HARRISON, John (c.1589-1669), of St Olave, Hart Street, London, and Balls Park, Great Amwell, Herts.

According to his daughter, the memorialist Anne Fanshawe, Harrison was born at Beaumont, in Skerton, just north of Lancaster, the twelfth son of William Harrison of the nearby township of Aldcliffe.32Fanshawe Mems. 21; VCH Lancs. viii. 58. Harrison was apparently unable to trace his descent back beyond his grandfather, also described as of Aldcliffe, and it therefore seems unlikely that his family had joined the ranks of the Lancashire gentry before the Tudor period.33Vis. London, 354.

Anne Fanshawe claimed that the Harrisons numbered several northern gentry families among their kinsfolk by the early seventeenth century – including, it seems, the Irelands of The Hutt and the Curwens of Workington – and it was these relations ‘who brought him to London and placed him with my Lord Treasurer Salisbury [Robert Cecil†], then secretary of estate [sic], who sent him into Sir John Wolstenholme’s† family and gave him a small place in the Custom House to enable him for that employment’. When he left for London his father was able to provide him with a ‘portion’ of only 20 marks – about £13. But being ‘of great natural parts, a great accountant, of vast memory [and] an incomparable penman’, he quickly prospered in the service of Sir John Wolstenholme senior, the prominent crown financier and customs farmer and one of London’s richest merchants.34Fanshawe Mems. 21-2; HP Commons 1604-29, ‘Sir John Wolstenholme’. In 1616, Harrison married Margaret Fanshawe, who was a servant and relation of Wolstensholme’s wife and a member of the Derbyshire family from which Harrison’s fellow MP for Lancaster in the Long Parliament, Thomas Fanshawe, was descended.35Supra, ‘Thomas Fanshawe’; HP Commons 1604-29, ‘Thomas Fanshawe I’; Fanshawe Mems. 6-7; London Mar. Lics. ed. Foster, 635. Four days after his marriage, Harrison was granted arms.36Grantees of Arms (Harl. Soc. lxvi), 116.

Wolstenholme was very probably involved in securing Harrison’s lucrative offices as joint collector of the new pretermitted custom in 1620 and as a customs farmer during the 1620s and 1630s. It was as a spokesman for the customers’ interest that Harrison was returned for the Yorkshire port of Scarborough to the 1628 Parliament, in which he was active on matters relating to the crown’s finances but remained silent on the constitutional issues that vexed the House’s proceedings.37HP Commons 1604-29, ‘John Harrison’.

As early as 1627, Harrison had proposed a scheme for the direct administration of the customs, but his idea had been rejected by the royal favourite George Villiers, 1st duke of Buckingham and received similarly short shrift from successive lord treasurers – largely because it upset powerful interests at court and was potentially expensive in the short term.38Stowe 326, ff. 59, 89, 89v; Ashton, Crown and the Money Market, 98, 102, 103; T. A. Mason, Serving God and Mammon (Newark, DE, 1985), 105; HP Commons 1604-29, ‘John Harrison’. Frustrated by what he perceived as the inadequacies of royal finances and of those who administered them, he followed the advice of Sir Thomas Rowe* in lending his financial expertise to Archbishop William Laud in his attempt in 1634 to oust Lord Treasurer Portland (Sir Richard Weston†). Harrison would later insist in his ‘A Discourse of Certain Passages in Customs Affairs’ – a self-exculpatory account of his career as a customs farmer, probably written in the early 1640s – that although he did not approve of Laud’s ‘innovations in the church’, he had heard that the archbishop ‘had a good regard to the due regulating of the king’s service’.39Stowe 326, ff. 60-1; M.C. Alexander, Charles I’s Lord Treasurer (1975), 196; HP Commons 1604-29, ‘John Harrison’. Anne Fanshawe would claim that her father favoured moderate Calvinist divines, among them the Cambridge college heads Ralph Brownrigg, Richard Holdsworth and Paul Micklethwaite.40Fanshawe Mems. 23.

