Lister’s father, a younger son of a Halifax gentry family, was apprenticed to alderman John Smith of Hull. He exported Derbyshire lead to Holland, and in 1595 bought a share in the salt monopoly the corporation leased from (Sir) Thomas Wilkes†.
An only son, Lister received a gentleman’s education and married the heiress of a recently deceased Hull alderman, who brought him a landed estate near the town.
It was presumably always intended that Lister should take over the family business, the largest in Hull, and on his father’s death in January 1617 he became a freeman and joined the Hull Merchants’ Company. The corporation immediately persuaded him to accept election as an alderman by waiving the normal requirement that he serve as chamberlain and sheriff.
Lister’s championship of the Hull merchants’ interests undoubtedly explains why he was elected to Parliament for the city on Christmas day 1620. Indeed, the corporation had apparently settled upon his nomination several weeks previously.
Lister may have made his maiden speech in the Commons on 27 Feb. 1621, at the second reading of a bill to assign the fees collected for maintaining the lighthouse at Winterton Ness, Norfolk to the Deptford Trinity House, as an unnamed Member moved ‘to have the committee take consideration of the privileges of Kingston-upon-Hull’. He had probably been briefed on this dispute by the Hull Trinity House, which feasted him before his departure and in whose behalf he intervened on 21 Mar., when he criticized an official request to confirm a buoyage levy at Newcastle on the grounds that ‘never any of the outports consented’.
Although some of his speeches were clearly planned in advance, Lister was happy to take advantage of opportunities as they arose. At the second reading of a bill to prohibit the import of corn on 8 Mar., he objected ‘that this bill may do much hurt, because much cloth transported into the East countries, whence the only return rye’. While this was not literally true, the Baltic did provide a vital supply of grain in years of dearth, and Lister was supported by Sir Thomas Riddell of Newcastle and Christopher Brooke, who spoke on behalf of his York constituents. Lister later joined Sir Thomas Wentworth and Sir Thomas Hoby in censuring John Lepton’s patent for the engrossing of bills before the Council in the North as ‘a grievance in fees’.
Lister’s correspondence reveals much about his activities outside the Commons’ chamber. His initial concern in 1621 was the delivery of the town’s election indenture, in which he was partnered with Maurice Abbot, then abroad on a trade mission to the Netherlands. The corporation was worried about electing an absentee, but Archbishop Abbot, high steward of Hull, who had nominated his brother Maurice, advised Lister to file the return, assuring him that Maurice would arrive ‘in good time’. Lister also suggested that Sir Dudley Digges*, Abbot’s companion on the mission, was likely to be able to avert censure as ‘an ancient and well respected Parliament man’. Pressure of business in the Commons afforded Lister little time to perform the other tasks specified in the corporation’s instructions. As early as 7 Feb. he asked for James Watkinson*, weighmaster of the Hull Woolhouse, to be sent to London to negotiate with the York merchants about lead dues, protesting that ‘I shall never fail to do my utmost, but one man can be but in one place at once’. The corporation quickly sent up a number of documents, including an old draft bill to confirm their lead tolls, but the issue was apparently dropped on Lister’s advice that ‘there is little to do us good in parliamentary courses’. Lister was later sent the town’s assessment for the first of the two subsidies voted at the beginning of the session, which he returned to the Exchequer. He also advised the corporation to prepare to send the Palatine Benevolence collected the previous autumn, which he wrongly guessed would be demanded shortly.
One of Lister’s earliest letters to the corporation confided that ‘I am in good hope that the Commonwealth shall receive much good by this Parliament’, and during the session he reported a steady stream of political news. Noting the arrest of the projector (Sir) Giles Mompesson*, for instance, he hoped that ‘more of that kind will follow’, and when the ecclesiastical judge Sir John Bennet* was detained on bribery charges after the Easter recess, Lister looked for his censure ‘according to the degrees of his demerits’. As well as relaying news, Lister also forwarded copies of several Proclamations, a speech by the Polish ambassador, and the confession of lord chancellor St. Alban (Sir Francis Bacon*) at the latter’s impeachment. Lister’s contacts at the Custom House and the Exchange also enabled him to relate news of foreign affairs. A firm supporter of the Protestant cause, he lamented ‘I can write no good news from Bohemia, both Morosia [Moravia] and Silesia ... being revolted [from the Elector Palatine] to the Emperor’. In the autumn, he was cheered by the news that the French royal army had raised the siege of the Huguenot stronghold of Montauban ‘and now the Protestants stand upon good terms with him [Louis XIII]’.
