HARRISON, Thomas I (1616-60), of Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffs. and Highgate, Mdx.

The Harrisons were established among the principal trading families of Newcastle-under-Lyme by the mid-sixteenth century. Thomas Harrison’s great-grandfather held the office of bailiff of the town twice, and at various times served as churchwarden, receiver, serjeant and constable as well. Richard Harrison, Thomas’s father, was evidently remarkably able, progressing unusually quickly along the cursus honorum of Newcastle to become mayor in 1626, the first of four periods when he served the town in that way. His civic career was crowned with the honour of an aldermancy. By trade, the Harrisons were butchers and graziers.38Pape, Newcastle-under-Lyme, 154, 156, 170, 173, 175. By contrast with the pedigree of the Harrisons, whose history is visible in the town records, nothing is known of Thomas Harrison’s mother, beyond her forename. It is assumed that Harrison, the eldest son of the family, was sent to a local grammar school. It is more certain that as Edmund Ludlowe II* was later to put it, quoting Ecclesiastes, he ‘remembered his creator in the days of his youth’, meaning that he was brought up in a godly environment.39Oxford DNB; Ludlow, Voyce, 199. Harrison as a young man went to London as an attorney’s clerk. His employer, Thomas Houlker (Hulker), lived in King’s Langley in Hertfordshire, and practised in the court of common pleas.40Smyth’s Obit. 21, 52; A Compleat Collection of the Lives, Speeches, Private Passages (1661), 1; Cases in the High Ct. of Chivalry, 1634-1640 ed. Cust and Hopper (Harl. Soc. n.s. xviii), 72. Harrison’s work in London must have taken him daily to or near the inns of court, so when at the outbreak of civil war a lifeguard for Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, was raised there, Harrison was on hand to enlist in it. In this military unit, he saw action at Edgehill (23 Oct. 1642) and at the taking of Reading for Parliament (27 Apr. 1643). 41Ludlow, Mems. i. 39; Ludlow, Voyce, 199.

Army officer, 1643-7

In 1643, perhaps in October, Harrison transferred from the lifeguard to the Eastern Association, an army containing whole regiments where godly enthusiasm flourished. He moved quickly from a captaincy of horse to the rank of major in the regiment of Charles Fleetwood*, with whom he had served in the lifeguard and who moved at the same time.42C.H. Simpkinson, Thomas Harrison, Regicide and Major-general (1905), 12, 15. The departure of the two officers from Essex’s army may have been controversial. The diarist Thomas Juxon records a quarrel between the pair and the Presbyterians Sir Philip Stapilton* and Lionel Copley*, over the issue of reform of the army. The eagerness for reform of Harrison and Fleetwood may have precipitated their resignations from the lifeguard in 1643, or may have occurred after they had taken commissions under the 2nd earl of Manchester (Edward Montagu†).43Juxon Jnl. 52; Simpkinson, Thomas Harrison, 12, 13, 15. ‘Look on Col. Fleetwood’s regiment with his Major Harrison, what a cluster of preaching officers and troopers there is’, observed a critic who did not share his religious outlook.44Manchester Quarrel, 72. By Marston Moor (2 July 1644), Harrison was a fully-fledged supporter of Oliver Cromwell* and the Independents, and was chosen to report the battle to the Committee of Both Kingdoms, to the chagrin of the Presbyterians.45Baillie Lttrs. and Jnls. ii. 209. The committee employed him subsequently to take messages to Manchester, and in the latter part of 1644, Harrison was based in Lincolnshire.46CSP Dom. 1644, p. 444; 1644-5, pp. 395, 544, 548; Luke Letter Bk. 113, 411. By March 1645, he was regarded even by his friends as highly partisan in the struggles between Independents and Presbyterians. He was evidently well thought of in Parliament, however, encountering no trouble in securing the approval of the Commons for his next military transfer, to the New Model army, under Fleetwood.47Luke Letter Bk. 223-4; CJ iv. 64b.