With his own finances apparently in good shape by the mid-1630s, Harrison and another gentleman contracted with the crown for disafforesting Leicester Forest, paying a £5,000 entry fine and a rent of £100 a year.41CSP Dom. 1636-7, p. 256. In about 1637, in what was probably an attempt to head off a take-over of the great farm of customs by the courtier George Lord Goring and his associates, Harrison pitched his scheme for direct administration of the customs to the treasurer of the household Sir Henry Vane II* and the lord chamberlain Philip Herbert*, 4th earl of Pembroke, who were keen to explore ways of improving the king’s revenues. Pembroke presented Harrison’s proposals to the king, but Charles was unconvinced, and when the earl then made an offer for the farm himself, Goring outbid him.42Stowe 326, ff. 39v-52v, 64-5; Ashton, Crown and the Money Market, 100, 101-2; HP Commons 1604-29, ‘John Harrison’. Pembroke was indebted to Harrison not just for ideas but also hard cash – owing Harrison £6,000 by 1643.43CCAM 1187. The earl was not Harrison’s only aristocratic creditor, for in 1639 he and Wolstenholme lent £10,000 to Thomas Viscount Wentworth (Sir Thomas Wentworth†, the future earl of Strafford), and by 1640, Harrison and his fellow financier Sir Paul Pindar had purchased the crown lease of the Yorkshire alum works from Wentworth.44Infra, ‘Sir William Pennyman’; Fanshawe, Fanshawe Fam. 48. Harrison was wealthy enough by 1640 to expend £1,000 on his wife’s funeral.45Fanshawe Mems. 18.

In the elections to the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640, Harrison stood as a candidate for the Kent borough of Queenborough and for Lancaster and was returned for both constituencies. He probably owed his election at Queenborough to Pembroke, the town’s leading local landowner.46Supra, ‘Queenborough’. At Lancaster, he may have relied in part upon government patronage, as exercised by the chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, Lord Newburgh (Sir Edward Barrett†).47Supra, ‘Lancaster’. But Newburgh’s task would doubtless have been made easier by Harrison’s status as a native son of Lancaster made good and by his ownership of the nearby manor and grange of Beaumont. His main estate at the time of his election, however, was Balls Park, in Hertfordshire, which he had purchased in 1637.48SP23/203, p. 791; VCH Lancs. viii. 58, 60; VCH Herts. iii. 412, 507. Having opted to sit for Lancaster, he was appointed to five committees in this Parliament, including those to report on several high profile Ship Money cases and to receive all petitions and ‘informations’ concerning trade (to which he was named second).49CJ ii. 3b, 8a, 8b, 15b, 17a, 17b.

In the summer of 1640, Harrison and other members of the old and new customs syndicates, including Sir Nicholas Crisp* and Sir John Jacob*, agreed to the request of the king and the chancellor of the exchequer Lord Cottington (Sir Francis Cottington†) to take over the great and petty farm from Goring in order to raise money to sustain the war effort against the Scottish Covenanters.50Stowe 326, ff. 66, 71-2; Cal. Ct. Mins. E.I. Co. 1640-3, p. 82; Ashton, Crown and the Money Market, 104-5. Although Harrison had failed to respond to the king’s pleas for money to fight the Scots in 1639, when informed of the king’s desperate financial plight in 1640, ‘as that his crown lay at the stake’, he answered (or so he later claimed) that ‘his Majesty being in such extremity and desiring our help ... that our lives, our estates and whatsoever we had or could procure should be at his service and assistance’.51Stowe 326, f. 71v; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iii. 913. Harrison and his fellow customers would later insist that by borrowing against the great and petty farms and by dipping into their own ‘private money’ they had advanced in excess of £250,00 for the king’s service – although the actual sum was probably nearer half that amount.52Stowe 326, ff. 71v-72, 100; CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 491; Ashton, Crown and the Money Market, 110-11.

