HARRISON, Thomas II (1627-87), of Allerthorpe, Burneston, Yorks.

Harrison’s family derived its fortune from trade in York during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. His great-grandfather, an innholder, rose to become one of the city’s aldermen and served as mayor in 1574 and 1590.21York City Lib. Skaife mss, SKA/2, f. 345; Dugdale’s Vis. Yorks. iii. 269. His grandfather, also an alderman and mayor (1607), married the daughter of a wealthy York merchant, William Robinson†. Robinson’s estate included the manor of Allerthorpe, which lay about seven miles north east of Northallerton in the North Riding. After the death of his son Thomas, in 1626, the manor passed to his daughter and so descended in turn to her son Thomas Harrison, the future MP’s father.22Dugdale’s Vis. Yorks. iii. 269; VCH N. Riding, i. 380; HP Commons 1558-1603, ‘William Robinson II’.

It was with Thomas Harrison senior that the family severed its financial ties with the York trading community and sought to establish itself among the landed gentry. In a letter to Thomas Viscount Wentworth (Sir Thomas Wentworth†, the future earl of Strafford), president of the council of the north, probably written in 1627, Christopher Wandesford† described Harrison senior as the ‘ablest man’ in the Northallerton area and reckoned that his estate at Allerthorpe was worth £400 a year.23Sheffield City Archives, WWM/Str P16/260. It was possibly on Wentworth’s recommendation that Harrison senior was added to the North Riding bench in 1632.24C231/5, p. 78. But despite strengthening his family’s links with North Riding gentry society, Harrison’s father preferred to maintain his principal residence at York, rather than at Allerthorpe or the family’s other estate at Copgrove near Ripon.25E179/262/8, m. 4; Shaw, Knights of Eng. ii. 208.

Harrison was admitted to Gray’s Inn on the same day – 16 March 1641 – as John Belasyse*, Thomas Lord Grey of Groby* and the sons of Mark Shafto*, John Wastell*, Sir George Wentworth II*, Sir Thomas Widdrington* and Sir William Withrington*.26G. Inn Admiss. He was only 15 at the outbreak of civil war the following year and played no significant role in public life before the 1650s. Thomas Harrison senior was a man of royalist sympathies and, in August 1642, was named to a Yorkshire commission of oyer and terminer issued by the king for assisting the work of the county’s commissioners of array.27The Presentment and Articles Proposed by the Grand Jury of the County of York (1642), 2-3 (E.116.37). In October 1643, he joined most of the county’s leading royalists in standing surety on loans for the maintenance of the forces under the commander of the king’s northern army, the earl of Newcastle, and in January 1644 he helped to raise troops in Yorkshire to resist the invading Scots.28Add. 15858, ff. 237-8; W. Yorks. Archives (Leeds), WYL150 (former Vyner ms 5809). He also remained on close terms with his royalist kinsmen John Lord Belasyse and Lord Darcy and Conyers.29CCC 968.

Although never sequestered for his involvement in the king’s cause, Harrison senior was probably regarded with considerable suspicion by the Yorkshire parliamentarians. However, this may have changed in 1649, when he secured a match for Harrison junior with one of the daughters of the godly Middlesex knight and future Cromwellian grandee Sir William Roberts*, who had also attended Gray’s Inn in his youth.30Infra, ‘Sir William Roberts’; Aylmer, State’s Servants, 251-2. Largely, it seems, as a result of his marriage, Harrison junior has often been confused with his contemporary and namesake Thomas Harrison of South Mimms, Hertfordshire, who married a daughter of the Yorkshire knight, Sir Thomas Bland.31N. Carlisle, Hist. of the Ancient Fam. of Bland 26, 36; Burke, Extinct Baronetcies (2nd edn.), 446; Parlty. Rep. Yorks. 67.

When the Nominated Parliament purged Rumpers and radicals from the North and East Riding benches in the autumn of 1653, Harrison was among those installed in their place, along with (among others) George Lord Eure*, George Smithson* and William Ayscoughe*.32C231/6, p. 270. Most of this group were godly parliamentarians but were generally more moderate, in political terms, than those they replaced – and Harrison was probably no exception. He probably welcomed the establishment of the protectorate late in 1653 and was an active member of the North Riding magistracy during the period 1654-8.33N. Riding QS Recs. ed. J.C. Atkinson (N. Riding Rec. Soc. v), 153, 236.

In the elections to the first protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1654, Harrison was returned for the North Riding, taking the third of the four places behind Eure and Francis Lascelles.34Supra, ‘Yorkshire’. His father’s links with the Belasyses and Darcys, two of the most powerful families in the North Riding, may well have been a factor in securing his return. He apparently took little part in this Parliament’s proceedings. He received only two appointments – to the committee of privileges (5 Oct. 1654) and a committee set up on 28 November for wording a clause concerning the summoning of future Parliaments in an abortive bill for revising the Instrument of Government.35CJ vii. 374b, 392b. He seems to have favoured the Cromwellian religious settlement, or at least some form of publicly-maintained national church, for he had been appointed an ejector in August 1654.36A. and O. ii. 971.

