Greek epsilon, before that Phoenician he.
E
in Phoenician this was a consonant, a breathy [h], drawn as a man with raised arms. Greek already wrote [h] with another borrowed sign, so this one was surplus — and Greek needed vowel letters, which Phoenician did not have at all. The most common letter in English began as a spare consonant.
Allen · Alvarez · Anderson · Andrews · Archer · Bailey · Baker · Bakker · Barker · Barnes · Bauer · Baxter · Becker · Bell
In the modern alphabet this letter is number 5 of 26. Before it comes D, after it F. The order itself is inherited: Latin took it from Greek, Greek from Phoenician, and the sequence has survived largely unchanged for about three thousand years. Every rearrangement since has been an insertion, not a reshuffle.
This is a vowel: the syllable rests on it, and vowels set the rhythm of a name. In a corpus of 315 surnames this letter opens 6 and closes 18. Among the 96 given names in the base it appears in 47. The surname carrying the most of it is Greene, with 3.
James · Robert · Michael · Joseph · Charles · Christopher · Daniel · Matthew · Steven · Andrew · George · Edward
These letters came from the Greek alphabet.