LISTER, Martin (1624-60), of Thornton-in-Craven, Yorks.

Very little is known about Lister’s upbringing and education. He has been identified as the Martin Lister who was admitted to Clare College, Cambridge, in 1648, matriculated in 1651 and who graduated BA in 1652.11Al. Cant. But the future MP spent much of late 1651 and early 1652 abroad, which would have been difficult (although not impossible) to combine with the study required for graduation in 1652.

In 1650, Lister and his brothers brought a suit in chancery against the trustees of their father’s estate – Sir William Lister, who had died earlier that year, having consigned his estate in trust to pay off his debts and to provide portions of £30 a year for his younger children. Lister and his brothers were dissatisfied with the stewardship of their father’s trustees – a group headed by Sir Martin Lister* – and in June 1650, succeeded in obtaining an order from chancery assigning the estate to new trustees, including their brother-in-law Major-general John Lambert*, Colonel John Bright* and Roger Coates*, who had served as an officer under Bright and Lambert and was one of Craven’s leading inhabitants.12C10/9/53; C10/41/61; Leeds Univ. Lib. YAS/MD234/36, 39, 42.

Granted a pass to go abroad by the council of state in October 1651, Lister travelled to the continent in the capacity of mentor or guide to a brother-in-law of Lambert’s friend and man-of-business Captain Adam Baynes*.13CSPD 1651, 535; D. Farr, John Lambert, Parliamentary Soldier and Cromwellian Major-General (Woodbridge, 2003), 100, 163. Lister was at Lyon by late November, when he wrote to Baynes, informing him that he intended to travel to Marseille and from thence to Italy and asking him to look after his business in northern England (the nature of which he did not specify).14Add. 21420, f. 275. Writing from Livorno, in Tuscany, in January 1652, he asked Baynes to arrange the purchase of former crown lands worth between £800 and £1,000 a year, assuring him that he had ‘those that will be engaged to supply the money’.15Add. 21421, f. 33. Lister justified this purchase as repayment ‘for the debt owing us of the late king’ – one of his family, probably his father, Sir William Lister, having lent either his money or services to Charles I’s agents at Venice before the war.16Add. 21421, f. 31. Like his elder brother Christopher, Lister was evidently close to Baynes and his circle. Lister asked Baynes to present his services to Baynes’s wife and to ‘cousin Lilburne’ – almost certainly Colonel Robert Lilburne*.

Lister’s letters to Baynes also reveal that he was a member of a prestigious party of English gentlemen, for he mentions that he and his friends had been received and lavishly entertained at the court of the grand duke of Tuscany.17Add. 21420, f. 318; Add. 21421, f. 31. At a time when the English republicans were looking to the Italian republics for moral support, Lister’s return to Italy may have not have been of an entirely private nature.18Infra, ‘Thomas Chaloner’. It is possible that it was authorised or arranged by leading figures in the Rump as part of their efforts to forge closer diplomatic ties with the Italian republics, and particularly it seems with Tuscany, the shrine of Machiavellianism and classical republicanism. Lister was possibly a kinsman of Martin Lister, a member of the English mercantile community in Livorno during the 1640s and early 1650s.19C6/132/66; HCA13/65 ff. 2v, 18; HCA13/124, ff. 51v, 53v, 56r-v, 60v, 64; Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Med. Princ., 4203, c. 926, 927, 1030-1.

During the mid-1650s, Lister had lengthy dealings with the Committee for Compounding following his purchase of the fee-farm rents of Hatfield Chase in Yorkshire (worth £1,228 a year), which was part of the sequestered estate of George, 2nd duke of Buckingham. Lister contracted for the purchase of the fee farm rents in June 1653, and it was ordered early in 1654 that if he brought in bills or debentures for £3,036 – which was the sum he and two other gentlemen were owed by the duke and his brother Lord Francis Villiers – then the treason trustees would provide him with a doubled bill for £6,073 towards the first half of the purchase money. It seems likely that the money due to Lister from the Villiers family was connected with the debt owed to the Listers by the crown. Lister later claimed that he had purchased the fee farm rents in trust for himself, the prominent Rumper Sir James Harington and one John Baker (possibly the man of that name who was elected for East Grinstead in Sussex in 1645). Lister had great difficulty in finding the full purchase price, although this did not deter him from extracting rent from his tenants, sometimes it seems in a very heavy-handed and oppressive manner. In 1658, possibly as a favour to Lister, Lambert proposed to pay the second half of the purchase price.20SP25/75, p. 49; CCC 2188-91; CSP Dom. 1653-4, p. 391; 1658-9, p. 213.

