First in the list of those who may justly be called ‘Famous Sons of the East Riding’ stand the names of Roger of Howden, William of Newburgh, and Peter of Langtoft. All these were men of learning in an age when knowledge was difficult to obtain, and each devoted himself to the work of spreading the knowledge of which he became possessed. The work that each of them bequeathed to us is a history of our country, the histories of the first and second being written in Latin, and that of the third in Norman-French rimed verse.

Roger of Howden and Peter of Langtoft took their surnames—i.e., additional names—from the places at which they were born. But William of Newburgh was born at Bridlington in 1136, and gained his surname from the fact that he became an inmate of the monastery at Newburgh in the North Riding. Peter of Langtoft was a Canon of the Priory at Bridlington.

Peter of Langtoft’s History of English Affairs takes rank as the ‘finest historical work left us by an Englishman of the twelfth century.’ It is interesting because there are introduced several of the songs sung by the peasantry and the townsfolk of Yorkshire in the thirteenth century.

But most interesting to us is the Annals of Roger of Howden. Roger was a clerk, or secretary, to King Henry II., and later became one of the King’s Justices in Yorkshire. He records several facts about his birthplace—among them that King John spent Christmas, 1191, as a guest of Hugh Pudsey, Bishop of Durham, at the latter’s palace or manor-house at Howden, and that in 1200 the King granted Bishop Hugh the right to hold there an annual fair.

Next in our list come the names of two famous churchmen, John Alcock and John Fisher, who were both destined to become Bishops of Rochester.

John Alcock was born at Hull about 1428, and became Bishop of Rochester in 1472. Four years later he was promoted to the see of Worcester, and after another ten years received further promotion to the see of Ely. In his time it was customary for churchmen to be at the head of all affairs of the State, and twice was Bishop Alcock appointed by the King to be Lord Chancellor of England. On the second occasion he had the duty of opening the first Parliament of Henry VII.

Hull folk have reason to be proud of the memory of their great townsman, John Alcock. For not only did he reach the highest position in the country next to the King himself, but he was also famed as a great architect and a great patron of learning. As ‘Comptroller of the Royal Works’ he designed the wonderful ‘Henry VII.’s Chapel’ in Westminster Abbey, and as a patron of learning he founded Jesus College, Cambridge, and the Hull Grammar School.

Bishop Alcock died in 1500 at Wisbech Castle, the palace of the Bishops of Ely, and was buried in the chapel of Ely Cathedral which he caused to be built, and which is to this day known as ‘Bishop Alcock’s Chapel.’

John Fisher was twenty-nine years younger than the Bishop of Rochester whose life has just been described. He is said to have been the son of a Beverley mercer, and to have owed his high office in the Church to the favour of Margaret, Countess of Richmond.

So eager was he for the advancement of learning that he started to study Greek when quite advanced in years; and so upright and sincere was he that when confessor to Queen Catherine of Aragon he was ‘the only adviser on whose sincerity and honesty she could rely.’

Fisher was the only bishop who opposed the divorce of Henry VIII. and Catherine of Aragon, and hence he incurred the enmity of the King. This was increased fourfold when, further, he refused to recognise Henry as the ‘Supreme Head of the Church of England.’ And when, as a result of this refusal, the Pope sent Fisher a Cardinal’s hat, Henry’s wrath became ungovernable fury.

‘Yf the Cardinal’s hat were layed at his feete, he wolde not stoupe to take it up, he did set so little by it,’ were Fisher’s words when he heard of the Pope’s present to himself. But for all that he was declared to be guilty of treason, and was sentenced by the King to be hanged at Tyburn as a common felon.

Nothing would move Fisher from the position he had taken up. Come what might, the King was not in his eyes the ‘Supreme Head of the Church.’ So at the age of 76 he suffered the fate of most of those who ventured to oppose the will of Henry VIII. The indignity of a death at the hangman’s hands was spared him, and he was beheaded on Tower Hill, his head being afterwards spiked on London Bridge, and his body buried in St. Peter’s Chapel, by the side of that of his friend, the great statesman Sir Thomas More.

‘A pure-minded patriot in the most corrupt times.’ Such has been the description of Andrew Marvell—son of a rector of Winestead and master of the Hull Grammar School—who was assistant to John Milton, the Latin Secretary to the Council of State in the time of the Commonwealth, and Member of Parliament for Hull during nineteen years.

