Marshall’s family originated from Yeadon, near Leeds, where the earliest known trace is that of another John, a clothier, in around 1600. The family remained there until Marshall’s father married his grandmother’s niece Mary Cowper, who brought him £1,200. He used the money to open a draper’s shop at 1 Briggate, Leeds. They were originally Baptists, but with no chapel in Leeds they joined the Unitarians of Mill Hill. His parents’ only surviving child, Marshall fell seriously ill after a smallpox vaccination when five years old and was sent away to live with his maternal aunt Sarah Booth at Rawdon, near Bradford, where he remained for five years, receiving a rudimentary education from the local minister. When he was eleven, his father decided his future lay as a merchant and sent him to Hipperholme school for 18 months, after which he returned to Leeds for a further year and a half before being dispatched to a Mr. Astley in Derbyshire to continue his education. Once back in Leeds he learnt French and accounting before entering his father’s business aged 17. When his father died in December 1787, he left the 22-year-old Marshall an estate worth £9,000, including £7,500 invested in the business, which produced an annual profit of £500. In the first week of 1788 Marshall visited Darlington where his attention was ‘accidentally turned to spinning of flax by machinery, it being a thing much wished for by the linen manufacturers.’ Reasoning that it would be ‘a new business, where there would be few competitors’, he was inspired to try his hand, motivated, he claimed, not by the lure of financial gain, but by ‘the ambition of distinguishing myself’. Borrowing £3,000 from Sarah Booth and raising more by taking on two partners, that summer he began attempting to spin flax by machine. The first three years were difficult as he struggled to overcome technological problems. In 1790 he risked all by selling the drapery business and investing in a new mill. As the enterprise prospered he bought out his original investors and in 1793 went into partnership with Thomas and Benjamin Benyon*, woollen merchants of Shrewsbury. He later recalled that ‘I set my shoulder to the wheel in good earnest. I was at the mill from six in the morning to nine at night and minutely attended to every part of the manufactory’. In 1796 he started to write an autobiography in order ‘to form a better judgement of my own prospects’. The key, he decided, was ‘perseverance, hard work and judgement’. In 1804, he concluded that his partners were gaining more from the business than he was and, confident of his own abilities, he bought them out. By now he was worth about £40,000. He appointed two of his experienced managers as junior partners, who were later joined by a third, and saw his business dramatically expand. The war with France made his fortune and by the end of it he was worth an estimated £400,000. He had started to diversify his business interests in 1813 by investing in exchequer bills, and he soon moved into American bonds and South American stock: his holding in the United States alone amounted to £212,000 in 1822.
Marshall’s wealth inevitably drew him towards improving his social position. In Leeds, as a Dissenter, he had never been accepted by the town’s elite, and he therefore looked further afield. In 1815 he bought Hallsteads, an estate at the head of Ullswater, for £11,800, where his wife could be near her childhood friend Dorothy Wordsworth, sister of the poet. Marshall’s acceptance was shown by his appointment as sheriff of Cumberland in 1821. By 1826 he owned properties worth £66,000 in the Lake District. In an effort to broaden his own perspective and social acceptance, in 1821 he leased a house in London, where he was drawn to the developing Utilitarian circle. He also pursued an interest in optics and astronomy, but it was the study of geology and political economy that gave him the greatest satisfaction, and he later gave lectures on these topics. In 1828 he produced a booklet, The Economy of Social Life, which attempted to explain political economy in simple terms. Philanthropy and education also played a significant part in his life: he helped to establish the Lancasterian school in Leeds and provided a range of schooling for his employees and their children. He was a generous benefactor of charities in the town and had a part in founding the Leeds Literary and Philosophical Society, where he often spoke, and the Leeds Mechanics’ Institute. From 1825-8 he was one of a group of similarly minded men who provided money for the Parliamentary History and Review, which was established to promote the ideas of Bentham and Mill, and in 1834 he gave money for the foundation of the London Review.
Marshall had long sought a seat in Parliament, for which his ‘chief motive’ was
a wish to see the mechanism by which the affairs of a great nation are conducted and to study the characters of the men who take the lead in public life, and the principles on which they act. I also desire it as being creditable to my family and an introduction to good society ... These measures would be ... obtained by a seat for a close borough, which involves but little of labour or attendance upon business.
An abortive attempt to secure a berth at Rye left him ‘so disgruntled with the manoeuvring and jobbing’ that he ‘determined to give up all thoughts of it’, but in 1825 his Lake District neighbour James Brougham* secured him a deal with Hylton Jolliffe* for a seat at Petersfield for 5,000 guineas. Meanwhile, Marshall had come to the attention of Earl Fitzwilliam’s son Lord Milton*, who in support of Lord Morpeth’s* proposed candidacy for one of the county’s new additional seats, suggested that
with respect to the seconder ... if a proper commercial man could be prevailed upon, I think much advantage would be derived ... There is a Mr. Marshall of Leeds who might perhaps be prevailed upon, a man of great property and the highest character, but I do not suppose you have any knowledge of him.
