Duncan Campbell (1726-1803), London shipowner in the West India trade, and the man who gave William Bligh his employment between the wars. The Manx connection is by marriage. Mary, wife of Richard Betham, Collector of Customs at Douglas, was Campbell's sister, so when Bligh married Betham's daughter Elizabeth at Kirk Onchan in 1781 he married into Campbell's family. After the American war many ships were laid off and naval promotion dried up. Bligh, on half pay, commanded ships for Campbell, who already employed two sons of his eldest sister Ann Somerville as captains, and it was that West India experience which made him an obvious choice when the breadfruit expedition was planned. His other business was convicts. He and his brother Neil had charge of the prison hulks, and he had contracted to carry two hundred and sixty felons to America. American independence ended that trade, and the consequences were laid before the Commons: judges were leaving the gaols as full as they found them, and two hundred persons under sentence of transportation were lying in Newgate alone. The scale of the business survived the loss of the American market. The government's annual budget reported in June 1789 recorded £48,417 paid to Duncan Campbell for convicts. He came late to planting. He became a Jamaican plantation owner only in 1787, on the estate of his late brother-in-law John Campbell, who died in 1782 and had owned Salt Spring in the parish of Hanover. His ships are reported, on research in the Public Record Office, not to have been in the slave trade, though he was not in favour of the protests against it.

Eamon de Valera (1882-1975) was an Irish revolutionary leader who later served as Taoiseach and President of Ireland. Following the Easter Rising of 1916, he was among the Irish prisoners interned at Knockaloe internment camp on the Isle of Man, before being transferred to other facilities. His internment on the Island forms part of the wider history of wartime internment on Mann.

George Montagu-Dunk, 2nd Earl of Halifax (1716-1771), served as President of the Board of Trade and was involved in colonial and insular governance during the mid-eighteenth century. His connection to the Isle of Man relates to the political discussions surrounding the Island's trade and customs arrangements in the period leading to the Revestment.

Edmund Hoskins of Lincoln's Inn, one of the two trustees in whose names the Isle of Man was bought for the Crown. He came into the business as a replacement. Archibald, Duke of Argyll, and John Sharpe had both been trustees of the Atholl settlement and both had died, and Viscount Stormont, with the privity and approbation of James, Duke of Atholl, nominated Sir Charles Frederick and Hoskins to supply their places in the execution of the trusts. The deeds name him as Edmund Hoskins of Lincoln's Inn in the county of Middlesex, Esquire, party of the fifth part with Frederick, in an instrument to which Duke James, Viscount Stormont, the new Duke John, John Wood as Governor and Commander in Chief of the Isle, and George, Earl of Aberdeen, were the other parties. The mechanics of the transfer ran through his name. Duke James and Viscount Stormont granted the territory of Man to John Wood, the Governor, his heirs and assigns, to the intent that he should re-enfeoff it to Stormont, Frederick and Hoskins as the new trustees, and by a deed poll of 8 July 1762 Wood did so. Duke James reserved a power of revocation. Then came the sale. The contract of 7 March 1765 was made between four of the Commissioners of His Majesty's Treasury on the one part and the Duke and Duchess of Atholl with Sir Charles Frederick and Edmund Hoskins, their trustees, on the other, for the absolute purchase of the Island with its dependencies. It provided that upon payment by the King into the Bank of England of seventy thousand pounds, in the names of the Duke and Duchess, Frederick and Hoskins, or the survivors or survivor of them, free and clear of all taxes, impositions, fees and other deductions, on or before 1 June 1765, the Isle of Man should vest unalienably in the Crown, and that the cashier's receipt should be a sufficient discharge to His Majesty.

Edward Callister, known as Edward Callister of Kenaa, was a Manx person identified by their connection to the farm or locality of Kenaa on the Isle of Man. No further sourced biographical detail could be verified for this specific individual; records found for other people named Edward Callister on the Isle of Man (including a member of the Legislative Council who died in 1931, and an Edward Callister associated with the Cleveland Medal in 1922) could not be confirmed as the same person without a documented connection to Kenaa, so are not included here to avoid misattribution.

Manx soldier and officer of the Stanleys in the second quarter of the seventeenth century. James, Lord Strange, first visited the Island in 1628 and took the direction of affairs into his own hands, and in that year appointed Edward Christian his lieutenant and captain. Writing afterwards to his son, he explained how the appointment came about. He had become acquainted with one Captain Christian, whom he observed had abilities to serve him, a Manxman born who had made himself a good fortune. The same letter gives a character sketch: excellent good company, as rude as a sea captain should be, but refined as one who had civilised himself half a year at Court, where he had served the Duke of Buckingham. For some few years, the Earl wrote, he pleased me very well, having the quality of the best servant, that what he was directed to do, if it succeeded ill he would take upon himself, and what happened well he would give his master the glory of. Chaloner places him earlier and higher, describing Captain Edward Christian of Maughold as appointed governor in August 1627 and serving for nearly seven years. Chaloner also records him experimenting with the ore of lead at the sea crag called Mine-hough, or Bradda Head in Rushen, which was reputed to hold much silver. He did not keep the Earl's favour. A modern Manx historian describes the able but restless Edward Christian of Maughold as having been relieved of the deputyship not long before the trial at which Ewan Christian, Deemster since 1605, was sitting as Deputy in his place.