Lister left no trace on the records of the autumn sitting, but wrote to the corporation via the town sheriff’s clerk, who was presumably in London to render his master’s account at the Exchequer. A letter of 26 Nov. explained that the sitting had been called to consider ‘the bleeding business [of the] Palatinate’, and outlined speeches by lord keeper Williams, lord treasurer (Sir Lionel) Cranfield*, and the diplomat [John] Lord Digby*, which revealed the failure of attempts to mediate a settlement of the Bohemian crisis. On 29 Nov. he reported the grant of a subsidy to support Count Mansfeld’s army in the Palatinate, ‘in which the recusants shall pay, [as] aliens, a double subsidy, as making themselves [st]rangers unto us in their hearts and affections, they are re[a]s[one]d to be made strangers in their purses likew[ise]’. He continued, hopefully:
we are now to petition His [Majesty] for the advancement of God’s true religion, and th[at] we may have an end of this session of Parliament before Christmas, so that at our coming into the country we may bring down some good laws and remedy some grievances, together with His Majesty’s free pardon if it may be obtained.
This optimism led him to under-estimate the significance of the free speech dispute between the Commons and the king: on 9 Dec. he made light of the Commons’ suspension of proceedings as ‘some stay and interruption in our parliamentary business’, although it led to the untimely prorogation of 18 December.
Following the dissolution Lister did not return to London until the spring of 1623, when he arrived with two other aldermen to further two cases being heard before the Privy Council. The first was the continuing dispute with the Greenland Company over whaling rights around Spitzbergen: Sir Arthur Ingram* and Archbishop Abbot negotiated a temporary agreement which allowed four Hull whalers to sail for Trinity Island (Jan Meyen Land),
Hull’s defeat at the hands of the York merchants probably cost Lister his seat at the next general election: in his stead, the corporation returned Sir John Suckling, comptroller of the Household, for ‘divers considerations’, foremost among which was doubtless the wish to acquire new allies at Whitehall. Lister did not sign the entry recording Suckling’s election in the corporation’s records, an omission which may indicate disapproval. However, he was not absent from the Commons for long, as Suckling opted to sit for Middlesex instead, and suggested that the town elect an inhabitant in his place. The corporation chose Lister on 15 Mar., rejecting rival nominations from lord treasurer Cranfield and lord admiral Buckingham.
Even allowing for his belated arrival, Lister played a much less active role in 1624 than he had in his first Parliament. In the debate of 12 Apr. on the bill to regulate grain exports, he scorned Suckling’s motion to prohibit rye from being exported at above 18s. a quarter, insisting, ‘that in the north rye did bear near the rate of wheat, and if there be not some proportion held in it with wheat it will make little of it sown. He thinketh 24s. a reasonable rate’. As both Sir John Savile and Sir Thomas Hoby advocated a rate of only 20s. per quarter, Lister’s remarks about the price were presumably motivated by animosity. Lister made one other speech, interrupting proceedings on 3 May to move for a formal censure of the pretermitted custom on cloth, from which Hull had been petitioning for exemption since its introduction in 1619. He was also named to the committee for a bill to confirm a Chancery decree awarding George Morgan £22,000 in damages as factor to the bankrupt Yorkshire alum syndicate led by William Turner and Sir John Bourchier* (1 May), and on 28 May he was one of four men ordered ‘to examine the grievances for trade’ a few hours before their presentation to the king.
Lister was returned to Parliament again in May 1625, when he was instructed to offer Sir Francis Barrington* £10 or £11 a year in lieu of the tun of Gascon wine given annually by the corporation for access to a local spring. Only one of Lister’s letters written during this Parliament survives. Drafted on 6 July, it was preoccupied with news of the outbreak of plague at Whitehall and the hasty dispersal of the Court. In it Lister confided, ‘I was never so weary of London in all my life, yet my conscience and affection to my country will not give [me] leave to come away till I see things brought to some perfection’. He resolved to stay for the passage of the Tunnage and Poundage bill, ‘being a business of the greatest importance that concerneth the ports’, and criticized colleagues who had fled from the plague: ‘if all men do as some do, what might become of these things if none but the courtiers were remaining?’. During the Oxford sitting, which he also attended, Lister warned that ‘the northern coasts [are] as much infested by the Dunkirkers’ as those of the west, and asked for the committee to take the safety of all ports into consideration (11 August).
