Henry IV (1367-1413), King of England from 1399 to 1413, and the king from whom the Stanley lordship of Mann descends. The Island came to him by forfeiture. William, Earl of Salisbury, had enjoyed it for seven years, and after his death it was sold in Richard II's time to Lord Scrope, who forfeited it to Henry IV by attainder. The King granted it on the nineteenth day of October in the first year of his reign to Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, for the term of his life. The Manx chronicle says that Percy was afterwards slain at the battle of Shrewsbury and that the King then gave the Isle of Man to Sir John Stanley, knight, Lieutenant of Ireland. The Stanley grant is the one that lasted. The charter of 1406 recites the earlier gift to Percy and settles the Island on Sir John Stanley and his heirs, with the patronage of the bishopric, and it stayed in that family for two and a half centuries. The Manx antiquaries mark a change of style within it: Stanley and his heirs were called Kings of Mann until the second Earl Thomas, and Lords only after that. The grant is the hinge of the Island's constitutional argument. It is the point at which the Island passed under an English title, and modern constitutional writing has used the same grant to argue that the Crown holds Mann as heir of Henry IV rather than by any descent from the Norse kings, with the later lordships of the Percys, the Stanleys and the Murrays subordinate to it.

Henry Nowell, Deputy-Governor and afterwards Governor of the Isle of Man, who ordered the sentence on Illiam Dhone. He was a younger son of Roger Nowell of Read, by his second wife Catherine Hyde of Hyde and Norbury, and he came in with the Derby interest at the Restoration. The lists of governors show the family holding the Island between them. In 1660 Roger Nowell was Governor with Richard Stephenson as his deputy. In 1663 the deputyship was held by Henry Nowell for one part of the year and Thomas Stanley for the other. From 1664 he was deputy again under Bishop Barrow, and from 1669 he held the government himself until Henry Stanley succeeded him in 1677. The trial of December 1662 ran through his hands. He was Captain of Castle Rushen and had William Christian in his custody and charge, and it was he, with Hugh Cannell the Lord's Attorney, whom the court sent with a guard of soldiers to require the prisoner to come to the bar and take his trial. When Christian refused, the order that followed bore Nowell's own signature: the court was required and ordered to pronounce sentence in the accustomed form, that he be brought to the place of execution called Hango Hill and there shot to death, that thereupon his life might depart from his body. London did not let it pass. A warrant to apprehend Henry Nowell, Governor, and others was issued at Whitehall on 18 May 1663, and the Earl of Derby was writing to Secretary Bennet about the business through that May and June. He was as hard on the Quakers as Chaloner had been. On 15 April 1665 he came to the Castle and read the prisoners an order from the Earl of Derby that they must forthwith be transported into some other land, and a fortnight later two men came by the Deputy-Governor's order to carry it out. Hango Hill came back into his hands in a better cause. He is one of the attesting witnesses, as Governor, to the grant of the estates of Ballagilley and Hango Hill in Malew parish to trustees for an Academic Students' Fund, out of which King William's College at Castletown afterwards grew. The other witnesses were the Deemsters Richard Stephenson and Thomas Norris.

Henry Pelham (c. 1694-1754) served as Prime Minister from 1743 to 1754. His government considered measures to address the smuggling trade centred on the Isle of Man, laying the groundwork for the Revestment that would follow under his successors.

Henry VII (1457-1509), first of the Tudor kings, whose accession settled the Stanleys in the lordship of Mann. The Manx account of it is brief and pointed: it was for Richard III's attempts on Thomas, Earl of Derby, and on his son the Lord Strange that Henry VII, whose mother Thomas had married, got his crown so early. The family's affairs in the Island are dated by his regnal years thereafter. George, third son of Thomas, Earl of Derby, died in the thirteenth year of Henry VII at Derby House on St Bernard's Hill in London, the building that afterwards became the College of Arms. The terms on which the Island had earlier been granted to Scrope, and the limits set on his heirs, were still being recited in the Manx records of the reign.

