Sir Ferdinando Gorges (c. 1565-1568 – 24 May 1647) was a naval and military commander and governor of the important port of Plymouth in England.

[13] Ferdinando's great-great-grandfather married the eldest daughter of John Howard, 1st Duke of Norfolk,[14] from which connection they claim royal descent.

[15] Notwithstanding the family tradition in royal offices, neither Edward nor his father Edmund took part in public affairs (the early deaths of both of them may have been a partial explanation).

[16] Ferdinando's mother was Cecily Lygon, a daughter of William Lygon of Madresfield, Worcestershire[16] (1512-1567),[17] (whose ancestors' connection with the throne could be traced back to King Richard II), by his wife Eleanor Denys, a daughter of Sir William Denys (d.1533) of Dyrham,[18] High Sheriff of Gloucestershire, whose family was the heir of the Russells of Dyrham, a descendant of which family in a direct male line was Ferdinando Gorges.

[23] Although as far as is known Ferdinando had no direct connection with the Court in his youth, he could not have been impervious to two great cultural currents of the time: the growing resistance to the absolute power of the monarchy, particularly in ecclesiastical matter, sometimes subsumed under the concept of "Puritanism", and the beginnings of English exploration and exploitation of the Western Hemisphere,[24] the latter especially owing to his distant family connections with Humphrey Gilbert and his half-brother Walter Raleigh.

In 1587, he was one of the "several eminent chieftains" commanding the 800 soldiers sent from Flushing by Sir William Russell to aid the Earl of Leicester's attempt to relieve the Siege of Sluis laid by the Spanish Governor General of the Netherlands, whose revolt against the Spanish Habsburg rule England had pledged to aid.

[31] With the end of the Anglo-Spanish War in 1604, there was a renewed interest in colonization projects from various ports, including Bristol, with which he was closely associated.

[32] Gorges' interest in colonization was said to have been stimulated when Captain George Weymouth presented him with three captured American Indians, who later learnt English and told him about their country.

[33] In 1607, as a shareholder in the Plymouth Company, he helped fund the failed Popham Colony, in present-day Phippsburg, Maine.

[34] In 1622, Gorges received a land patent, along with John Mason, from the crown's Plymouth Council for New England for the Province of Maine, the original boundaries of which were between the Merrimack and Kennebec rivers.

[35][36] "Ye Province of Maine" had its birth in this charter, dated 10 August 1622, in the reign of England's King James I.

[clarification needed] This sale finally extinguished the interests of the Gorges family in those American lands which Sir Ferdinando had labored to develop as a proprietary province owing to a close relationship to the English Crown.