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.
[Illustration: JOHN FISHER, BISHOP OF ROCHESTER.]
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.
[Illustration: Andr. Marvell]
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:—
He nothing common did or mean
Upon that memorable scene,
But with his keener eye
The axe’s edge did try;
Nor called the gods, with vulgar spite,
To vindicate his helpless right;
But bowed his comely head
Down, as upon a bed.
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.’
* * * * *
[Illustration:
WILBERFORCE HOUSE, HIGH STREET, HULL.
The Birthplace of William Wilberforce.
]
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.
[Illustration: WILLIAM WILBERFORCE.]
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:—
Wilberforce 11,806
Milton 11,177
Lascelles 10,989
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:—
NEGRO
SLAVERY
ABOLISHED
I. AUGUST
MDCCCXXXIV.
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.
[Illustration:
_Photo by_] [_Henry Thelwell_
Sir Tatton Sykes.
]
* * * * *
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.
[Illustration:
_Photo by_] [_Barry, Hull_
Charles Wilson, First Baron Nunburnholme.
]
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.
[Illustration:
_Photo by_] Arthur Wilson. [_Barry, Hull_
]
XXVII.
SHIPS OF THE HUMBER.
Let us ask ourselves what is our idea of a ship. However we express this
in words, it will be vastly different from the idea of a ship that
possessed the minds of those early inhabitants of Holderness of whom we
read in Chapter III. Theirs was that of a tree-trunk hollowed out partly
by fire and partly by hand labour with implements of flint, until it
would balance itself on the water, and could be pushed along by its
occupants with some sort of paddle.
Such were the ships that men first used on the Humber. Not long ago one
of them was found buried six feet below the surface of the ground at
Brigg in North Lincolnshire.
At a time when the river Ancholme spread widely over the surrounding
land, this boat had been deserted on the river bank, and as years went
by it sank into the mud of which the bank was composed. Then the river
gradually silted up, so that what had once been a wide expanse of water
became merely a narrow water-channel.
This ancient ‘dug-out’ is now one of the treasures of the Hull Museum.
It has been constructed of the trunk of an oak tree, split lengthwise,
and is nearly forty-eight feet long from stem to stern. Its width is
from four to five feet, and its depth roughly two feet six inches. There
is probably no oak tree growing in our country that would be tall enough
to make a similar boat of equal length.
The stern board of the boat is a separate piece of timber, fitted into a
groove along each side; and originally the sides were bound across with
leathern thongs to keep the board in position.
[Illustration: AN ANCIENT ‘DUG-OUT’ FOUND IN NORTH LINCOLNSHIRE.]
Think of the immense amount of labour that the making of this early
‘ship of the Humber’ cost. The patience that its makers must have
displayed would put some of us to utter shame in our frantic haste to
finish a thing in the shortest possible space of time after its
beginning.
* * * * *
Long after the days of the builders of this boat, the Romans and the
Angles came to our shores. With them the knowledge of shipbuilding had
greatly increased, and their ships were propelled with both oars and
sails.
Later again came the Northmen, against whose attacks the Angles prayed
in vain. A true sea-faring race were these Vikings of old, and they
could boast, as their lineal descendants in Norway boast to-day, that
they possessed more ships than any other nation in the world.
_Long-ships_ was the name given to the Northmen’s ships of war, they
being thus distinguished from the wider and clumsier merchant ships. But
the Northmen were a poetic race, and to a Viking his ship was a ‘black
horse of the sea,’ a ‘deer of the surf’ or a ‘raven of the wind.’
The largest ships of the Vikings were ornamented with a dragon’s head at
the stem, and often a dragon’s tail at the stern, whence their name
_Dragons_. The dragon’s head and tail might be covered with thin sheets
of gold, if its owner were a great king. Its prow and sides might also
be coated with iron to aid in ramming other vessels.
[Illustration:
A VIKING SHIP ON A CHURCH DOOR.
Norman Ironwork at Stillingfleet.
]
These ships were driven along by the use of a large square sail, and
also by the use of oars. Twenty or thirty rowers’ benches was the usual
number allowed for, and the space between two benches was known as a
‘room.’ Each ‘room’ would hold seven or eight men; so that a
thirty-seater, which would be in length about 150 feet, would have a
crew of something over two hundred men. Cnut the Great had a monster
ship 300 feet long, and containing sixty ‘rooms.’
The Norsemen were very fond of bright colours, and the sails of their
long-ships were made of woollen material striped red, blue, green, and
white. The sides were painted red, purple, and gold, and along each were
ranged the warriors’ shields, alternately yellow and black.
Picture to yourself what a fleet of some two or three hundred of these
long-ships must have looked like when it sailed up the Humber. What
terror it must have struck into the hearts of those who watched its
arrival!
Then picture another scene. A single ship, the home of a renowned
Viking, drifting slowly down the Humber on an ebb tide, with sail set,
bearing in its bosom the dead bodies of its owner and his favourite
horses, and alight from stem to stern with blazing tallow, tar, and oil.
This is the picture that a great English poet has painted for us in his
poem called _Balder Dead_:—
Soon, with a roaring, rose the mighty fire, And the pile crackled;
and between the logs Sharp, quivering tongues of flame shot out, and
leapt, Curling and darting, higher, until they licked The summit of
the pile, the dead, the mast, And ate the shrivelling sails. But
still the ship Drove on, ablaze above her hull with fire.
[Illustration:
THE ANCIENT SEAL OF THE
CORPORATION OF HEDON.