Henry VIII (1491-1547), King of England, who took the lands of Rushen Abbey. The Manx antiquaries make a point of what the English Crown had and had not been granted. When the Island passed to the kings of England no rights of Holy Mother Church were made over with it, and yet, as one editor observes, they afterwards presumed to give or to sell the patronage of the bishopric, and Henry VIII and Elizabeth seized on the lands and revenues of Rushen Abbey. The lordship itself stayed with the Stanleys through his reign, and the Island felt the Reformation as the dissolution of its abbey rather than as a change of lord.

Hugh Bainbridge was a Manx sailor who served at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. He was twenty-four years old and lost his right arm in the battle.

Member of the House of Keys, and one of the two commissioners the Keys sent to Britain over the sale of the Island. In March 1765 the Keys resolved that Thomas Moore and Hugh Cosnahan, gentlemen and members of their House, should be their commissioners in the name and on behalf of the people of the Isle, to take such steps as they were advised to support and maintain the constitution, rights and privileges of the Island by application to the ministry or parliament of Great Britain, and to obtain such terms as were consistent with the welfare of the Isle. The two of them presented a petition to the House of Commons on behalf of themselves and the rest of the Keys as representatives of the people. His evidence to the 1792 inquiry is the reason the delegation matters to the record. Examined at Douglas on 27 September 1791, and cross-examined by the Duke of Atholl, he said that January 1765 was the first time any rumour of the treaty for the sale reached the Island. The commissioners used the Keys' petition to prove two things: the delegation itself, and that no meeting of the Keys was called by the Governor until 19 March, nearly a month after the transaction of the sale was closed. In another examination the moment is dated more precisely still, when Hammersley asked Quayle whether he had let the inhabitants know of the treaty and Quayle said that he had, at which Cosnahan and others present declared that they had received no notice of it and must have heard had any been given. He was still writing on Island business two decades later, in letters to George Farquhar from Douglas in May 1789 and April 1790.

Hugh Stowell (3 December 1799 - 8 October 1865) was a Church of England clergyman born in Douglas, the son of the rector of Ballaugh, who was educated at St Edmund Hall, Oxford before becoming a prominent evangelical preacher in England, ultimately serving as rector of Christ Church, Salford, from 1831. He was a prolific hymn writer, best remembered for 'From Every Stormy Wind That Blows' (1828), and was appointed an Honorary Canon of Chester Cathedral in 1845.

William Christian of Ronaldsway, Receiver-General of the Isle of Man, shot for treason at Hango Hill on 2 January 1662-3. He was the son of Ewan Christian, Deemster, of Ronaldsway near Castletown, and first appears in the record in 1643, in a petition to James, seventh Earl of Derby, brought against his father. He had held the office of Receiver-General since 1648, a position of trust through which large sums passed. When the Earl left the Island for the last time to join Charles II, he placed the insular infantry under Christian's command and left his Countess and children in his care. Sir Philip Musgrave was left as governor, with Sir Thomas Armstrong at Rushen Castle and Armstrong's brother at Peel. The commission from the Earl to his Countess to act for him in every respect during his absence is dated 6 August 1651. What Christian then did is the disputed centre of the case. The charge against him was that he had headed an insurrection against the Countess in 1651, assuming the power to himself and depriving her, the Earl and their heirs of it. His own dying speech says instead that he carried the petition to the Countess, that she accepted it, and that she came to terms with the petitioners. Shortly afterwards, with Colonel Duckenfield's army lying off Ramsey, Musgrave marched against him at the head of the Manx troops. He petitioned Charles II in 1660 and believed himself covered by the act of amnesty and indemnity. A mandate of Charles, eighth Earl of Derby, dated at Lathom in September 1662, had him proceeded against for all his illegal acts at, before or after 1651. The court overruled the plea of general amnesty on the ground that it did not avail in the Isle of Man in a case of treason against the Lord. The Manx Society editor who printed the records regarded that court as a packed jury and said so. Christian was buried in the chancel of Kirk Malew. Even his name is disputed in the sources. One Manx Society editor glosses Illiam Dhone as William the brown haired, another as fair-haired William, and a Manx grammar of the same series as swarthy William. The memory was kept by the ballad Baase Illiam Dhone, which one editor thought had done more than anything else to preserve him among Manx country people. It was translated by George Borrow as Brown William and by the Rev. John Crellin, and its refrain returns each stanza to the death that broke their hearts. A Manx distich remembers William M'Cowle, said to have been rewarded with land in the north of the Island for doing his duty, and wishes him no good of it. Sir Walter Scott drew on the case in Peveril of the Peak. Some have doubted whether the dying speech is Christian's at all, or the later composition of a friend.