Edward Christian of Bemahague, of the Conchan branch of the Christians. Bemahague is an estate on the rising ground above Douglas in the parish of Conchan, in the treen of Tremsare, where Edmund McGawne was the tenant in 1511. It is now Government House. A guidebook of the early nineteenth century called it a very delightful summer residence with a commanding view of land and sea, and allowed that the building had no architectural beauties, having been reared without a plan and enlarged at different times to gratify a whim or to suit convenience. The Conchan burial registers place an Edward Christian of Bemaughag there in the eighteenth century. He died on 1 March 1790, aged fifty-six. The same list records others of the connection: an Edward Christian, husband of Margaret Christian alias Gell, who died on 6 January 1778 aged sixty-seven, and a Matthias Christian who died on 1 January 1772 aged forty. The house did not stay with the family. By the early nineteenth century Bemahague belonged to the Heywoods, and John Joseph Heywood, born in 1789 and died in 1855, was its proprietor and one of Her Majesty's Deemsters. Joseph Jefferson of Bemahague was treasurer of the Manx Society in the 1860s. Bemahague keeps a place in Manx folklore as well. The tale of the Mooayer ny Booiagh, the begrudged consent, is told of a servant girl there who was sent to Glen Crutchery Well for a can of water before daylight, and met the old man of Glen Crutchery on the way.

Edward Crow was a Manx sailor who served at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 and lost his right leg during the engagement.

Edward Forbes (12 February 1815 - 18 November 1854) was a naturalist born in Douglas, the son of a banker, who became one of the leading marine biologists and paleontologists of his generation. His 1838 Malacologia Monensis catalogued Manx molluscs, and he went on to become curator at the Geological Society of London, professor of botany at King's College London, and finally Professor of Natural History at Edinburgh University shortly before his early death. His 1846 theory on the ice-age redistribution of montane species anticipated ideas later credited to Charles Darwin, who acknowledged Forbes's priority.

Edward I (1239-1307), King of England, in whose reign the English claim to the Isle of Man was pressed and the Scottish possession of it contested. The claim of the heirs of the Manx kings came before him and got nowhere. Mary, of the line that married into the Waldeboef family, had sought the Island and been told that she must lay her claim before the King of Scots, who then had possession of it. Her grandson John Waldebeof prosecuted his grandmother's claim in the parliament of the thirty-third year of Edward I, urging it before the King of England as lord paramount over the King of Scotland. The record gives him no more than leave to try elsewhere: that he might prosecute his title before the justices of the King's Bench, and let it be heard and justice done. He reached into the Island's church as well. Bishop Mauritius was carried off to prison by Edward I, and Allen, or Onanus, was put in his place, to be followed by a succession of Scots in the see. The chronologies of the Island mark his reign as the turn. One nineteenth-century account, explaining why the Isle of Man was included in a survey of Scotland, says that it had formed part of the territories belonging to Scotland in 1266, was taken under the protection of Edward I in 1290, and in 1307 was assumed by him as his own.

Edward III (1312-1377), King of England, who granted the lordship of Mann to William Montacute. The grant is dated in the seventh year of his reign, 1333, and opens in the usual form: the King, to all to whom these presents may come, greeting, know ye that by the consent of the prelates, lords and barons. Manx writers translate it from Cumming's notes to Sacheverell and from Oliver's Monumenta. They also give it a colour beyond the legal one. One account has it that where Edward I had broken King John's papal yoke of tribute from England's neck, it was his grandson Edward III who enabled his friend William Montacute, first Earl of Salisbury, as the heir of Reginald, to set the golden crown of Man upon his own head. The same writer notes that the Montacutes were no friends of Rome and belonged to the party of John of Gaunt, the protector of Wycliffe, so that the change of lordship carried a religious direction as well as a dynastic one. The recovery of the Island was Montacute's own work and the King's approbation followed it. The Wiltshire account is that the earl drove the Scots out, recovered the seigniory and crown from Edward III, and by his approbation was called King of Man.

