LISTER, Sir John (1587-1640), of High Street, Kingston-upon-Hull, and Linton Wold, Wintringham, Yorks.

Lister was the most successful Hull merchant of his generation. His trading ventures, which centred on the export of Derbyshire lead to Holland and France, netted him in excess of £10,000 a year by the early 1620s, making him the town’s wealthiest inhabitant.26E190/314/14; E190/315/3; E179/205/454; HP Commons 1558-1603, ‘John Lister’. He inherited this thriving business from his father – the scion of a minor gentry family from Halifax – who had been apprenticed to a Hull merchant in the 1570s and had risen to become an alderman and mayor of the town.27Hull Hist. Cent. C BRG/1, f. 91v; Hull Hist. Cent. C BRB/2, ff. 260, 290, 295; Vis. Yorks. ed. Foster, 546; Dugdale’s Vis. Yorks. ii. 339-40; Abstracts of Yorks. Wills ed. Clay, 165; HP Commons 1604-29, ‘John Lister’. Lister’s father was the first member of the family to serve as an MP, representing Hull in the Parliament of 1601.28HP Commons 1558-1603, ‘John Lister’.

Although Lister received a gentleman’s education at Oxford and the Middle Temple, he followed his father into the less than gentlemanly profession of a Hull merchant trader. With his father’s death in 1617, he inherited not only the business but also Lister senior’s exalted position within the municipal hierarchy – the corporation appointing him to the place on the aldermanic bench left by his father’s demise.29Hull Hist. Cent. C BRB/3, f. 25v. During his first mayoralty (1618-19), Lister fought hard to preserve the privileges of the Hull Merchant Company, and it was probably his championship of the town’s mercantile interests, allied to his wealth and standing, which recommended him to the corporation as a suitable choice for parliamentary selection.30APC 1618-19, pp. 482-3; 1619-20, pp. 90-1; A. Friis, Alderman Cockayne’s Project and the Cloth Trade, 124-7.

Lister was returned on the corporation interest to every Parliament of the 1620s, proving himself an able and diligent promoter of the town’s interests at Westminster. A regular, if by no means prolific, contributor to debate, he almost invariably addressed issues of significance to Hull, its traders, or the merchant community generally.31HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘John Lister’. On the broader, more contentious questions of the day, such as the relationship between the king’s prerogative and the liberties of Parliament, he tended to remain silent. He was a little more forthcoming in his correspondence with Hull corporation, particularly when it came to discussing foreign affairs.32Hull Hist. Cent. C BRL/168, 178, 180, 200. He was much affected by ‘the bleeding business of the Palatinate’, and during the late 1620s he helped to organise shipping at Hull for the transportation of soldiers to the continent.33APC 1625-6, p. 58; APC 1627, pp. 101, 104-5. However, like many MPs of the 1620s Parliaments, he seems to have thought that the prerequisite of any campaign for the recovery of the Palatinate was the suppression of papists at home. He thus supported the imposition of higher taxes upon recusants and endorsed the Commons’ petition to the king, presented on 3 December 1621, ‘for execution of laws against Jesuits, papists etc.’; although it is not clear whether he also favoured the inclusion of the controversial clause that Prince Charles be married ‘to one of our own religion’ (rather than the Spanish infanta, as James proposed).34Hull Hist. Cent. C BRL/179; CJ i. 649b; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. i. 41-2.

Despite his commitment to the ‘advancement of God’s true religion’, there is no firm evidence that Lister supported war against Spain, even as a means of recovering the Palatinate. And given that approximately a third of his trade was with France, he is unlikely to have welcomed the duke of Buckingham’s crusade against Cardinal Richelieu during the later 1620s. Only on the issue of impositions – the crown’s ‘unparliamentary’ duty on wine and other imports – and related ‘grievances for trade’ did he make common cause with the more vocal critics of crown policy.35HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘John Lister’. And the fact that he received his knighthood in May 1628, near the height of the conflict between the king and the Commons over the Petition of Right, suggests that he was regarded favourably at court.36Shaw, Knights of Eng. ii. 194. But although he had no hand in the petition’s framing or in the debates over its form and content, he seems to have appreciated the significance of the issues involved, supplying Hull corporation with detailed notes on ‘the arguments touching the liberties of the subjects of England made at the Parliament’.37Hull Hist. Cent. C BRB/3, ff. 93, 94; HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘John Lister’.