Following the withdrawal of Morpeth a Whig meeting was held at Wakefield, 13 Jan. 1826, at which Marshall was mooted as a possible candidate.
In his maiden speech Marshall seconded Hume’s amendment to the address, 21 Nov. 1826. Speaking in Utilitarian terms, he argued that after a considerable period of peace the people ‘had a right to expect a diminution of the country’s burdens and an increase of general happiness and prosperity’. Instead, there was ‘an equal degree of want and suffering’, from which ‘the higher ranks were relieving themselves ... by a monopoly of the great necessity of life, wheat’. The only solution, he declared, was a revision of the corn laws. He was in the minority of 24 for the amendment. Morpeth reported that the speech was ‘inaudible and asthmatic’, while James Abercromby* observed that ‘all agree [he] will do nothing. His sense and being Member for Yorkshire may sustain him, but his speaking power will not’.
It occupies a considerable proportion of a man’s time, but to one accustomed to the management of extensive commercial transactions, is not likely to be either difficult or oppressive, and I should rather wish for the employment than not when I do attend.
He had recovered sufficiently to present Bradford and Halifax petitions for repeal of the Test Acts, 6 June.
Marshall brought up numerous Yorkshire petitions for repeal of the Test Acts in February and early March and voted accordingly, 26 Feb. 1828, when he protested that the Acts were ‘revolting to the spirit of the age’. He secured accounts of the stamp duties on bills of exchange between 1805 and 1826, 21 Feb., and was probably appointed to the select committee on criminal commitments, 5 Mar. He voted against extending the East Retford franchise to the freeholders of Bassetlaw, 21 Mar., 30 June. He moved the second reading of the Leeds and Hunslet road bill, 21 Mar. During the debate on the second reading of the freeholders registration bill, 25 Mar., Sir James Graham alleged that Marshall had spent £120,000 on his election, which Marshall denied, noting that the bill would ‘very materially lessen the expenses of the candidates’. On 28 Apr. he objected to a Yorkshire petition against Catholic relief presented by his colleague William Duncombe, as it gave a ‘very erroneous opinion’ of the opinions of the inhabitants. He brought up a York counter-petition that day and voted accordingly, 12 May. He spoke against the imposition of a duty on imported wool, which would ‘materially affect a numerous body of his constituents’ and ‘enable the foreign manufacturers to compete with ours’, 28 Apr., and voted for a reduction of the corn duties, 29 Apr. He presented a petition from the wool staplers of Leeds against the East London railway bill, 1 May, and from Hartished-cum-Clifton against the friendly societies bill next day. He brought up constituency petitions against the restrictions on the circulation of pound notes, 12 May, 5 June, and for the abolition of slavery, 3, 6, 10 June. He was in the minority of 13 for revision of civil list pensions, 10 June, and divided against the third reading of the archbishop of Canterbury’s bill, 16 June. He voted for repeal of the usury laws, 19 June. He presented a Leeds petition against the practice of suttee, 23 June, and later that day was in the minority condemning the use of public money for renovating Buckingham House. He divided against the additional churches bill, 30 June, and presented a hostile Sheffield petition containing ‘upwards of 10,000’ signatures, 3 July. At a meeting of Leeds Dissenters to discuss the bill, 7 July 1828, he explained that he and several other Members had done their best to filibuster on the second reading and had partly succeeded as Goulburn, the chancellor of the exchequer, had agreed to withdraw the clause in the bill giving the power of assessment to churchwardens. However, he warned that power would still rest with the vestries:
If this law were to pass, then we in Leeds, instead of having one parish church, would have four, and our rates would quadruple ... This obnoxious measure cannot be thrown out without the entire and hearty concurrence of the public of England.
Such parliamentary tactics, he insisted, were the only way to defeat the bill as long as
we have a House of Commons pretending to represent the people of England [when] it is in fact little more than the nomination of the aristocracy ... I hope and trust that the time is not far distant when these great trading towns will consider it their duty, their indispensable duty, to combine together to demand that share of the representation which is unjustly withheld from them.
Leeds Intelligencer, 10 July 1828.
