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.’
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.