One of Harrison’s prime concerns as a magistrate was to defend godly ministers. Thus in October 1656, he and several other North Riding magistrates, including Ayscoughe and John Wastell, wrote to the lord protector in support of a parish minister who had been threatened with legal proceedings by his ejected predecessors.37CSP Dom. 1656-7, p. 144. His godly reputation was confirmed by his appointment in 1656 as sheriff of Yorkshire, an office he was to hold until late 1658.38List of Sheriffs (L. and I. ix), 164. The first choice for sheriff had been Richard Robinson*, but Major-general Robert Lilburne* had vetoed his appointment on the grounds that he was insufficiently godly.39TSP iv. 397. Harrison was evidently trusted by the protectoral council, which employed him on several occasions in 1657-8 to investigate or arrest suspected enemies of the government.40Bodl. Rawl. A.57, f. 5; SP25/78, pp. 658-9; CSP Dom. 1658-9, p. 47; TSP vii. 240, 242.

In the elections to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament of 1659, Harrison was returned for Yorkshire, along with the 3rd Baron Fairfax (Sir Thomas Fairfax*), who took the senior place. The election had been a hard fought affair in which Fairfax and Harrison had stood together against Major-general John Lambert* and Francis Thorpe*.41Supra, ‘Yorkshire’. Only Harrison had appeared in person on election day – the other candidates had been represented by their proxies – but had been able to muster only about 300 voters when the contest went to a poll, ‘and the one half of them gained after he mounted his horse at the request of Colonel Fairfax [Lord Fairfax’s uncle]’.42Add. 21427, f. 262. In the event, he had been elected largely by default, it seems, after both Lambert’s and Thorpe’s interests had faltered through poor management of their supporters during the poll.43Supra, ‘Yorkshire’. After the election, one of Lambert’s supporters alleged that the Fairfax interest had secured an unfair advantage by preventing news of the election date reaching areas beyond their influence (notably the East Riding), by which ‘unworthy design’, it was claimed, ‘the country [was] cheated of their ancient and undoubted right, and only the day of election known to a few, otherwise Mr Harrison could not have been chosen for this county’.44Add. 21427, f. 262. Similarly, a correspondent of the Yorkshire royalist Sir George Savile†, claimed that the sheriff’s failure to give proper notification of the election date had been highly resented by the county’s gentry, and particularly by John Dawnay†, who ‘would have come in [i.e. stood for election himself] but could not have any certainty of the day’.45Notts. RO, DD/SR/221/96/4. That the sheriff, Barrington Bourchier†, was a nephew of Fairfax’s political ally Sir Henry Cholmley*, lends substance to these allegations. Harrison’s electoral partnership with Lord Fairfax may have been arranged through his kinsman, the Cromwellian grandee Lord Fauconberg (Thomas Belasyse*), who was Richard Cromwell’s brother-in-law.

As in the first protectoral Parliament, Harrison was largely inactive in the House. He received only one appointment – to the committee of privileges (28 Jan. 1659) – and his only significant contribution on the floor of the House was on 14 February, during the final day of debate on the bill of recognition (the bill confirming Richard Cromwell as Protector), when he joined the court party in its efforts to scupper a motion designed to delay the bill’s passage until further limitations had been set on his powers. ‘I am one of those’, declared Harrison

that are sorry the debate has laid so long, for I think there is no such danger [to the people’s liberties]... in the vote. It was never understood so, in the acknowledging of any king. As ... single persons have turned into tyranny, so the liberties of the people have been abused, like Pandora’s Box. All sects and heresies have grown up under the abuse of these liberties. The liberties of the people are dear to us all. They are so to me ... [but] to limit [the protector], as is propounded, is but splendidum nihil [a glorious nothing] ... If this vote pass thus limited, it is making him a protector today and none tomorrow.46CJ vii. 595a; Burton’s Diary, iii. 264.

This speech was directed against the republican interest at Westminster, which had campaigned vociferously against the bill as detrimental to the people’s liberties.

By early 1660, Harrison favoured a return to monarchy, and on 10 February he joined Lords Fairfax and Fauconberg and their supporters (who included many of Yorkshire’s leading Presbyterian gentry) in a declaration to General George Monck*, demanding a free Parliament – a measure which, by this point, was almost certain to result in the restoration of the Stuart line. Harrison was part of the four-man delegation of northern gentlemen that presented this declaration to the general in London.47A Letter and Declaration of the Nobility and Gentry of the County of York (1660, 669 f.23.48); CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 356. In the elections to the 1660 Convention, he stood for Thirsk – almost certainly on the interest of Lord Fauconberg – but his return was disputed and was not upheld by the Commons.48HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Thirsk’.

Having been omitted from the East Riding bench in March 1660, Harrison was dropped from the North Riding commission of the peace that autumn and apparently received no subsequent appointments. Not only was he removed from local office, but, in November 1661, the duke of Buckingham (Lord Fairfax’s son-in-law), the lord lieutenant of Yorkshire, gave orders that his mail be opened on suspicion that he was involved in ‘very dangerous plots and designs contrived by several persons disaffected to his majesty’.49HMC Var. ii. 117. Whether Harrison was indeed involved in such plotting seems unlikely. In fact, after 1660, he appears to have abandoned public life altogether.

Harrison died on 29 December 1687 and was buried at Burneston on 1 January 1688.50Dugdale’s Vis. Yorks. iii. 270-1; Burneston par. reg. No will is recorded. None of his immediate family sat in Parliament.