Edward Moore Gawne (1802-1871) of Kentraugh, Speaker of the House of Keys from 1854 until the dissolution of the non-elected House in 1867. He appears in the record chiefly in that character. When the committee for rebuilding St John's Chapel drew up its memorial and resolutions, it resolved that a copy be presented to the House of Keys through the Speaker, Edward Moore Gawne. When the subscription list for the new chapel was opened he headed the members of the Keys with twenty-five pounds, well ahead of any other member. James Kelly had already dedicated a volume printed at Douglas in 1844 to Edward Moore Gawne, Esquire, of Kentraugh. The Kentraugh seat came into the family in his lifetime. A vacancy in the Keys occurred on the death of Mr Gawne of Kentraugh on 4 October 1837, and among those canvassed to fill it was Edward Gawne of Ballacurry, nephew to the deceased member, of whom a contemporary ballad noted that he was not attached to the Radical party. He was offered a knighthood in recognition of his services and declined it. He was an enthusiastic agriculturist, and did much to improve the breed of livestock on the Island.

Edward VII (1841-1910), King of the United Kingdom from 1901 to 1910 and Lord of Mann. He came to the Island in August 1902, the year of his coronation, and the visit is remembered at Peel. On 25 August he and Queen Alexandra, with Princess Victoria, were shown over Peel Castle by William Cashen, its custodian, whose collection of Manx folklore was published after his death. Cashen described the castle in his own conversational way rather than by any set piece, and the King was much taken with it. The party signed their names on a stone in the castle, and at the end of it the King shook Cashen's hand. Cashen afterwards paid out of his own pocket for a brass plate recording the visit, set into the wall at the entrance, and that plate was the only public memorial in Peel of the occasion. Tynwald marked the coronation in its own way. A joint committee reported on 11 April 1902 on the question of celebrating the coronation of the King and Queen Alexandra, and its report was printed at Douglas.

Edward VIII (1894-1972), King of the United Kingdom and Lord of Mann for less than a year in 1936 before his abdication. He visited the Isle of Man during his brief reign. The abdication gave sudden importance to a piece of constitutional machinery that had been settled five years earlier. The preamble to the Statute of Westminster of 1931 had laid down that any alteration in the law touching the succession to the throne or the royal style and titles required the assent of the parliaments of the Dominions as well as of the United Kingdom, and the events of December 1936 were the first occasion on which those rules had to be worked. The abdication was given effect by the Declaration of Abdication Act.

Edwin of Northumbria (c. 586-633), King of Northumbria, who took the Isle of Man from the Scots. The Manx antiquaries date the conquest to 625 and cite Bede for it. Following up his successes against Cadwallon, King of Gwynedd, Edwin wrested the Island from the Scots, who were then in possession of it. His hold on it did not outlast him. He was killed at the battle of Heathfield in 633, and on his death Cadwallon not only regained his own territories but gained the Isle of Man with them.

Daughter of the first English Collector of Customs in the Isle of Man, and wife of Captain William Bligh. Her father was Richard Betham, LL.D. On the completion of the sale of the Island, the government agreed at the Duke of Atholl's request to retain every officer of his appointment except the Collector of the Customs, and that office was conferred on Betham. He held it until his death in 1789. A contemporary called him a gentleman whose erudition was truly respectable, and to whose politeness and friendship he was highly indebted. Her mother Mary died in 1766, aged forty-two, and is buried at Onchan. Mary's father was Neil Campbell, Principal of Glasgow College from 1728 to 1761, which is how the family came to be connected with the Campbells of the West India trade. A Margaret Betham buried at Onchan in 1783 may have been Richard's sister, come over to keep house for him, since he was left with two young daughters, Elizabeth and Anne. Elizabeth married William Bligh at Kirk Onchan on 4 February 1781. Some accounts of the marriage give her name as Betty. A daughter of the marriage was baptised at Douglas in 1784.

Elizabeth Christian, recorded in Charles City County, Virginia, in 1662, of the Manx Christian connection in the colony. The family had been there since the middle 1650s. In 1655 two brothers, William and Jonathan Christian of Maughold, went out to Virginia, and a family of Cottiers from Lezayre went with them, the two families intermarrying afterwards. The Christians acquired considerable tracts of land in the colony and their descendants came to be possessed of an ample fortune.

Elizabeth Holloway Marston (born Sarah Elizabeth Holloway, 20 February 1893 - 27 March 1993) was born in Sulby, the daughter of an American bank clerk father and English mother, before the family relocated to the United States while she was a small child and she was raised in Boston. A lawyer and psychologist, she is credited as an uncredited co-creator, with her husband William Moulton Marston, of the comic-book character Wonder Woman, and her work on blood-pressure research also contributed to the development of the polygraph lie-detector test.