Harrison worked closely with Oliver Cromwell during the next two years, and the two shared common religious views, favouring a rejection of legalism in theology and sympathising with the freedom of conscience associated with adult baptism. Harrison fought with Cromwell at Naseby in June 1645, and later that month was stationed near the minister and army chaplain, Richard Baxter, at the battle of Langport. It was there that Baxter observed Harrison ‘with a loud voice break forth into the praises of God ... as if ... in a rapture’. The minister noted how he appeared ‘of such a vivacity, hilarity and alacrity as another man when he hath drunken a cup too much’, as good an insight as any into Harrison’s character.48Reliquiae Baxterianae (1696), i. 54, 57. Cromwell sent Harrison to negotiate the terms of the surrender of Winchester (5 Oct. 1645); a little over a week later, the major apparently killed two soldiers ‘with his own hands’ during the siege of Basing House: a hostile variant of the story made it three men murdered after their surrender.49Sprigg, Anglia Rediviva, 140, 142, 151; Mercurius Civicus no. 125 (9-16 Oct. 1645), 1202 (E.305.3); Mercurius Elencticus no. 58 (26 Dec. 1648-2 Jan. 1649), 551 (E.536.31). With Cromwell as a backer, and a high profile because of his military exploits, Harrison was earmarked for a seat in the House of Commons during the recruiter elections, on the interest of the Independents. He was first put forward for Ilchester, where his name was promoted in December 1645 by the Independent fixer, John Pyne*. By February 1646, however, it was clear that Pyne’s nominees would not have a clear run, and Harrison’s name was no longer being mentioned.50D. Underdown, ‘The Ilchester Election, Feb. 1646’, Som. Nat. Hist. and Arch. Soc. Procs. cx, 44-6.

The appearance of his name at Ilchester as a complete outsider foreshadowed the circumstances of Harrison’s eventual election at Wendover, where he was elected without any property or family interest in the borough.51Supra, ‘Wendover’. By May 1646, he was attached to Col. Edward Whalley’s* regiment in the Buckinghamshire area, in quarters at one point in the parish of Marsh Gibbon, in that county.52SP28/151. He participated in the negotiations which resulted in the surrender of Oxford.53Sprigg, Anglia Rediviva, 264; CSP Dom. 1645-7, pp. 309, 312. In June, he helped negotiate the surrender of Boarstall House in Buckinghamshire.54LJ viii. 365a. It was probably the dual connections with Cromwell and Whalley that commended him to the electors of Wendover. Nothing is known of the election except that it took place during the last week of October 1646. Harrison was admitted to the House on 2 November and received his first appointment on 24 November, when he was named to a committee on compensation for officeholders after the abolition of the court of wards. He was named on 16 December to the important committee of privileges chaired by Sir Robert Harley, a committee in which the struggles between Presbyterians and Independents were being fought out, and which investigated the contested election at Ilchester in which Harrison had himself been a candidate. Other committees on which he sat in the first two months of his service in the Commons were connected with military matters, dealing with petitions from soldiers or addressing the problem of their arrears of pay.55Supra, ‘Wendover’; Perfect Occurrences no. 45 (29 Oct.-6 Nov. 1646), sig. Vv2v (E.360.13); CJ iv. 727a, v. 9b, 14b, 28b.

Independent soldier and politician, 1647-9

As an ardent Independent and a highly competent army officer, Harrison was a natural choice to accompany Philip Sidney*, Viscount Lisle to Ireland in his capacity as lord lieutenant. Lisle personally selected Harrison for the expedition, an initiative of the Independents which was intended to deliver a military victory uncomplicated by alliances with existing political interests in Ireland. Although Lisle had been commissioned in January 1646, it was not until February 1647 that he sailed for Ireland, and by then the political climate at Westminster had changed, to the disadvantage of the Independents. Although Harrison received the blessing of the Commons to take ship for Ireland as a member of Lisle’s retinue, his service there was unremarked and unremarkable, as the whole venture became mired in a quarrel with Lord Inchiquin at the same time as, back in England, political support for it wilted. By mid-April 1647, the expeditionary force was packing its bags to leave Ireland.56CJ v. 63b; Oxford DNB, sub Harrison and Philip Sidney, Viscount Lisle; HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, vi. 566; P. Little, Lord Broghill and the Cromwellian Union with Ireland and Scotland (Woodbridge, 2004), 45-8. Even so, on 7 May 1647, Harrison was mentioned with Lisle, Algernon Sydney* and Sir John Temple* as deserving the thanks of the House.57CJ v. 166a.