In the elections to the Long Parliament in the autumn of 1640, Harrison was re-elected for Lancaster.53Supra, ‘Lancaster’. He made little immediate impact upon the House’s proceedings, however, for in accordance with a vote on 9 November disabling all monopolists from sitting, he forbore to take his seat. He fell foul of this resolution because of his role as an assignee of the man who enjoyed the monopoly on the export of hides and calfskin, the groom of the bedchamber James Maxwell – although there is little reason to doubt the claim of Harrison’s son William* (elected for Queenborough) that his father merely helped administer Maxwell’s patent and took no profit himself.54APC 1629-30, p. 283; Procs. LP i. 246, 254. With Charles desperate for money to pay off the Scottish army encamped in northern England, the solicitor-general Sir Edward Herbert* persuaded William Harrison to pledge that his father would raise a loan of £50,000 for the king’s service. Harrison was ‘much displeased’ with his son’s presumption and refused to honour the offer, despite Herbert’s ‘great persuasion’. However, after talking with Cottington he agreed to raise the money, which (so he claimed) encouraged other City lenders to do likewise. The Commons, taking notice of his offer, re-admitted him on 25 November, with the ‘great concurrent affection of the House’.55Stowe 326, f. 90v; CJ ii. 36b; Procs. LP i. 292-3, 295, 307, 311, 321. The next day (26 Nov.) he and the 50 MPs whose securities he had taken for raising the £50,000 were added to the committee for maintaining the king’s army and relieving its reluctant northern hosts.56CJ ii. 37a. In a debate on 12 December concerning how to raise another £50,000 for the forces in the north, Harrison declared that ‘he would rather lend without security than that the City should fail’.57Procs. LP i. 581. That same day he was added to the bill for levying two subsidies.58CJ ii. 50a.

In all, Harrison was named to 19 committees between the assembling of the Long Parliament and the outbreak of civil war – the vast majority of them concerning maritime commerce, the customs and other financial matters.59CJ ii. 37a, 50a, 64a, 88a, 101a, 155a, 229a, 251a, 295b, 378b, 461a, 461b, 483a, 491b, 499a, 512b, 534b, 570b, 667a. Harrison’s ideas for direct management of royal finances attracted the attention and patronage of Francis Russell†, 4th earl of Bedford, the man mooted for the office of lord treasurer in the 1640-1 projected settlement between Charles and the parliamentary ‘junto’. Bedford, to whom Harrison referred as ‘his great and noble friend’, wished to make use of Harrison’s expertise ‘in sundry affairs relating to that great office’. In what was very probably intended as a gesture of goodwill to Bedford in the settlement negotiations, the king knighted Harrison on 4 January 1641 – Harrison having been ushered into Charles’s presence by Bedford’s close ally the earl of Pembroke. At Bedford’s behest, Harrison drew up or revived proposals during the spring of 1641 for advancing money on anticipated customs revenue and for paying off some of the debt thus accumulated by the sale of crown lands.60Stowe 326, ff. 73, 91, 95; Procs. LP iv. 250, 255.

Bedford’s untimely death on 9 May 1641 seems to have undermined much of Harrison’s political credit at Westminster (he would later claim that the earl’s demise was ‘to the great loss or rather ruin of king and kingdom’).61Stowe 326, f. 73v. In a report from the committee for customers on 22 May, Denzil Holles* alleged that since the late 1620s the customs farmers had systematically ‘cozened’ and defrauded the king and kingdom to the tune of half a million pounds.62Procs. LP iv. 526-9. When he had concluded

one question grew about Sir John Harrison ... whether he should withdraw or not. That [it] was soon agreed that being voted to be a delinquent by the committee he ought to withdraw when that question came to be voted which concerned him, who had a share at one time amongst the customers. But having done so good service to the House as to have lent £50,000 but lately, the House was willing he should sit till it came to that vote and that then also he should have liberty to speak for himself before he withdrew.63Procs. LP iv. 529.

Anxious to pre-empt the likely punishment for their alleged offences, Harrison and the rest of the customs farmers petitioned the Commons on 26 May, proposing a fine of £150,000 in order to ‘take them off from crime or delinquency to the commonwealth’ – which sum the House accepted. Harrison’s share was reckoned at £10,828, and, although he claimed that he had reaped a much smaller dividend than his colleagues, he was ranked fifth among the customs farmers in terms of personal gain, with estimated profits of £41,843.64Stowe 326, f. 92; CJ ii. 157b, 164a; Procs. LP iv. 561, 564-5, 567-8, 676; vi. 22. On 8 June, he informed the House that the farmers would raise £100,000 ‘with all speed’ (which they did) and that the rest would follow shortly: ‘and if they do not procure it they will lay their lives and fortunes at our feet. And doubts not but if they might be admitted into the good opinion of this House, they might be able to do this House more service’. When one of the farmers refused to pay his share of the fine, the House was inclined to make Harrison, Pindar and Jacob pay the £31,000 that was still outstanding. On 5 August, however, Harrison ‘excused himself and the other two as being unable to pay the said arrear’, and the next day (6 Aug.) it was voted that the sum should be reduced to £10,489, of which the share of Harrison and his ‘partners’ was computed at £2,489.65CJ ii. 241b; Procs. LP v. 41; vi. 22, 24, 213-14, 232-3, 247-8. Despite his heavy financial obligations, Harrison subscribed £1,200 as an Irish Adventurer in the spring of 1642, although he only paid in a quarter of that amount.66CSP Ire. Adv. 1642-59, p. 302; Bottigheimer, Eng. Money and Irish Land, 183.

