Sir Matthew Wood, 1st Baronet (2 June 1768 – 25 September 1843)[1] was a British Whig politician, Lord Mayor of London from 1815 to 1817, and from 1817 until his death in 1843 a reformist Member of Parliament.

Around 1804, Wood went into business, on the hops side, with Lieut.-Col. Edward Wigan, who died in 1814, a London militia officer and goldsmith.

[12] Wood was elected to the Court of Common Council of the City of London, representing the Cripplegate ward, in 1802, holding the seat to 1807.

[1] His initial effort to get into parliament was at the 1812 general election, when he and Robert Waithman only split the radical vote, coming 6th and 5th respectively in the four-member City of London constituency.

[17] He won popularity by encouraging resistance to unpopular government measures and by his vigour as first magistrate in seeking to suppress the London underworld.

[17] In December 1816, he dispersed the Spa Fields riot, but went on to present to the Prince Regent a petition expressing the rioters' demands for popular representation and reform.

[18] In June 1817, Wood was elected unopposed[19] as a Member of Parliament for the City of London, following the resignation of Harvey Christian Combe MP.

[20] In 1821, Matthew Wood was one of "seven wise men" that John Cartwright proposed to Jeremy Bentham, to act as "Guardians of Constitutional Reform", their reports and observations to concern "the entire Democracy or Commons of the United Kingdom".

[21] Wood was a prominent partisan and adviser of Queen Caroline on her return to England in 1820: she arrived at Dover on 5 June.

[22] In 1813, when she was a beleaguered Princess of Wales, he had gone to Kensington Palace with an address from the City of London, and congratulated her "upon her triumph over a wicked conspiracy against her honour and her life".

At Saint-Omer, he frustrated the efforts of Henry Brougham, the Queen's attorney-general, and Lord Hutchinson, who were on a government-backed mission to buy her off.

[11] The diarist Charles Greville noted on 7 June: The Queen arrived in London yesterday at seven o'clock… She travelled in an open landau, Alderman Wood sitting by her side and Lady Anne Hamilton and another woman opposite.

At the Queen's funeral in London on 14 August 1821, Wood's son John, her chaplain, was in one of the main mourning coaches; his father Matthew's carriage was further back in the procession.

Wood attended, bringing under his coat an engraved plate, made with the agreement of the Queen's executors, Stephen Lushington and Thomas Wilde.

In a resulting legal case, on 20 February 1839 Judge Herbert Jenner-Fust at the Arches Prerogative Court, London, "decided that the terms were made by conspiracy and fraud, and ordered that the whole of the immense property should be divided amongst two relations".