Elizabeth II (1926-2022), Queen of the United Kingdom and Lord of Mann from 1952 until her death. She visited the Isle of Man on several occasions and took a personal interest in Manx affairs. The title Lord of Mann, and not Lady, was used at her express wish, keeping the historic form. Her title was also the point on which a modern constitutional argument turned. Writing in 2003 on how far Manx emancipation from English tutelage falls short of independence, Augur Pearce set out the case that the Island's claims to constitutional continuity cannot be made out in law. On that reading the Queen held the Island not by any descent from the Norse kings but as heiress of Henry IV of England, whose conquest ended the independence enjoyed under the House of Godred and began the present era of Manx government, and the subordinate lordship of the Percys, the Stanleys and the Murrays is beside the point.

Ewan Callister, assistant to the revenue officer at Douglas before the Revestment. He was paid three pounds Manx a year, the same as Paul Bridson whom he assisted, and more than the assistant at Castletown, who had one pound. The whole of the Duke of Atholl's revenue establishment for the Island cost forty-nine pounds thirteen shillings and fourpence Manx, against collections running at between five and six thousand pounds a year over a ten-year average, and a Receiver General at forty pounds stood outside that figure. Douglas, where Callister served, was the first port of the Island, and the two men there were paid the same. The Duke printed those figures for a reason. He was answering the suggestion that his officers had done well out of the trade, and he set the salaries against the reputation: when he heard of people on such pay as this living splendidly, bringing up numerous families or dying opulent, he left his readers to draw the conclusion.

Member of the House of Keys and one of the three who settled the terms of the Act of Settlement with the tenth Earl of Derby. The Christians of Lewaigue in Maughold descend from Robert, second son of the William Christian who was Deemster alongside his father and succeeded to the Ronaldsway estate in 1535. They are therefore a branch distinct from the Christians of Milntown, and that distinction matters for reading the record, because the two houses used the same forenames. His known part in Manx affairs is the settlement of the tenures. The ninth Earl had tried and failed to come to terms with the tenants over their holdings. Nothing was done until 1704, when a bargain made between James, the tenth Earl, and Bishop Wilson, with three members of the Keys, was agreed to by the Tynwald Court. The three were Ewan Christian of Milntown, Ewan Christian of Lewaigue, and John Stevenson of Balladoole. The Act which confirmed that agreement is the Act of Settlement, and it secured the tenants in their farms in perpetuity on fixed terms. A tradition collected in the twentieth century attaches to the name rather than to a dated event. An extremely violent and obstinate spirit at Dreem-y-Jeeskaig had defeated everyone who tried to lay it, until Ewan Christian, known simply as Christian Lewaigue, was called in. The first time he addressed it, it told him to come again on a certain night, alone. He went the second time as asked, and it was not seen afterwards.

Fingal, King of Mann, who held the Island against Godred Crovan's first two invasions. The Chronicle of Man names him in the succession without ceremony: Godred was succeeded by his son Fingal, of whose reign and death nothing is recorded, and the date given is 1076, the year Godred died. The fuller narratives give him one campaign. Godred Crovan, having judged from an earlier visit that the kingdom was weak or its king unpopular, came back with a force sufficient for his purpose and found his hopes frustrated, because Godred was dead and his son Fingal was seated on the throne and generally beloved. Godred Crovan landed his men all the same, was defeated in a general engagement, and had to retire. He came a second time and failed again. On the third attempt he joined fraud to force, landing three hundred men in the night, and that succeeded.

Master's mate of the Bounty and leader of the mutiny of 1789. The Manx sources claim him as one of the Christians of Milntown. One account traces the descent through the eldest brother of Illiam Dhone, and notes that although the family had been settled in Cumberland for three generations, his father being a lawyer and coroner there, they kept strong Manx links. He was one of three men aboard the Bounty with Manx connections, the others being Bligh himself, who had married into a Manx customs family, and the midshipman Peter Heywood. Bligh had taken to him. On an earlier voyage, during which Bligh learned of his appointment to the Bounty, he took Christian under his wing and gave him lessons in navigation. The break came at the Friendly Islands. Bligh was a great martinet, there was much discontent in the crew, and the feeling culminated in open mutiny, which Christian headed. The mutineers put Bligh and nineteen men who stayed loyal to him into the ship's launch.

Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was an English philosopher, statesman and Lord Chancellor. His connection to the Isle of Man relates to his involvement in early seventeenth-century English governance and legal affairs that touched upon the status of the Island under the Stanley lords.

Sir John Frank Kermode (29 November 1919 - 17 August 2010) was a literary critic born in Douglas, the son of a ferry-company warehouseman, who became one of the most influential English-language critics of the 20th century. He held the King Edward VII Chair of English Literature at Cambridge (1974-1982) and is best known for The Sense of an Ending (1967) and his extensive studies of Shakespeare and modern literature. On his death his ashes were scattered at sea between Liverpool and Douglas.