Harrison was back in the Commons on 11 and 14 May, when he was named to some army-related committees.58CJ v. 167a, 171b, 174a. On the 16th, the major of Fleetwood’s regiment attended the council of army officers at Saffron Walden, and reported how he had drawn up the regiment to read Parliament’s votes on disbandment and to receive in turn a statement from the soldiers of their grievances, in which indemnity, a subject of one of Harrison’s committee appointments a few days earlier, figured. If the major was Harrison, it is difficult to square his participation in events at Saffron Walden on the 13th (when the regiment presented its grievances) and the 16th (when he reported to the council), with his presence in London.59Clarke Pprs. i. 52; Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, 75. Harrison was certainly in sympathy with the soldiery, however, and on 11 June signed the army declaration assuring the city fathers of London that the capital would not be harmed as the regiments moved inexorably towards it, but unambiguously also announcing its political programme.60LJ ix. 257b.

Soon after this, and certainly before 16 July, Harrison was promoted to be colonel of a horse regiment whose previous commander, Thomas Sheffield, was hostile to the uncompromising attitude towards Parliament of his own soldiers and of the army in general.61Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. i. 195-6. At the general council of officers at Reading, Harrison displayed his usual sanguine outlook by calling for decisions on whether or not to debate, and he was appointed part of the committee of officers to meet with the agitators to try to settle a common army approach to political issues.62Clarke Pprs, i. 176, 182, 216. The outcome was the Heads of the Proposals. There is no reason to believe that Harrison was particularly sympathetic towards Leveller thinking at this point, or that he was anything other than a reliable ally of the army ‘grandees’, Cromwell and Henry Ireton*. Around the time the army entered London (August 1647), he encouraged the army officer, John Jubbes, to persist with a paper that when it reached publication called for a temporary deposition of the king, but it is difficult to be sure that the paper, which was amended in its printed versions, contained this demand when first drafted, as Jubbes was encouraged by Fairfax because his proposals tended towards peace.63J. Jubbes, An Apology unto the honorable and other...worthy officers (1649), 4 (E.552.28); J. Jubbes, Several Proposals for Peace and Freedom (1648, E.477.18).

After joining his regiment at Saffron Walden in May, Harrison never returned to the Commons for the rest of 1647, although he was wholly in sympathy with those MPs who left Westminster to join the army in the face of Presbyterian-inspired intimidation in the summer of 1647.64HMC Egmont, i. 440. He was at the general debates of the army at Putney, but probably missed the earliest meetings of the convention: as a recent historian has noted, he was so irrepressible that it seems unlikely that he would have sat silently through them.65Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, 267. He was first noted at Putney on 9 November, when he was named to a highly important committee to consider and weigh the existing obligations and commitments of the army, but two days later he intervened in a debate to denounce the king. By this time, Harrison’s attitude had hardened significantly. He pronounced any obligations of the army vis-a-vis the king as void. He called for Charles to be prosecuted and his choice of the epithet ‘man of blood’ for the king would have left his hearers in no doubt that he meant him to be ‘cut off from his people’, as in Leviticus 17.4. This might not necessarily have implied death as opposed to deposition, but Harrison went on to call in effect for the abolition of the House of Lords too.66Clarke Pprs. i. 417. Contemporary commentators such as Edmund Ludlowe II associated Harrison with his ‘man of blood’ pronouncement subsequently.67Ludlow, Voyce, 200. It has been suggested plausibly that much of the forcefulness of Harrison’s contribution may have derived from his late entry to the debates, which had for most of the active participants involved long and wearisome discussions involving casuistry and compromise rather than simple outbursts.68J.E. Sampson, ‘Thomas Harrison and the Mid-Century Crises in the Three Kingdoms, 1616-60’ (Florida State Univ. PhD thesis, 2001), 185. Cromwell responded to Harrison by offering him some cases, one hypothetical, and one Biblical, in which murder would not, or was not, punished, but conceded tacitly that the king was indeed guilty of that offence.69Clarke Pprs. i. 417.

