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.
John Cockrane was a Manx sailor rated as Boy Third Class who served at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. He was twelve years old and was wounded during the engagement.
John Corlett, one of the five founders of the Manx Society at Cleveland.
He was one of the five men, all bearing Manx names, who set the society up in 1851: James Christian, John Corlett, William K. Corlett, William Cubbon and William Brew. It existed to help the immigrant from the Isle of Man who reached Cleveland with an empty pocket or in poor health, and it is counted among the earliest bodies of its kind in America.
Corlett was one of the Manx names that took firmest root in northern Ohio, and the family produced both the fullest surviving set of emigrant letters and, two generations on, a physician of international standing.
Merged. This man was one of the six jurors who found William Christian, Illiam Dhône, a traitor in 1662. The whole of the record concerning him is the single line of the verdict naming that jury, so the account is now held under one item, The Jury that Convicted Illiam Dhône (1662), rather than divided among six near-empty records. See that item.
A confirmation charter issued by John de Stanley, lord of Mann and the Isles, reaffirming and extending the ecclesiastical privileges and territorial grants originally made by King Magnus to the bishops of Mann and Sodor. The document traces a chain of authority from Magnus through Thomas Randulph (Earl of Moravia) to Stanley, confirming liberties, judicial powers, fisheries, mines, and revenue rights granted to the Church. Relevant to understanding pre-Revestment Manx governance, feudal tenure, and ecclesiastical authority structures.
A nested charter document in which John de Stanley (Lord of Mann and the Isles, 1423) confirms a charter granted by Thomas Randulph (Earl of Moravia, Lord of Mann), who in turn had confirmed an earlier charter of King Magnus of Mann and the Isles to the Bishop of Mann and Sodor. The charter grants ecclesiastical liberties, lands (including the Island of St. Patrick), fisheries, customs rights, mining rights, and exemptions from secular service and exaction. This document provides evidence of medieval constitutional arrangements on the Isle of Man and the powers and property of the Church prior to the Revestment period.
John E. Christian was a member of the Christian family of Manx origin who settled in America. He forms part of the wider pattern of Manx emigration to the United States.
John Frissell, High Bailiff, member of the House of Keys and one-time Attorney-General of the Isle of Man.
He had held the Attorney-Generalship under the Duke of Atholl and resigned it with a view of going into the army. In May 1774 he memorialised for the appointment again, this time from the Crown, the office being the one commonly called Attorney-General but formally that of solicitor for the Crown in the Isle of Man.
He sat in the Keys through the Revestment and after it. His name is on the resolution of the House at Castletown on 21 March 1765 appointing commissioners to act for the good of the people and inhabitants so far as was consistent with the welfare and prosperity of the community, and he signed the Acts promulgated at Tynwald from the 1740s onward.
As High Bailiff he put his name first to a petition to the public of the Isle, praying aid and assistance for the erection of a bridge over the river of Ballure at the highway, which would conduce to the safety of all who might have occasion to travel that way. Twenty other subscribers followed him.
He was a captain in the Island's own forces, in the first battalion of the Manx Volunteers before 1802, under Lieutenant-Governor Alexander Shaw as Major Commandant.
The family went into the navy. His son John, by Elizabeth daughter of Captain John Llewellyn, was a lieutenant wounded in the battle of the first of June 1794, and afterwards married a French marchioness and settled in France. Two more sons, Charles and William, were also in the navy.
John Howard, fifteenth Earl of Suffolk (1739-1820), a speaker on the Duke of Atholl's claim.
He is listed among those who spoke when the claim came before the House of Lords on 5 July 1805, with the Lord Chancellor, the Duke of Norfolk, the Duke of Montrose, Lord Holland, Lord Hawkesbury and the Marquis of Buckingham. He had spoken earlier the same day on the case of Colonel Cochrane Johnstone.
John Kneene was a Ramsey fisherman whose boat was illegally seized in Ramsey Bay in November 1765, just six months after the Revestment. He petitioned against the seizure alongside fellow fishermen John Sayle and John Wattleworth.
John Miller Nicholson (29 January 1840 - 1913) was a Douglas-born painter, apprenticed as a house-painter and decorator in his father's business, who became regarded as the Isle of Man's leading Victorian artist. His meticulous pencil sketches of Douglas shore at sunrise, annotated with time, date and weather notes, drew the admiration of critic John Ruskin, who purchased several and compared his talent to Turner's. He continued in the family decorating trade throughout his life while amassing a substantial body of work now held largely by the Manx Museum.