]
With the passing of centuries came more peaceful times, when the ships
that passed up and down the Humber were no longer ships of war, but
ships of peace. They were ships ‘that sailed from Hull ... to Bergen
with English wares, and brought back cargoes of salt fish; that fetched
iron from Sweden, and wine from the Rhine vineyards, and oranges and
spices and foreign fruits from Bruges; and that carried out the English
woollen cloths to Russia or the Baltic ports, and brought back wood,
tin, potash, skins and furs.’
What the ships of the fourteenth century were like we can judge from the
old plan of Hull on page 165, and from the drawing of the seal of the
Corporation of Hedon here shown. The Humber was then noted for its
ships, and in the year 1346 furnished the following ships and men to the
expedition fitted out by King Edward III. for the siege of Calais:—
TOWNS SHIPS MARINERS
Kingston-upon-Hull 16 466
Grimsby 11 171
Barton 3 30
Ravenser 1 27
For the same expedition London provided only twenty-five ships and 662
mariners.
Gradually the ships of the Humber increased in size; and when in 1598
the seamen of Hull first engaged in whale fishing, the kind of ship they
had was one much more seaworthy than the ‘cockle-shells’ of previous
centuries.
In the hall of the Hull Trinity House hangs a strange relic of the early
days of the whale fishery. This is an Esquimaux canoe, built entirely of
whalebone and sealskin, and picked up off the Greenland coast by the
captain of a Hull whaler in 1613.
When sighted, the canoe held the dead body of its owner sitting strapped
upright with his paddle across his knees. The ‘Bonny Boat’ the English
sailors christened it, and there in the Trinity House it may be seen
to-day, with what at first glance appears to be its owner still sitting
as he sat when he died of starvation on the wide Atlantic Ocean.
During the time of the Dutch wars of the reign of Charles II., the
whaling industry passed into the hands of the Dutch, but a century
later—in 1765—it was resumed by the Hull seamen. A shipowner named
Captain Standidge took a great part in this revival of the Greenland
fisheries, and for his services in this direction received the honour of
knighthood.
[Illustration: ENGLISH WARSHIPS IN THE TIME OF THE ARMADA.]
From 1772 to 1852 the WHALING INDUSTRY flourished. To the icy seas
around Spitzbergen, or to the Greenland seas and the Davis Straits,
there went each year ships of the Humber in number from three to
sixty-five. Often they were unlucky, and had to return ‘clean’—that is,
with nothing in their holds to repay their owners and their crews.
Sometimes they were still more unlucky, and did not return at all,
having been gripped in the ice or captured by French privateers. Out of
ten ships that sailed from the Humber in 1775, six came back ‘clean,’
and two were lost.
One of the most disastrous years known was 1835, when five of the Hull
ships were frozen up, three of them being eventually lost, one with all
hands.
In the following year a Hull vessel, named the _Swan_, was frozen up
much farther north than the whalers usually went; so that it was the
midsummer of 1837 before she got free. Meanwhile she had been given up
as lost; and on Sunday, July 2nd, a memorial service was held on the
Dock Green, and a collection of £47 taken on behalf of the families of
the crew. In the midst of the service, however, news arrived that the
‘missing’ vessel was entering the mouth of the Humber.
We can imagine the excitement caused by her arrival. Among other things
it meant, of course, a ‘Hextra Speshul’ edition of the News Sheet, as
the photograph on the opposite page shows.
As a rule, however, a voyage resulted in fair profits for both owners
and crews. The thirty-one ships that went to Greenland in 1821 took
between them 204 whales, and the twenty-one that went to Davis Straits
took 294 whales. These 498 ‘fish’ produced whalebone and oil to the
value of £150,000. The average return per ship was here slightly lower
than that for the whole period 1772–1852, which works out to £3,500.
[Illustration:
A NEWS SHEET OF 1837.
(_Presented to the Wilberforce Museum, Hull, by Mr. John Suddaby_).
]
Occasionally a ship would be particularly fortunate. In the Greenland
Sea in one day the _Gibraltar_ killed eleven whales, the _Manchester_
ten, and the _Molly_ six. In 1794, also, the _Egginton_ arrived from
Greenland with the produce of fifteen whales, 3,021 seals, and five
bears. She had been away from home only a hundred days, and created a
record by afterwards making two trading voyages to St. Petersburg the
same season.
Such luck as this was quite exceptional. Usually the capture of a single
whale meant much hard work and many dangers for the boats’ crews. In
1821 the _Baffin_
struck a whale which ran out fifteen lines of 240 yards each, and
dragged two boats and fifteen men for a long time. When the ‘fish’
was killed, it was found to have been also dragging under water six
similar lines and a boat belonging to the _Trafalgar_, of Hull. The
5,040 yards of line weighed a ton and a half.
Most famous of the ships of the Humber that passed to and fro in the
whaling industry was the _Truelove_. This was a three-masted barque with
a length of 96 feet and a width of 27 feet. Built at Philadelphia in
1764, the _Truelove_ was captured by the English in the American war,
and eventually sold to a merchant of High Street, Hull.
The _Truelove’s_ first whaling voyage was to Spitzbergen in 1784. From
that year till 1868 she made seventy-two voyages to Spitzbergen,
Greenland, or the Davis Straits, and accounted for about 500 whales. In
1873 she was taken to her birthplace, where the captain and crew were
fêted; and for several years afterwards she made trading voyages to
Norway until eventually she was broken up as no longer seaworthy.