Lister emerged in the months preceding the elections to the first protectoral Parliament, in the summer of 1654, as an important member of Lambert’s interest in the West Riding – despite the fact that he and his brothers had brought a suit in chancery the previous year against Lambert and the other trustees of Sir William Lister’s estate, once again alleging poor stewardship on their part.21C10/41/61. Lambert’s electoral manager, Anthony Devereux, assisted by Lister and Baynes, was apparently canvassing support for the major-general and his allies as early as May 1654.22Add. 21422, ff. 248, 317, 327, 328. The day before the election (11 July), Devereux was optimistic about Lister’s chances – as he informed Baynes: ‘As to Mr Martin Lister, he is in a fair way to be elected [for the West Riding] tomorrow at York, since it hath been in preparation a good while’.23Add. 21422, f. 342. But Devereux’s confidence that Lister was almost home and dry proved to be misplaced. On election day (12 July), Lord Fairfax (Sir Thomas Fairfax*), Lambert, Henry Tempest, Bright and Edward Gill were elected ‘without any dispute, most in general appearing for them’. However, the sixth and final place became the subject of a fierce contest between Lister, the Presbyterian knight Sir Edward Rodes* and the Cromwellian judge and former Rumper Francis Thorpe*. It was probably not just Lister’s republican politics that the voters found objectionable, but also the fact that he was clearly riding on Lambert’s coat-tails, for his own landed estate and electoral interest were negligible. Thorpe was quickly knocked out of the contest, but the ‘shout’ between Lister’s and Rodes’s supporters continued for almost two hours, and the sheriff was eventually forced to hold a poll. In the event, another of Lambert’s election managers succeeded in rallying enough ‘old roundheads’ to secure Lister a narrow victory.24Supra, ‘Yorkshire’.

Yet for all the effort that had been put into securing his election, Lister appears to have been one of the less active Members in this Parliament. Unfortunately, the clerk of the House’s failure to distinguish between the four Listers in the House (Christopher, Martin, Thomas and William), referring repeatedly simply to ‘Mr Lister’, makes it impossible to obtain a precise tally of the West Riding MP’s appointments. But on only three occasions did the clerk note the appointment of ‘Martin Lister’ specifically – to committees concerning the transportation of corn and to consider petitions regarding the drainage of Hatfield Chase Level and for the re-establishment of a council in the north at York.25CJ vii. 374b, 380a, 401a.

Lister’s ties with Lambert’s republican interest lent him some measure of influence in Yorkshire under the protectorate, even though his very low tally of local appointments suggests that he spent little time in the county during the 1650s. In December 1655, the Danbys of Masham, a royalist family, relied on Lister’s influence with Major-general Lilburne and the militia commissioners to help put their case against liability for decimation. ‘No doubt, but Mr Martin Lister will be a very faithfull friend to [i.e. within] his power’, wrote one of the Danbys’ friends, ‘for the which cause, if his stay in these parts be short, the more haste must be made to appear before the commissioners...’.26N. Yorks. RO, ZS, Swinton estate mss, Danby fam. letters and pprs. (mic. 2106), unfol.: Stephen Jackson to Thomas Danby jun. 30 Dec. 1655.

Lister evidently stood as a candidate for the West Riding in the elections to the second protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1656, when his kinsman, Thomas Belasyse*, 2nd Viscount Fauconberg, wrote to Sir George Savile† soliciting his interest on Lister’s behalf.27Notts. RO, DD/SR/212/36. However, Lister failed to garner any appreciable support when the contest for the West Riding places went to a poll on 12 August 1656.28Supra, ‘Yorkshire’. Lister was probably the ‘Mr. Lister’ who, with John Bright, supported the return of Lambert and the godly Yorkshire lawyer John Hewley for Pontefract in the elections to Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament in January 1659.29Add. 21425, f. 5.

Lister died – apparently intestate and childless – in the summer of 1660 and was buried on 19 August at St Mary Abbot, Kensington, where his father had been buried and where Lambert had inherited Sir William’s residence at Coleherne.30Kensington Par. Reg. 129.