‘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.
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.
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.