Member of Parliament and member of the House of Keys, and the Duke of Atholl's most effective opponent in the Commons. He came of the Milntown Christian family, and one Manx commentator records him as the only person ever to have sat at the same time in the British Parliament and in the House of Keys. He was no friend of the Duke, and he was a considerable mover in the improvement of Manx agriculture. David Robertson dedicated his Tour through the Isle of Man of 1794 to him. His set-piece was the debate of 7 June 1805. The Duke of Atholl had petitioned for further compensation for the rights sold in 1765, and a committee of the House of Commons reported that he had fully established his allegations and that compensation should be granted, charged on the revenue of the Island. When that report came before the House, Curwen spoke against it, and the House of Keys afterwards voted him their thanks. The opposition carried its real point. The Duke did obtain an additional revenue, but it was made a charge on the Consolidated Fund and not on the Manx revenue. His speech was printed the same year. He spoke to the state of the Island as well as its politics. In 1805 he put the productive acreage at a hundred and sixty thousand, at an average rental of ten shillings, and told the Commons that no inconsiderable proportion of the duties arising in the Isle of Man were on goods paying low duties which were afterwards clandestinely re-shipped and smuggled back into England.

John Joseph Kneen (12 September 1873 - 21 November 1938) was a Manx linguist and scholar born in Douglas, renowned for his authoritative works on Manx grammar and on the island's place names and personal names, published in the 1920s with Tynwald funding. He helped form the Manx Language Society in 1899 and produced an improved edition of Cregeen's 1838 Manx dictionary, as well as translating the Manx national anthem into Manx. In recognition of his scholarship he received an honorary Liverpool University MA in 1929 and was knighted into Norway's Order of St Olav in 1934 for his work on Manx Celtic-Norse history.

Jacob Osorio Davids was a member of the small Jewish trading community that operated on the Isle of Man during the eighteenth century, connected to the Island's commercial and smuggling networks.

Douglas printer and publisher associated with the Isle of Man Times and with nineteenth-century Manx public and legal life. Brown was operating as a printer in King Street by 1850, when a Manks Historical and Geographical Dictionary of the places mentioned in the Bible was printed and published by him. By the mid-1860s his name appears repeatedly on official and public printing from the Times Office. In 1865 Brown printed the orders, bye-laws, rules and regulations of the Douglas Town Commissioners after their confirmation by Tynwald. In 1866 James Brown and Son printed the official correspondence concerning the fiscal changes of that year from the Times Office. Brown also became involved in litigation which reached the English courts. A later Manx constitutional note records a case involving James Brown in 1864 in which a writ was issued from the Queen’s Bench to the Isle of Man. The court held that legislation restricting such writs from being sent to a “colony or foreign dominion of the Crown” did not prevent issue to Mann: the Island was a dominion of the Crown, but not a foreign one. A later biography of Richard Sherwood also identifies the important case of James Brown versus the House of Keys, in which Sherwood acted after returning to Mann from Queensland.

