the county committee wanted to make sure that the children received a sound Protestant upbringing.

In the meantime, Wingate’s publishing output had been shifting away from mathematics into his other principal interest, the law. A edition of the treatise by John Britton on the laws of England was edited by him for publication in 1640 and an abridgement of statutes for use by country magistrates and other lay practitioners of the law followed. He also began work on a larger synopsis of all the statutes in force. Such works of popular legal guidance may not have made him popular with other lawyers but his scholarship nevertheless won recognition from his professional colleagues. In 1645 he was called to the bar and he was promoted to become a bencher of his inn in 1649. He was willing to take the Engagement in order to qualify himself for the latter promotion.41PBG Inn, i. 374; Ath. Ox. iii. 424. The Gray’s Inn records reveal that, once appointed, he was very active as a bencher.42PBG Inn, i. 374-417.

According to Anthony Wood, Wingate ‘became known to Oliver’.43Ath. Ox. iii. 424. Whether this meant that he was personally acquainted with Oliver Cromwell* or merely was seen as a supporter of the protectorate is not clear. What can be said is that it was in the early 1650s that he began to be appointed to local office.44A. and O.; CJ vii. 227a. His appointment as deputy recorder of Bedford was no doubt made on the advice on the recorder, Samuel Browne*, with Wingate then, for most purposes, acting for the town on Browne’s behalf.45Min. Bk. of Bedford Corp. 36, 40-1, 61, 72. His son, Edmond junior, would later be admitted as a burgess by the Bedford corporation in recognition of his father’s efforts.46Min. Bk. of Bedford Corp. 94-5, 98.

Wingate’s chance to sit in Parliament came in 1654 when he was one of the five MPs elected for Bedfordshire. Unsurprisingly, the four committees to which he was named during this Parliament all had a strong legal theme, the most important of them being that to prepare the bill to settle the government to which he was added on 18 December 1654 after several clauses were re-committed.47CJ vii. 381a, 387a, 394b, 403a. It is, however, his next publication which best reveals his attitude towards this Parliament. That book, his long-delayed summary of the statutes in force to 1641, finally appeared in 1655. In its preface, which was probably written before this Parliament was dissolved in February 1655, he explained that its publication had previously been postponed because the Long Parliament

being determined, and afterwards the time seeming (for a while) tempestuous against the law, leaving no certainty to depend upon whether or no the laws then in being should remain, or be changed into new precepts, I thought it expedient to suppress the publication hereof; but now, that there is another Parliament sitting, which hath power to establish both the statute and common law in such a posture, as may best fit this commonwealth, and to the end I may add a stone to the repair of that building, I have presumed to expose this abstract to public view.48E. Wingate, An exact Abridgement of all Statutes In Force and Use, upon the 4th January, in the Year of our Lord 1641/42 (1655), sig. [A4].

The government now saw Wingate’s legal expertise as something they could use. On the recommendation of the council of state sub-committee chaired by Richard Sydenham, Wingate was appointed in May 1656 to a seven-man commission to investigate allegations of improper dealings by the trustees and surveyors of forfeited estates.49CSP Dom. 1655-56, p. 337; 1656-57, pp. 24, 46.

What the council probably could not have known was that Wingate did not have long to live. The diarist Thomas Burton* noted his death on Saturday 13 December 1656, stating that it had occurred during the previous week.50Burton’s Diary, i. 136. That same day Wingate was buried in St Andrew’s Holborn.51Ath. Ox. iii. 426. Administration of his estates was subsequently granted to his son, Button Wingate.52PROB6/33, f. 27v. His various books continued to sell in large numbers and in different formats for several decades after his death. No others in his immediate family sat in Parliament.