John Moore of "The Hills," Douglas, served as Speaker of the House of Keys on the Isle of Man and was the uncle of Edward Moore Gawne, who succeeded him in that role. He was a member of a prominent Manx family with deep roots in the Island's political life.
John Murray, one of the three trustees of the Atholl settlement of the Isle of Man.
The indenture of enfeoffment conveyed the island, castle, pele and lordship of Man, with the other premises described in it, to John Earl of Dunmore, William then Lord Mansfield, and John Murray, and to their heirs and assigns for ever, upon the trusts and for the intents and purposes declared in it. A power was reserved to the Duke.
The trust was the machinery by which the sale to the Crown became possible. Its terms provided for the trustees, or whoever was then in actual receipt of the rents, revenues and profits of the Isle, being of the age of twenty-one years, to sell and convey, or release and surrender, the Isle, castle, pele, lordship and territories of Man, and the other trusted premises over which the Duke had made no appointment in his lifetime under the power reserved to him, to the King's Majesty, his heirs or successors, for such price as was named.
John Murray, third Duke of Atholl (1729-1774), the Lord of Mann who sold the Island to the Crown.
He held it in right of his wife. Charlotte, daughter of the second Duke and Baroness Strange in her own right, was the heir to the lordship, and the deeds of the transaction name the two of them together as the Duke and Duchess of Atholl.
The sale was carried through by trustees and in stages. The Island was conveyed to John Wood, the Governor, to be re-enfeoffed to Viscount Stormont, Sir Charles Frederick and Edmund Hoskins, and the Duke's own power of appointment over the trust property was reserved to him for his life. The contract with the Commissioners of His Majesty's Treasury of 7 March 1765 was made between four of the Commissioners on one part and the Duke and Duchess with Frederick and Hoskins their trustees on the other, for the absolute purchase of the Isle with its dependencies, and provided that on payment of seventy thousand pounds into the Bank of England in the four names the Island should vest unalienably in the Crown.
His friends thought he had done well out of a bad business. Lord Kinnoull wrote to him from Dupplin on 9 March 1765, having heard of what he called the happy conclusion of the Duke's troublesome and interesting business, saying that he could not judge whether the compensation matched the loss of income but that all circumstances considered the agreement was proper, wise and prudent to accede to, and putting the success down to the Duke's own firmness, moderation and spirit.
Fourth Duke of Atholl and the last member of the family to retain substantial proprietary rights in the Isle of Man.
By the early nineteenth century the sovereign rights formerly held by the Atholls had already passed to the Crown under the 1765 Revestment. The family nevertheless retained property, patronage and other rights which had not formed part of that original purchase.
The fourth Duke pressed further claims for compensation. Parliamentary proceedings in 1805 repeatedly considered “the Duke of Atholl’s Claim”, leading to the settlement of an annuity calculated by reference to Manx customs revenue but charged on the Consolidated Fund.
He later also held the office of Governor-in-Chief of the Isle of Man. Home Office indexes preserve warrants and instructions concerning his appointment, together with correspondence over Manx judicial and constitutional questions.
His role brought him into disputes and petitions involving the courts, the Keys and local administration. Surviving Home Office entries include questions put by Atholl concerning the role of the Keys in the Court of Gaol Delivery and petitions transmitted to him during the 1820s.
Parliament authorised the Treasury in 1825 to purchase the remaining Atholl rights in Mann. Later Manx accounts identify the final surrender as taking place in 1828.
Clerk of the Rolls of the Isle of Man in the decades after Revestment, and steward of the Atholl manorial interests.
His patent for the office came from George III, reciting the King's confidence in the fidelity and prudent circumspection of his trusty and well-beloved John Quayle, and appointing him to hold the Clerkship of the Rolls during pleasure with all its rights, fees, profits and privileges.
The office made him the custodian of the Island's memory. When the Commissioners of Inquiry sat in 1791 and 1792 and wanted the record, it was Quayle who produced and certified it. Extracts from the Liber Scaccarii of 1641, 1690, 1707, 1719 and 1770, printed in the Commissioners' appendices, each close with his examination of the copy as Clerk of the Rolls. He was himself examined repeatedly at Douglas and Castletown through late September and October 1791, on the herring custom, on wrecks and flotsam, and on the constitution.
He also put his own view on paper. Writing from the Rolls Office at Castle Rushen on 17 October 1791, he told the Commissioners that he had carefully perused and considered Sir Wadsworth Busk's sketch of the history of the constitution and government of the Isle, that he believed it a just representation of facts, and that he concurred entirely with the Attorney-General in the principles and reasoning it advanced.