Harrison received ten committee appointments between mid-January and mid-July 1642 and clearly preferred remaining at Westminster to following his son William into the king’s camp.67Infra, ‘William Harrison’. His allegiance to Parliament may have owed something to his zealous anti-popery. On 28 February, he moved that a bill drawn up by the godly MP for Wigan, Alexander Rigby I, for seizing the lands of recusants in order to pay off their recusancy fines should be given a third reading, only for Sir Walter Erle and others to have it laid aside as being ‘too rigid’.68PJ i. 486. In June, he pledged to bring in four horses on the propositions for the defence of Parliament (which he later changed to £200), and on 12 July he was named to a committee for advancing money, plate and horse in Hertfordshire upon the propositions.69PJ iii. 469; CJ ii. 667a, 801b. Two days later (14 July), the House ordered Harrison and a number of the county’s MPs to propound the propositions at the Hertford assizes.70CJ ii. 671b.

Anne Fanshawe propagated the story, followed by later authorities, that her father had ‘openly espoused the royal cause’ before the end of 1642 and had been imprisoned in London by the parliamentarians.71Fanshawe Mems. 24; A. Kingston, Herts. during the Gt. Civil War (1894), 122-3; Fanshawe, Fanshawe Fam. 44. However, Harrison’s record at Westminster during 1642-3 strongly suggests that she was either mistaken or deliberately distorting the truth. Having declared his readiness late in August 1642 to assist Parliament’s commander-in-chief Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, ‘with life and fortune’, he was named to several committees between December 1642 and late March 1643 for overseeing Parliament’s war revenues.72CJ ii. 740a, 878a, 919b, 975b; iii. 9b. Moreover, on 30 March, he and Sir William Allanson were entrusted with the important task of searching any Oxford-bound wagons for arms and money.73CJ iii. 23b. These appointments hardly suggest a man who had thrown in his lot with the king. Nor did the death of his son William in a skirmish with the parliamentarian soldiery in June or July 1643 bring about a change of heart. On 6 June, Harrison took the vow and covenant that was introduced after the discovery of the plot of Edmund Waller*, and he was named on 7 August to a committee for investigating rumours that certain MPs, among them John Pym, had spirited money abroad.74CJ iii. 118a, 196b.

What seems to have turned Harrison away from Parliament during the second half of 1643, as it did other MPs, was the war party’s defeat in August of the attempt by its peace party rivals to offer the king easy terms and thus secure a swift, negotiated and exclusively English settlement before the Scottish Covenanters entered the civil war. Given Harrison’s apparent wish to retain episcopacy in some form – if his taste in Calvinist ministers is any guide – and his readiness to raise money for the king to fight the Scots in 1640 and to pay off and send home their army in 1641, it is likely that he was hostile to the idea of further Scottish intervention in English affairs. But whereas the majority of Parliament-men who were opposed to a Scottish alliance – a group that included Harrison’s old patron Pembroke – merely withdrew from the House for a time, Harrison was among the minority that decided enough was enough and defected to the king. At some point between 7 and 24 August – when the Commons ordered that his estate be sequestered as that of a ‘notorious delinquent’ – Harrison went to Oxford, and on 4 September he was disabled from sitting as an MP, ‘being in arms against the Parliament’.75CJ iii. 217b, 227a; Harl. 165, ff. 155v, 165v; Stowe 184, f. 161; SP20/7, ff. 9v-11; Fanshawe Mems. 24.