James Chaloner (d. 1660), Governor of the Isle of Man under the Commonwealth and the first writer to give a usable account of the Island. He came to Manx business as an administrator. When the conquest of the Island was complete, Thomas Lord Fairfax asserted his right under the Act of Parliament and appointed Chaloner, William Steane and John Rushworth commissioners to enquire into his estate in the Island and its yearly value. On 4 December 1651 the three of them deputed Captains Eaton and Beale to make the enquiries and to give the tenants notice of Lord Fairfax's right. On 17 August 1652 Fairfax named a fresh commission for governing the Isle: Chaloner, Robert Dynely, and Joshua Witton, minister of the gospel. The Council of State in London dealt with him directly, conferring with him on the condition of the Island as to its civil government and its security against an enemy. He was Governor from 1658 to 1660. The Commonwealth changed less than might be supposed. Parliament kept a military force on the Island and made the Governor an allowance as its commander, besides the pay of a captain, and the monarchical form of government was continued. His book came out of the commission. A Short Treatise of the Isle of Man, digested into six chapters, was dedicated to Fairfax as Lord of Man and of the Isles and dated from Middle Park on 1 December 1653. It treats the Island itself, the inhabitants, the state ecclesiastical, the civil government, the trade, and the strength of the Island, and was printed in London in 1656 by John Streater as an appendix to King's Vale Royal of England, with a map, eight small views and the arms of the Island and of Lord Fairfax. The edition of Seacome printed at Preston in 1793 says plainly that nobody had given any tolerable account of the Isle of Man before Chaloner and William Blundell of Crosby. The Manx Society reprinted the treatise as its tenth volume. He was hard on the Quakers. In 1656 William Callow and Evan Christian were severely imprisoned in Peel Castle, the one for refusing to pay sixteen pence and the other twopence demanded by a priest for the bread and wine of the sacrament, and similar cases are recorded down to 1659. Chaloner as Governor was heard to say that he would quickly rid the Island of Quakers.

James Christian, one of the five founders of the Manx Society at Cleveland. The society was formed in 1851 by five men with characteristically Manx names, Christian among them with John Corlett, William K. Corlett, William Cubbon and William Brew. Its purpose was to assist and take care of the poor immigrant from the Isle of Man who arrived with an empty pocket or in feeble health, and it holds an honoured place among the pioneer bodies of its kind in America. The settlement it served was a generation old by then. The first Manx families reached the Cleveland district in 1826, and about seventy families, some two hundred people, followed into Ohio in 1827. Christian was not among the most characteristic of the Ohio Manx surnames, which ran to Crellin, Shimmin, Kaighin, Cowley, Collister, Gelling, Kermeen, Monier, Mylchreest, Carran, Kewley, Lewin, Bridson, Crow, Killip, Cain, Corkill, Looney, Clucas and Kneen.

James Clarke, Attorney-General of the Isle of Man in the years after Waterloo. He held the office from about 1816, and it is his opinion that later writers cite on a point of Manx usage: that the presiding officer of the House of Keys was properly the Chairman rather than the Speaker. He worked largely by post, and often from the mainland. The Home Office papers have him writing from Liverpool about the behaviour of the water bailiff, from Lancaster about a proposed interview with Lord Sidmouth and his own travel to the Island, and on the rank and precedence of the Attorney-General and the state of the laws. His absences and the difficulty of filling the office in his room are a recurring theme: a warrant was issued for J. C. Gelling to act as Attorney-General and then returned unused, and correspondents were pressing the merits of J. J. Heywood for the place. The Duke of Atholl used him as a legal referee. In January 1823 the Duke put to him a set of questions on the role of the Keys in the Court of General Gaol Delivery, and whether they had a voice in the court giving judgement. Clarke found them difficult to answer and advised that the whole matter be put to the Home Secretary instead. He gave a guarded reply to Thomas Fell's petition and complaint against Deemster Gawne, and in March 1823 he was arguing that an English barrister was needed to fill the office of First Deemster.