Lister’s concern about the threat from the Dunkirkers was not misplaced, for at the end of October, storms dispersed the Anglo-Dutch squadron blockading Dunkirk, and Dutch and Dunkirker squadrons clashed off Scarborough.
hath been moved in Parliament, and divers of the lords of the Council have been acquainted with the Dunkirkers their spoils on our coasts, but as yet nothing is done either for the restraining of them, or securing our commerce. I should as soon certify you as I should willingly hear of some settled course against them.
Hull Trin. House, ATH/47/1, letter of 17 Mar. 1625/6.
This frustration with the inactivity of both government and Parliament may explain his outburst three days later, in a debate on ‘the interruption of the merchants’ trade’, which formed part of the developing attack against the duke of Buckingham.
As approximately one-third of his lead exports went to Bordeaux, Le Havre, Rouen and Calais,
Lister was also active on his constituents’ behalf outside the House. One of his first actions was to procure an a quittance for the money the corporation had received for transporting 2,000 recruits to the Low Countries in the summer of 1625.
With the town’s trade heavily dependent upon naval protection, the Hull corporation could not afford the luxury of dissent from the arbitrary measures to which the government resorted after the dissolution of Parliament in June 1626. Consequently, Lister swiftly collected the reduced Privy Seal loans, remitting 90 per cent of the town’s £200 quota to the Exchequer on 16 August, shortly before the levy was superseded by the Forced Loan.
The Dunkirker threat was probably still uppermost in Lister’s mind during the parliamentary session of 1628. On 7 May, when the York Member Thomas Hoyle called for action on hearing news of fresh losses in the north, he was seconded by Lister, who made ‘pitiful complaints’, and warned that ‘we that have given laws to others are now kept in by two paltry towns [Dunkirk and Ostend]; merchants dare not set forth. We must never hope to be a brave nation again without speedy reformation’.
Much of Lister’s recorded activity during the session concerned the grievances of the Hull whalers. The agreement which he had helped to arrange with the Greenland Company in 1623 had quickly broken down, and there were accusations of sabotage which led to armed clashes between the rival interests in 1626.
Lister was involved in a number of other minor trade issues during the session. He supported the bill for regulating the clerk of the market’s supervision of weights and measures, but may have been drawing attention to regional variations in coal and lead measures on 18 Apr., when he warned that ‘the scope of the bill was to regulate, not to confound weights and measures’; he was named to the committee.
Although the Hull corporation sent its Members to London with a lengthy list of suits, which included the renewal of the town’s charter, they accomplished little outside the House in 1628: Archbishop Abbot, disgraced at Court for his stance over the Forced Loan, even declined his fee as high steward, claiming that ‘he could do the town no pleasure’.
Lister returned to Westminster in January 1629 with a list of instructions which the town had augmented since the previous year, but which met with an equal lack of success.
England’s war effort largely ceased with the fall of La Rochelle in the autumn of 1628, but enemy privateers remained a problem during Lister’s second mayoralty in 1629-30. Thus in March 1630 burgesses were permitted to buy alehouse licences because of ‘the interruption of the trade at sea by the Dunkirkers and otherwise’.
Lister continued as a lobbyist after the end of his mayoralty. In 1635 he was delegated to avert the threat of a law suit by the London lead merchants over dues at the Hull Woolhouse.
Lister was returned to both the Short and Long Parliaments, but left no trace on the records of either. He drew up his will in London on 4 Dec. 1640, settling landed estates on his two eldest sons. A third received his interest in a chamber at the Middle Temple, the fourth and fifth took over the businesses at Hull and Bawtry, and provision was made for the education of his three youngest sons. He provided £200 to build an almshouse in Holy Trinity churchyard, and generous endowments for its maintenance. He died on 23 Dec., and, in accordance with his wishes, his body was buried in Holy Trinity church on 19 Jan. 1641.