Harrison was by this time prominent as a radical, but even after Putney was not in fact in alliance with the Levellers. The story that he was present at the head of his regiment when it mutinied at Corkbush Field (15 Nov. 1647) and subjected Cromwell to a harangue in support of the mutineers, so provoking the lieutenant-general that he was nearly out of his saddle with rage, seems implausible in the light of the close working between the two men which could hardly have survived an incident of this kind.70Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, 281. Harrison in fact seems curiously absent from the military scene after Putney, but was in the Commons for at least two days early in March 1648.71CJ v. 480a, 484b, 486a. This was only a brief prelude to his being posted to help suppress the risings that together formed the second civil war. In May, Harrison’s regiment lay outside London, in Surrey, and was apparently threatened with attack by rebels. He was soon afterwards despatched north, to Lancashire and then to Yorkshire, where he commanded under John Lambert*, his task being to prevent an incursion from royalists in Scotland.72Clarke Pprs. ii. 12-13, 21; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, i. 609; HMC Hamilton, i. 124; Simpkinson, Thomas Harrison, 72-3. He was badly wounded at Appleby, and probably never completely recovered from the injuries.73Observations upon the Last Actions and Words of Maj. Gen. Harrison (1660), 15; HMC Portland, i. 471, 477, 478. He was hors de combat for a month.

Harrison is recorded as being in the Commons only on one occasion further in 1648, on 4 November, when he was appointed part of a delegation to the common council of London, on the need for strengthening the security of the Commons, an issue which highlighted conflict between Presbyterians and Independents over control of the armed forces.74CJ vi. 69b. His presence at Westminster explains why he missed the meeting of the general council of officers on the 7th, but after that he attended the council on the three other occasions it met that month, apparently avoiding Parliament altogether.75Clarke Pprs. ii. 274. By then, with other Independent officers in the New Model, he was probably determined to intervene in the protracted negotiations on the Isle of Wight between king and Parliament. With Ireton, John Disbrowe* and Edward Gravener*, he wrote to Robert Hammond*, governor of Carisbrooke and the king’s gaoler, to advise him of their intervention to ‘interpose’ in the treaty and to urge him to be vigilant in protecting the king against capture by other parties.76Letters between Colonel Robert Hammond...and the Committee of Lords and Commons at Derby House ed. T. Birch (1764), 87-9. The Leveller leaders thought Harrison ‘extreme fair and gilded’ towards them at this point, and reported his praise of the Agreement as ‘as just, as rational, and as equitable, as possibly could be’. He apparently assured them that ‘he doubted not but that all interests would centre in it’ and he committed himself to advancing it.77J. Lilburne, The Legall Fundamentall Liberties (1649), 31-3 (E.560.14); Clarke Pprs. ii. 259-61; F. Henderson, ‘Drafting the Officers’ Agreement’, in P. Baker, E. Vernon ed. The Agreements of the People, the Levellers and the Constitutional Crisis of the English Revolution (Basingstoke, 2012), 166.

Whether or not their hopes in him were justified, there is no doubt that the Levellers saw Harrison as their most eminent ally in either Parliament or army early in December 1648. Given Harrison’s style, which seems to have been verbally conciliatory, emollient and even flattering towards those he felt shared some of his political and religious perspective, it is possible that they mistook his friendliness for genuine political support. It is also possible that his personal involvement, later in December, with transporting the king from the Isle of Wight to Hurst Castle and thence to Windsor made him invest more of his own energies in preserving the solidarity of the army against outsiders. It was during this episode that Harrison encountered Charles personally. The king had feared that Harrison was on a mission to murder him, but he was reassured by the colonel’s military bearing, polite, if uncompromising, insistence on the equality of all before the law and by his face, by which the king considered himself able to judge Harrison’s character.78Clarke Pprs. ii. 133, 142-4; HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, vi. 576; T. Herbert, Memoirs of...King Charles I (1813), 97-9; Ludlow, Mems. i. 212.