James Drinkwater was a Manxman who became mayor of Liverpool. In 1811, he wrote to the Lords of the Admiralty begging for the release of Manx fishermen impressed at Douglas by Lieutenant Hawkes of HMS Maria after Hawkes had promised not to interfere with the fishery.

James McCrone, the Duke of Atholl's chief tithe proctor on the Isle of Man. Emigrants remembered him as a hard and unsympathetic man. Thomas Kelly, writing home from Ohio in 1827 in a letter printed in the Manx Sun the following March, named him among the people the Manx emigrants were glad to have left behind them. He was prosecuted for perjury and acquitted. Robert Cunninghame, Resident Attorney-General of the Isle of Man, preferred an information against him, and the trial came on before the Honourable Thomas Gawne, His Majesty's First Deemster, on Thursday 7 September 1820, continuing by adjournment to the evening of Saturday the 9th. McCrone was honourably acquitted. A full report was printed, taken from the records of the several proceedings and containing the evidence.

Lord of Mann from 1736 until his death in 1764, and the last proprietor before the sale of the Island. He succeeded the tenth Earl of Derby in the Lordship and took possession in 1736. An account of that first visit, printed by the Manx Society more than a century later and not published before, describes his holding a Tynwald Court at St John's on midsummer day. It is the earliest detailed report of the Manx legislature in Tynwald assembled, newspapers being then unpublished on the Island. Bishop Wilson preached before that court. His assent to Manx legislation was given at a distance. The Act of 1738 was confirmed under his hand at Dunkeld on 5 June, signed Atholl and Strange, with an order that it be proclaimed on the Tynwald Hill according to ancient form and custom. Basil Cochrane reported to him as Governor through the later 1750s, and petitions from the Island were addressed to him as Duke of Athole, Baron Strange, Lord of Man and the Isles. He died in 1764. Charlotte, his only surviving child, succeeded on 8 January that year, and her husband and first cousin John Murray became third Duke as nephew and heir male.

Seventh Earl of Derby and Lord of Mann, who governed the Island from the later 1620s until his execution in 1651. He was named in the letters patent of 1610 alongside his parents, William Earl of Derby and Elizabeth his countess, in the grant of the Isle, Castle, Peel and Lordship of Mann with all its islands and lordships. The grant was to be held of the Crown by homage and allegiance and by the service of presenting two falcons, once immediately after homage and thereafter to the King's heirs on the days of their coronation, in lieu of all other services, customs and demands. That settlement, the Insular Entail Act of 1610, fixed the descent of the Lordship in the Stanley line and was still being cited against his successors a century and a half later. He was returned to Parliament for Liverpool in 1625, and was made one of the knights of the Bath the day before the coronation of Charles I. In September 1626 Buckingham informed the attorney-general that the King had granted the lieutenancy of Cheshire and Lancashire to James Lord Strange for life, jointly with his father. He was called to Parliament by writ in his own right in 1627, and from that date until his death the government of the Isle of Man was administered by him. His Manx legislation runs from page 84 to page 113 of Mills' Statute Book, taken from the authorised copies kept in Castle Rushen. Its most considerable moment came on 30 October 1643, when he assembled the Clergy and the twenty-four Keys, with the four men of every parish, at Castle Rushen, to hear the grievances of the Church and Commons laid out in their petitions and to devise remedies which might stand with the maintenance of his own royalties, rights and prerogatives. His handling of the charterlands and of the older tenures was the grave charge later laid against him by nineteenth-century Manx editors, who traced the uncertainty of tenure settled by the Act of Settlement of 1704 back to his dealings. A letter signed Strange from Knowsley in October 1637 shows the same temper in estate business. Tenants who tried to rest on their contracts were to be advised what those contracts were, and if they wronged themselves they would repent. Payment would be expected at the times agreed, according to their bonds, and those who did not pay would be accounted refractory. He left the Island for the last time in 1651 to join Charles II, leaving the insular troops under William Christian and the care of his Countess and children behind him. At his execution a trooper answered his invocation of the King and the laws by calling out that they had no King and would have no Lords. He is called the Martyr Earl throughout Lancashire, and a later Roman Catholic claim that he had converted before his death was rejected by his Chetham Society editor. He left his son a book of advice. Two long letters of instruction from him to his heir Charles, Lord Strange, survive, one of them cast as a series of aphorisms for his observation in life, beginning with the injunction to seek above all things to know the Word of God, and to know that about God there is neither greatness, place, quality, figure nor time, for he is all, through all and about all. In the other he reflects that it was safer by much to take men's lives than their estates, since children will sooner forget the death of a father than the loss of a patrimony, which is a hard remark from a man who lost both. Lord Strange was the courtesy title borne by the eldest sons of the Earls of Derby, and it was as Lord Strange that he governed the Island from 1628 until he came to the earldom in 1642.