Andrew Marvell was born in 1621 at his father’s rectory, and, as an ‘old boy’ of the Hull Grammar School, passed on to Cambridge at the age of fifteen. When he was nineteen years old, his father was drowned in crossing the Humber by the ferry-boat, and as a result he was adopted by a Mrs. Skinner of Thornton, in North Lincolnshire.

In 1657 Marvell entered the service of the Commonwealth, and two years later he was elected a Member of Parliament for Hull, which post he continued to hold until his death. It was then the custom for Members of Parliament to be paid for their services by their constituents, and Marvell thus received from the townsfolk of Hull the sum of six shillings and eightpence per day ‘for knight’s pence.’ It is curious to notice that he was the last member for Hull to be paid for his services in Parliament until the year 1911.

Notwithstanding this payment Marvell’s means were always very limited, and for some years he lived in a state bordering upon actual poverty. But the scantiness of his means did not cause him to swerve from what he considered to be the path of honesty, and the tale is told of how Danby, the Lord Treasurer, tried unsuccessfully to bribe him with the offer of £1,000. ‘Up two pair of stairs in a little court in the Strand’ Marvell was found by the Lord Treasurer’s messenger. And there he was also left, incorruptible in his honesty.

Marvell earned considerable fame as a writer of political satires, and also as a poet. The poems by which he is best remembered are probably those entitled Thoughts in a Garden and An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland.

In the latter poem occur the famous lines in which the author, himself a strong Parliamentarian, honours the way in which King Charles I. met his death:—

Marvell died in 1678, so poor that his funeral expenses were paid by the Corporation of Hull. How great his worth was may be judged from the words of the great statesman William Pitt:—‘Every man has his own price; I know of but one exception, and that is Marvell, in the past.’

The house in which Sir John Lister entertained King Charles on his visit to Hull in 1639 was also that in which was born Hull’s greatest son, William Wilberforce. Tradition states, further, that he was born in the room in which the King had slept.

William Wilberforce was born on August 24th, 1759, the grandson of another William Wilberforce, who had been a Baltic merchant and an alderman of the town. Delicate as a child, and reared in luxury, he yet grew up filled with an understanding of the earnestness of life; and after leaving Cambridge he entered Parliament at the age of twenty-one, as a member for Hull. Four years later he was chosen a member for both the county of York and the town of Hull. The former of these distinctions was the one that he selected, and thenceforth for twenty-eight years he remained one of the two members of Parliament for the ‘Shire of Broad Acres.’

Just at that time the minds of thoughtful Englishmen were beginning to be stirred by feelings of horror at the evils of the slave-trade. It had been an English seaman of Queen Elizabeth’s time who had started the traffic in human beings. And, curious as it may seem to us, that traffic had been blessed by the Church; since the negroes who were taken across the Atlantic to the West Indies were being given a chance to learn the truths of Christianity.

It had been, also, an English crew of seamen who had on one occasion thrown overboard a hundred and forty ‘niggers’ to lighten their vessel. But it was also Englishmen who first set to work to put an end to the unholy traffic.

In 1787 a small band of thinkers—Thomas Clarkson, Granville Sharp, William Wilberforce, and a few others—started to labour with this end in view. The great statesmen of the time, Pitt, Burke, and Fox, all supported their efforts, and piles of information were obtained.

They got together details of the bartering of prisoners by African chiefs for supplies of rum; details of voyages across the Atlantic during which the slaves lay chained on decks which had only a couple of feet of space between them, and were so closely packed together that they had hardly room to move their limbs; details of the cruel treatment meted out to them when they were eventually sold to work in the sugar plantations of the West Indies.

But the slave-trade was a very profitable one. Merchants did not feel anxious to give up profits of one hundred and twenty per cent.; so the opposition met by Clarkson, Sharp, and Wilberforce was great. Eleven times during the years 1791–1805 was a Bill introduced in Parliament for the abolition of the slave trade, only to be either rejected by the House of Commons, or thrown out by the House of Lords.

However, in 1806, the Bill was passed by the Lords, and afterwards carried in the House of Commons by two hundred and eighty-three votes to sixteen. Royal assent to the Bill followed on March 25th, 1807.

Almost immediately after this the Ministry resigned, and a General Election took place. This was the occasion of the historic contest between William Wilberforce, the Hon. Henry Lascelles (son of the Earl of Harewood), and Viscount Milton (son of Earl Fitzwilliam). Wilberforce and Lascelles stood as Tories, Viscount Milton as a Whig.