Harrison’s task of escorting the king to Windsor deprived the council of officers, which met at Whitehall between 14 and 26 December, of what would doubtless have been his lively contribution. The debates ranged over the precise shape of the constitution, based on a revised version of the Leveller Agreement of the People, after Pride’s Purge had delivered a Parliament subservient to the army, a Parliament which had declared itself rooted in popular sovereignty. Harrison was present on only four days of the December debates, on the 14th, 15th, 26th and 29th. He argued on the opening day that the question of religious toleration should not be postponed until the civil constitution was settled, but instead a committee should be appointed to discuss the safeguards for religious freedom. He sought a vote on whether or not the sovereign body would have power in religion or not, clearly anticipating making a defence of the principle of non-interference by the civil power in religious affairs.79Clarke Pprs. ii. 92-3, 100, 112. While the law enjoining attendance at parish churches on Sundays remained on the statute book, this was not a plea for toleration in the sense defined by the Instrument of Government of 1653-4, but rather simply an attempt to be rid of a power of compulsion. There is no doubt that by this time Harrison was fully committed to a millenarian view of events, and was sympathetic to the Leveller position only so far as it was compatible with an eschatological perspective. He took a keen interest in the appearance before the council of officers of the prophetess, Elizabeth Poole, pressing her for specific revelations, and argued for the Agreement as an empowering, liberty-giving document. He expressed the hope among his fellow officers on 13 January 1649 that ‘by this we do very much hold forth a liberty to all the people of God, though yet it may so fall out that it may go hardly with the people of God’, an early recognition that the cause of God may suffer, and a revealing elision between ‘the people’ and ‘the people of God’.80Clarke Pprs. ii. 153-4, 183-6.

Regicide and millenarian Rumper, 1649-53

By this time, the king had been tried and executed. Harrison had been an assiduous attender at the trial, present at most of the sessions in January, and missing the meeting at Westminster Hall on 13 January 1649 to attend the council of officers the short distance away at Whitehall.81Muddiman, Trial, 193-230. He was one of the officers charged with making the arrangements for Charles’s execution, and as he had made a few sporadic appearances in the House in January, was first named among the committee charged with organizing the king’s burial and examining his papers and effects.82Muddiman, Trial, 226; CJ vi. 107b, 112b, 120a, 127a. The commissioners for the king’s trial asked Harrison to move the House to pay the expenses of the court.83CSP Dom. 1648-9, p. 353. He attended the now unicameral Parliament regularly through February. He was given the responsibility of rewarding those who had captured the royalist, Lord Capell (Arthur Capell*), after his escape from the Tower. After that of Henry Marten, his name was second on the list of those charged with reviewing the commissions of the peace, even though he himself was not yet a justice in any county.84CJ vi. 131a, 134a. His service in the north in 1648 accounted for his involvement in managing the military there, and as a colonel it was natural enough that he should be interested in the welfare of soldiers. But at this point in the life of the new commonwealth, his influence and popularity were limited, as evidenced in his failure to secure a place on the new council of state (14 Feb.), even though he had been proposed for it in January.85CJ vi. 137b, 139b, 141b; CSP Dom. 1648-9, p. 345.

Harrison was with Francis Allein* in charge of the investigation into the aborted Cirencester by-election of 2 January 1647. There had been a strong New Model interest in that election, in which not only Sir Thomas Fairfax* but also Nathaniel Rich* had been candidates. Harrison’s interest in this affair derived either from his seniority in the army or from his friendship with Rich, whose religious outlook he was noted as sharing. Either way, this was Harrison’s introduction to the local politics of the Welsh marcher region, as the military men’s opponents included a client of Sir Robert Harley*, whose committee of privileges had let the case lie unresolved for two years. But it was Edmund Harvey who reported from the committee in favour of Fairfax and Rich; Harrison’s attention had presumably been drawn elsewhere.86CJ vi. 142a, 144b. In this period of the early days of the Rump, Harrison served on a number of committees that held various parties to account. These included the Cirencester committee, but also an inquiry into whether the committee of Kent had followed correct procedures, two committees on taking accounts, and a committee for regulating Oxford University.87CJ vi. 142a, 146b, 149b, 154a, 187a. He was involved in a different sort of holding to account when in March he arrested Lucy Hay, countess of Carlisle, who was accused of intriguing with royalists and Presbyterians. She was later fondly recalled by Harrison’s Rumper colleague, Sir Arthur Hesilrige, as one of those who in January 1642 tipped off the Five Members of the king’s coming to arrest them, but such past services evidently cut little ice with Harrison.88HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, vi. 587; Burton’s Diary, iii. 93.