After Milton had presented a Sheffield petition for Catholic relief, 27 Feb. 1829, Marshall urged the House to look at the evidence provided by the ‘great commercial towns’, citing his recent attendance at a Leeds meeting of 16-18,000 people, at which the ‘decided majority’ were in favour of emancipation. He was of course expected by Planta, the Wellington ministry’s patronage secretary, to side ‘with government’ for their concession of emancipation, and he voted accordingly, 6 and (as a pair) 30 Mar. He brought up a favourable Tadcaster petition, 12 Mar., and questioned the validity of a hostile one from Leeds, 23 Mar. He presented and endorsed petitions from the Bradford, Leeds and Wakefield Gas Light Companies against Crosely’s gas apparatus bill, 7, 10, 28 Apr., and brought up petitions from tenement owners in Leeds and Sheffield against the labourers’ wages bill, 4, 19 May. He seconded and divided for Tennyson’s motion to transfer East Retford’s seats to Birmingham, 5 May 1829, when he criticized the proposed extension of the franchise to the hundred as simply handing over the borough to the landed interest and again advocated the enfranchisement of the industrial towns of the North. He voted again in the same sense, 11 Feb., 5 Mar. 1830. He divided for Daniel O’Connell to be allowed to take his seat unhindered, 18 May 1829. Next day he was in a minority of 12 for a fixed duty on corn. In December 1829 he was appointed to a subcommittee of the Society for the Propagation of Useful Knowledge which was formed to draw up a report on the state of the country.
Marshall voted for the amendment to the address, 4 Feb, tax cuts, 15 Feb., and a £500,000 reduction of the army estimates, 22 Feb. 1830. He presented and endorsed a Leeds petition against the renewal of the East India Company’s charter, 16 Feb., and brought up similar Yorkshire petitions, 4, 16, 25 Mar., 1 Apr. He voted for Lord Blandford’s parliamentary reform scheme, 18 Feb., endorsed a Sheffield petition calling for its own representation and voted for the enfranchisement of Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester, 23 Feb. He chaired a Leeds meeting for retrenchment and reform, 18 Mar., and endorsed the ensuing petition, 11 May. He was in the minority of 13 for O’Connell’s motion for a radical reform bill including universal suffrage, 28 May, but later that day voted for Lord John Russell’s more conventional motion. He voted to refer the Newark petition against the duke of Newcastle to a select committee, 1 Mar. He moved the second reading of the Leeds and Selby railway bill, dismissing objections as ‘slight and frivolous’, 4 Mar., and presented multiple petitions in its favour, 22, 25 Mar. On 23 Mar. he brought up a petition from Sheffield surgeons and physicians for the removal of obstacles to ‘the science of anatomy’, hoping that the ‘subject will be taken up as it ought to be, without any desire to provoke popular excitement’. He successfully moved the second reading of the Dewsbury road and bridge bill, 25 Mar., but presented the earl of Cardigan’s petition against it, 1 Apr. He divided for Jewish emancipation, 5 Apr., 17 May, when he presented a favourable Leeds petition. He brought up a petition of the inhabitants against the Sheffield waterworks bill, 5 Apr., and a Craven petition for a duty on imported lead, 8 Apr. He was in O’Connell’s minority to alter the law on Irish vestries, 27 Apr. He presented petitions from Bradford and Sheffield publicans against the sale of beer bill, 27 Apr., 4 May, and one from Leeds for the poor law amendment bill that day. He was a majority teller for bringing up the report on the Hull and Hedon road bill, 10 May. He divided for abolition of the Irish lord lieutenancy and for inquiry into the state of Newfoundland, 11 May. He seconded Slaney’s motion for a select committee on the condition of the poor, 13 May. He voted for information on privy councillors’ emoluments, 14 May. He presented a petition from Leeds Dissenters for the abolition of slavery, 24 May, and divided for abolition of the death penalty for forgery that day, and 7 June. He was in the minorities against the grant for South American missions, 7 June, for a reduction in consular services, 11 June, and for inquiry into the conduct of church commissioners in the St. Luke’s case, 17 June. He was added to the select committee on manufacturing employment, 3 June, and presented a petition from Leeds merchants for compensation for the losses they had suffered after the 1807 sacking of Copenhagen, 1 July 1830.
At the 1830 dissolution Marshall retired from Yorkshire, declining a request from the Whig gentry to reconsider. Dorothy Wordsworth told his wife:
Another Parliament would have been too much to look forward to ... When I consider the variety of his tastes, and multiplicity of his affairs and connections, it seems to me that he will have more than enough of salutary employment to satisfy the craving of any mind ... I can fancy Mr. Marshall the gladdest of the glad on retiring to his beautiful home among the mountains.
In the ensuing election he was instrumental in persuading the county Whigs to support Henry Brougham*, whom he considered to be a ‘man of business’ capable of representing the manufacturing and commercial interests of the West Riding.