For fifteen days the polling went on in the Castle Yard at York, to which the voters from the whole county had to travel by stage coach or post chaise, on horseback, or afoot. From the East Riding there were 3,556 voters, and at the close of the poll the figures stood:—

Thus William Wilberforce and Viscount Milton became the two members for Yorkshire. The defeated candidate owed his position at the bottom of the poll largely to the fact that his father owned slaves on his West Indian estates, and one of the election cries against him was ‘No Yorkshire votes purchased with African blood!’ The election cost Wilberforce £28,000, and each of the other two candidates about £100,000—a striking example of the difference that has come over our political life during the last century.

In 1812 Wilberforce retired from his old constituency, and thenceforth sat for a small borough in Sussex until 1825, when he withdrew from Parliament. But the good work which he had helped to start was continued by others, and two weeks after his burial in Westminster Abbey—August 5th, 1833—an Act of Parliament was passed for the Abolition of Slavery in the British Colonies, the sum of money paid as compensation to slave-owners being £20,000,000.

The memory of our great philanthropist has been perpetuated at York by the building of the Wilberforce School for the Blind, and at Hull by the erection of the Wilberforce Monument near Whitefriargate Bridge, and the opening of his birthplace in High Street as a Public Museum of Local Antiquities. The Wilberforce Monument, which towers up 102 feet above the roadway, bears on one of its sides the simple yet effective inscription:—

From William Wilberforce we turn to Sir Tatton Sykes—‘t’owd Squyer’ of Sledmere. Sir Tatton was born in 1772, the second son of Sir Christopher Sykes, and succeeded to the title and the family estates on the death of his brother, Sir Mark Masterman Sykes, in 1823.

Before this he had become widely known as a breeder of sheep and racehorses, and as a fearless sportsman. At the age of twenty-three he rode his first race at Malton, at the age of sixty he rode his last; and on both occasions he came in the winner.

Under Sir Christopher Sykes the cultivation of the bleak, desolate Wold country was successfully begun, and under Sir Tatton Sykes great improvements were wrought by the introduction of bone manure. Sir Tatton was for forty years a master of fox-hounds, and the discovery of the usefulness of bone manure was due to his observing that on the places near his kennels at Eddlethorpe where the hounds were fed, the grass grew more luxuriantly than it did elsewhere.

Throughout his long life of ninety-one years Sir Tatton Sykes continued to dress in the fashions of his early days—‘a long frock coat, drab breeches, top-boots, and a frilled shirt.’ And such was his reputation that sixty years ago the three things best worth seeing in the county were said by Yorkshiremen to be ‘York Minster, Fountains Abbey, and t’owd Squyer.’

Absolutely ‘straight’ in all that he did, he takes rank as a true specimen of ‘The Fine Old English Gentleman’—the Sir Roger de Coverley of the nineteenth century.

Last on our list of Famous Sons of the East Riding stand the names of Charles and Arthur Wilson.

The younger sons of Thomas Wilson, founder of the great shipping firm of ‘Thomas Wilson, Sons & Co., Limited,’ they were born at Hull in 1833 and 1836 respectively. On the retirement of their eldest brother David in 1867, the control of the firm came into their hands, and how it grew and prospered, and how the town of Hull grew and prospered at the same time have been described in a previous chapter.

The parallel between the ancient family of the De la Poles and the modern family of the Wilsons has been noted by more than one writer. It may rightly be said that as the former were the founders of the commercial prosperity of the town of Kingston-upon-Hull, so the latter were the founders of the commercial prosperity of the city of Hull.

For thirty-two years—from 1874 to 1906—Charles Wilson sat in Parliament as a representative of the burgesses of his native place. Then his political services were recognised by the Ministry, and he became the first Baron Nunburnholme of Kingston-upon-Hull.

Arthur Wilson did not, like his brother, enter political life, but became widely famed as a sportsman. For twenty-five years he was Master of the Holderness Hunt, and the most famous Meet under his rule was that at Brantingham Thorpe, then the residence of Mr. Christopher Sykes, in January 1882, when more than four thousand people assembled to greet the Prince of Wales.

Charles, Baron Nunburnholme, died at Warter Priory, on October 27th, 1907, and his brother, Mr. Arthur Wilson, at Tranby Croft, on October 21st, 1909. The body of the latter was drawn to its resting-place in Kirkella Churchyard on a farm rulley by a team of farm horses, and public feeling at the time may be gauged from the following passage in one of the newspaper reports of his death:—

In Hull Mr. Wilson was known and respected as a just and honourable merchant and a philanthropist; in the county he was known and admired as a model landlord, and a keen and fearless sportsman.