Joe Kelly was a Manx emigrant who settled in the Cleveland, Ohio area during the nineteenth century, forming part of the significant Manx community in the American Midwest.

John Cawle was a Manx sailor who served aboard HMS Temeraire at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 and lost his right arm in the engagement. He returned to Kirk Bride, a parish of fewer than 700 souls, and became a schoolteacher.

John Christian, Deemster of the Isle of Man and brother of William Christian, Illiam Dhone. The Journals of the House of Commons call him one of two of the ablest and honestest gentlemen in the island, and he was summoned to London during the Commonwealth to be consulted about the Manx laws and other matters. He was on the bench through his brother's prosecution and he tried to hold it to form. The examinations in the case were taken before him, with Richard Stevenson, Henry Nowell, Thomas Norris, Richard Tyldesley, Hugh Cannell, the Calcotts, the Huddlestons and Robert Quayle. On 13 November 1662, on the advice and assistance given by as many of the twenty-four Keys as were then present, he and Deemster Norris declared that the within-named Mr William Christian was to be tried by the enquest, and both signed the declaration at Castletown. When it came to sentence he was not there. On the day of the Court of General Gaol Delivery he did not appear, and his son Edward, who acted as his assistant, forbore to sit, which left Norris alone on the bench. Father and son had sailed for England to lay the case before the King.

One of the Manx Quakers banished from the Island under the restored Stanley lordship. The persecution began under the Commonwealth and went on after it. In 1656 William Callow and Evan Christian suffered severe imprisonment in Peel Castle, the one for refusing to pay sixteen pence and the other twopence demanded by a priest for the bread and wine of the sacrament, and similar cases are recorded through to 1659. James Chaloner, then Governor, was heard to say that he would quickly rid the Island of Quakers. The end of it was transportation. The prisoners were told that as persons cast out of the Church by excommunication they were delivered over from the power of the Bishop and his law, to be and continue the Earl of Derby's prisoners. On 15 April 1665 Governor Henry Nowell came to the Castle and read them an order from the Earl of Derby that they must forthwith be transported into some other land, and on the 29th two men came by the Deputy-Governor's order to carry it out. Banished Manx Quakers were among the earliest Manx settlers in the American colonies.

John Clucas of Balla-nicholas in Marown, merchant and member of the House of Keys. He was one of seventeen named Manx merchants who signed a petition to the Governor in 1769 setting out the economic devastation the Revestment of 1765 had caused. He was in the House through those years. His name is on the resolution of the Keys at Castletown on 21 March 1765 appointing commissioners to act for the good of the people and inhabitants, and on the letter the House sent to George Moore at Peeltown in the same business. He was still signing Acts promulgated at Tynwald in the 1740s and in the reign after, in company with the Taubmans, the Christians and the Stevensons. Balla-nicholas stayed with the family. Feltham lists Mr John Clucas there among the principal proprietors of Marown, with a Mr Clucas at Corvalla nearby and a T. Clucas, then a minor, at the Garth. The parish church holds a memorial to Henry, son of John Clucas of Balla Nicholas, called a virtuous and notable youth and an academic student, who died on 23 June 1732 aged twenty-three.