Alongside the public office he acted for the Atholl family. He and William Callow were appointed stewards of the manorial interests by the third Duke and continued under the fourth, remitting rents in bills through Drummonds and handling the mines, the impropriate tithes of Malew and the drafting of a proposed Act of Parliament on the ducal revenues. It fell to Quayle to report the death of Governor John Wood in a letter of 1 May 1777, noting that the Governor had been appointed by the Duke's grandfather and had remained a steady friend to the family.
Letter from John Quayle to Harrison (25 Sept 1761) reporting on the new Governor's arrival and planned circuit of Sheading Courts, discussing financial remittances, constitutional inquiry regarding coronation ceremony, and disputes over mill licensing — specifically Captain Moore's paper mill scheme and its impact on Lords' mill rents. Reflects governance and revenue issues on the Isle of Man in the years preceding the 1765 Revestment.
Letter from John Quayle (Manx revenue officer) to Mr Harrison regarding financial accounts with the Duke of Atholl, collection of customs revenue, and serious incidents of cruiser harassment and robbery in Manx ports. Documents tensions between revenue enforcement and smuggling trade, with specific incidents at Douglas and Ramsey involving seizures of brandy, tea, and correspondence.
Letter from John Quayle to Harrison (25 September 1761) discussing the arrival of the new Governor, financial remittances, constitutional matters relating to the Duke of Atholl's prerogatives, and concerns about Captain Moore's proposed paper mill and its impact on the Lords' mill rents. The letter reveals administrative and economic tensions on the Isle of Man in the pre-Revestment period.
John Sayle, Wesleyan local preacher, one of the Manx emigrants who settled in Ohio.
He sailed in 1827 in the ship Ocean, which carried something like a hundred and twenty-nine Manx people, and he went out with Patrick Cannell, another local preacher.
They were part of the first real movement. Manx people had been going to America since the seventeenth century, but the Cleveland district was opened only in 1826, when three families arrived: William and Eleanor Kelly, Patrick and Ann Tear, and William and Mary Kneen, with seven children between them. The next year something like seventy families, about two hundred people in all, followed them into Ohio. The names that took root there are a roll of the Island: Crellin, Shimmin, Kaighin, Cowley, Collister, Gelling, Kermeen, Monier, Mylchreest, Carran, Kewley, Lewin, Bridson, Crow, Killip, Cain, Corkill, Looney, Clucas and Kneen.
The settlers organised early. A Manx Society was founded at Cleveland in 1851 by James Christian, John Corlett, William K. Corlett, William Cubbon and William Brew, to assist and take care of the poor immigrant from the Isle of Man who came with an empty pocket or in feeble health, and it holds an honoured place among the pioneer bodies of its kind.
John Sayle was a fisherman from Ramsey on the Isle of Man whose boat was illegally seized in Ramsey Bay in November 1765, six months after the Revestment. He petitioned for its return alongside John Kneene and John Wattleworth.
John Scott, first Earl of Eldon (1751-1838), Lord Chancellor, who spoke on the Duke of Atholl's claim.
The claim came before the House of Lords on 5 July 1805, and the report of the debate lists the Lord Chancellor as a speaker twice in it, with the Duke of Norfolk, the Duke of Montrose, Lord Holland, Lord Hawkesbury and the Marquis of Buckingham. Eldon held the Great Seal from 1801 to 1806, so the office was his at that date.
The claim itself was the Duke's petition for further compensation for the rights sold in 1765. A committee of the Commons had reported that he had fully established his allegations and that compensation should be granted, charged on the revenue of the Island, and the argument in both Houses that summer was over whether the Manx revenue or the Consolidated Fund should bear it. The Consolidated Fund did.
John Stevenson of Balladoole (c. 1655-1737), Speaker of the House of Keys and one of the commissioners who negotiated the Act of Settlement of 1704 with the Earl of Derby. The Act is sometimes called the Manx Magna Carta, and Bishop Wilson styled him the Father of his Country.
What the Act did is put plainly in the Manx sources: it did away with the proceedings that had gone before and restored the violated tenures. That is the whole of his public reputation in this corpus, and later writers reach for the Act rather than for the man.
Balladoole itself kept the papers. The account of James, Duke of Atholl, first taking possession of his kingdom of Man in 1736 comes from an old manuscript formerly in the possession of Stevenson of Balladoole, and was probably written by one of that family. It gives a detailed narrative of the Duke and his suite embarking at Liverpool on board the ship Prince William, and of the proceedings at the Tynwald at St John's on 24 June 1736. Stevenson was alive that summer and died the following year.