In fact, there is no evidence that Harrison ever took up arms for the king. However, he did sit and vote in the Oxford Parliament, having first signed its letter to the earl of Essex on 27 January 1644, requesting that he arrange a peace treaty.76Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 573; Lancs. Royalist Composition Pprs. ed. J.H. Stanning (Lancs. and Cheshire Rec. Soc. xxix), 165. Harrison’s friends at Oxford included the chancellor of the exchequer Sir Edward Hyde* and the senior royalist lawyer Geoffrey Palmer*.77Fanshawe Mems. 25-6. Harrison followed his son-in-law, Richard Fanshawe (secretary to the prince of Wales’s council), into the west country in 1645, and he later claimed that after the fall of Bristol to the New Model army he had attempted to surrender himself to Parliament but had been enforced to go into exile in France.78SP23/203, p. 808; CCC 1523; Fanshawe Mems. 30-1, 33, 37, 39.

Harrison returned to England in September 1646, when he took the Covenant and negative oath, and in October he petitioned to compound. His fine was set initially at half his estate – that is, £10,745 – but was later reduced, on petition, to £1,000.79SP23/203, pp. 791, 792, 808; CCC 1523; CJ v. 619b. But though he was in the clear politically, his financial situation was extremely precarious, having lost, by his own and his daughter’s reckonings, somewhere between £97,000 and £141,000 during the civil war and with debts of at least £25,000.80Stowe 184, ff. 161-2; SP23/203, pp. 792, 795-7, 799; CCC 1206, 1523; Fanshawe Mems. 22; Fanshawe, Fanshawe Fam. 48. He and the other surviving pre-war customs farmers wrangled with their creditors (who included the East India Company) throughout much of the 1650s, it seems, with Harrison mortgaging off most of his estate in a desperate (and ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to stave off bankruptcy proceedings. In at least one of the parliamentary bodies dealing with this public debt – the Nominated Parliament’s commission for the relief of creditors and debtors – he had an ally (doubtless for a retainer of some kind) in the person of Robert Warcupp*.81Supra, ‘Sir Nicholas Crisp’; ‘Sir John Jacob’; Stowe 185, ff. 13, 26v, 46, 65, 79; To the Right Honourable the Commons Assembled in Parliament (1649, 669 f.14.17); CSP Dom. 1653-4, pp. 265, 301, 319, 353; Cal. Ct. Mins. E.I. Co. 1650-54, pp. 186-7, 234, 252; Fanshawe, Fanshawe Fam. 46, 47.

Harrison’s financial situation probably did not improve much, if at all, until the Restoration, when he and several of his old colleagues were appointed to a royal commission for collecting tonnage and poundage, with a salary of £2,000 a year.82CCSP v. 54; CTB i. 226. In the elections to the Cavalier Parliament, he was returned again for Lancaster and was listed by Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton as a likely supporter of a Presbyterian church settlement – although he made little impression upon the House’s proceedings.83HP Commons 1660-90. In 1663-4, the crown issued warrants for repaying a substantial portion of the money that Harrison and his fellow customs farmer had lent to Charles I, ‘to save them from the clamours of their creditors’.84CSP Dom. 1663-4, pp. 50, 639, 676; CTB i. 628.

Harrison left behind all worldly clamours forever on 28 September 1669 and was buried at All Saints, Hertford on 4 October.85Fanshawe Mems. 21; Clutterbuck, Herts. ii. 186. According to Anne Fanshawe, he died owning property worth £1,600 a year – which was very modest considering the vast sums that had passed through his hands since the 1620s.86Fanshawe Mems. 22. In his will, he charged his estate with legacies totalling almost £5,000, including bequests of £100 to the parish of All Saints, Hertford, and the town of Lancaster.87PROB11/338, f. 121. If Anne Fanshawe can be credited, her father left her the princely sum of £20,000, while the crown conceived that Harrison died owing in excess of £50,000 in unpaid rent as a customs farmer during the 1660s and, after his death, seized his personal estate accordingly.88C7/60/6; Fanshawe Mems. 22, 210; CTB iii. 1348. Harrison’s only surviving son Richard† was returned for Lancaster in 1669 in his father’s place and was re-elected for the borough to the first Exclusion Parliament in 1679.89HP Commons 1660-90.