Lister appears to have remained entirely conformable during the personal rule of Charles I and was diligent in carrying out privy council orders during his second mayoralty (1629-30).38Hull Hist. Cent. C BRB/3, ff. 102v, 112. It may also be significant that by the mid-1630s he was on close terms with another loyal crown servant, Sir John Hotham*, the governor of Hull.39Add. 28082, f. 80v. Hotham, a zealous collector of Ship Money during his shrievalty, was a client of one of the architects of ‘Thorough’, Thomas Viscount Wentworth (Sir Thomas Wentworth†, the future earl of Strafford).40Supra, ‘Sir John Hotham’. Lister’s loyalty to the crown was shared by his heir John Lister – probably the man of that name who had been appointed an extraordinary squire of the body in June 1628 – who served in the king’s army in one or both of the bishops’ wars.41C10/119/74; HP Commons 1604-29, ‘John Lister’. When the king visited Hull in April 1639, he was ‘sumptuously entertained and lodged’ in Lister’s townhouse on High Street.42J. Tickell, Hist. of Hull (1798), 322.

In the months preceding the elections to the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640, Lister was in contact with Sir John Melton* and the recorder of Hull, Francis Thorpe*, who were managing the northern electoral interest of the future parliamentarian grandee, Algernon Percy†, 4th earl of Northumberland. Melton described Lister as ‘the chief man of power’ in Hull and sought his help in securing the return there of Northumberland’s candidate, (Sir) Henry Vane II*. The elections at Hull were held in mid-March and saw the return of Lister and Vane.43Supra, ‘Kingston-upon-Hull’; Alnwick, Y.V.1d, bdle. 1: Francis Thorpe* to Melton, 3 Jan. 1640; X.II.6, box 23B, bdle. v: Melton to Hugh Potter*, 6 Mar. 1640; CSP Dom. 1639-40, p. 568. Lister departed Hull for London on 20 April (a week after the Short Parliament had assembled), but received no appointments in the House and made no recorded contribution to debate.44Hull Hist. Cent. C BRB/3, f. 524. In contrast to Sir John Hotham, Lister remained a loyal king’s man during the last, troubled months of the personal rule of Charles I. He disdained to join Yorkshire’s ‘disaffected’ gentry, signing none of their petitions to the king during the summer and autumn of 1640 in which they complained about the local impact of the bishops’ wars. Re-elected at Hull that autumn, he died in London on 23 December 1640, leaving no trace on the records of the Long Parliament.45Gent, Annales Regioduni Hullini, 35. His corpse was carried back to Hull, in accordance with his wishes and buried in Holy Trinity church on 19 January 1641.46Holy Trinity, Hull par. reg.; Borthwick, Wills in York Registry, Holderness Deanery, Feb. 1641.

Having settled the bulk of his land upon John Lister junior some time during the 1630s, Lister, in his will (written in London on 4 December 1640), divided most of his remaining properties among his younger sons. He left the greater part of the family business to his fourth son, Hugh, whom he desired ‘should live two years beyond sea, viz. one year in Holland and one year in France, to learn his languages and book keeping there’. He bequeathed some of his lands in Hull and the adjoining townships, plus £600, to fourteen trustees for the establishment of an almshouse – or ‘hospital’, as the corporation termed it – in in Holy Trinity churchyard, Hull. In all, he charged his estate, which included several merchant ships, with about £2,500 in legacies and annuities. His legatees included his ‘good friend’, the godly but orthodox minister of the Hull Charterhouse, Andrew Marvell the elder (father of the poet Andrew Marvell*), another orthodox divine, Richard Perrot (vicar of Hull) and Francis Thorpe. His trustees included Marvell, eight of the Hull aldermen and Peregrine Pelham, who would be elected the town’s MP in Lister’s place.47Infra, ‘Peregrine Pelham’; C6/153/85; C10/119/74; Borthwick, Wills in York Registry, Holderness Deanery, Feb. 1641; Hull Hist. Cent. C BRB/3, f. 580; Marchant, Puritans, 118-21, 262. At least three of his sons – John, William and Hugh – became firm parliamentarians; but his son Samuel was suspected of complicity in Hotham’s design to betray Hull in 1643, and another son, Walter, was later adjudged a delinquent.48Infra, ‘William Lister’; Hull Hist. Cent. C BRS/7/3, 15; A True and Exact Relation of...the Siege of Manchester (1642), 13-14 (E.121.45); The Petition and Presentment of the Grand-Juries of the County of York (1649), 3 (E.548.26); Jones, ‘War in north’, 391. William Lister represented Hull in the first and second protectoral Parliaments and was a staunch Cromwellian.49Infra, ‘William Lister’.