In May, Harrison’s service in Parliament was interrupted by the revolt by Levellers in the army. They hoped to join with elements in his regiment, which had on previous occasions shown itself to be open to radical influences. Any lingering Leveller expectations that Harrison himself might be sympathetic to their cause would have been misplaced. Harrison and Cromwell were united on the need to deal firmly with threats to the new commonwealth. Oxford University gave honorary degrees (19 May) to the leading figures involved in suppressing the mutiny, including Harrison.89Gardiner, Commonwealth and Protectorate, i. 52-4; Al. Ox. Back in the House on the 29th, he was named to the important Navy and Excise Committees, but the surviving attendance lists suggest he played no significant role in the former body.90CJ vi. 219b; SP18/5. On 9 June, Harrison was a teller in a motion that no Member should be allowed to take his seat unless he had acknowledged the authority of the court which had tried the king. Harrison was in favour of putting the motion in an uncompromising wording; his opponents, who carried the day, among them Richard Salwey, presumably sought a more nuanced and less urgent form of words to be employed.91CJ vi. 228a. During the rest of the summer, Harrison was busy in legislation on sales of crown and church lands. Some of his interest in this topic undoubtedly derived from his concern about soldiers’ arrears, in which his own case figured. He had long interested himself in soldiers’ pay, and the sales of confiscated estates offered a solution to an enduring problem. He seems to have been the manager of those aspects of the crown land sales act of 16 July which allowed for arrears to be met from the sell-offs.92CJ vi. 147b, 150b, 207b, 238b, 244b, 245b, 254a, 259b; A. and O. ii. 168.

Harrison was interested in Parliament as a vehicle for religious reform, but only insofar as it had potential for removing prescriptive power from the civil magistrate. He sat on a committee to remove compulsory attendance at church (29 June), but on 6 August found himself on the opposite side from William Purefoy I in a division on the future direction of the church. As work began on a religious settlement, conservatives like Purefoy and John Gurdon hoped to build a structure that would be an English ‘Presbyterian’ model, with forms of church government shared between lay and clerical authority, and with hierarchical committees. Harrison wanted no state system of this kind, so led the noes in the division on whether to accept a Presbyterian model. The vote was a tie, the Speaker cast a vote with the noes, and so for the moment the decision was deferred.93CJ vi. 275b. Soon afterwards, Harrison was chosen for service away from the House, but it provided him with an opportunity to advance his own millenarian vision. On 16 July, a number of gentlemen from south Wales petitioned Parliament for a military successor to Thomas Horton, the colonel who had been in effect governor of south Wales since the second civil war. They named Henry Marten as an acceptable substitute to Horton. They may have proposed him because of reports that he was to have an estate in the Welsh marcher counties settled on him by Parliament (he was granted the manor of Leominster Foreign in September). It was unlikely to have been through any reputation of Marten’s for godliness.94A Perfect Diurnall no. 312 (16-23 July 1649), 9; CJ vi. 248a, 300a; Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. i. 185. The House referred the matter to Fairfax; Harrison’s was the name that on 21 August was settled upon. His religious convictions were well known in army circles; he interpreted scripture to the force being assembled for Ireland. From November 1649, Harrison began to figure in the commissions of the peace for south Welsh counties, but in the December assessment act he appeared for all of Wales. His command seems to have been in south Wales, Gloucestershire and Herefordshire, a posting that gave him influence in the important cities of Gloucester and Bristol, and where he was able to advance the cause of religious radicals who built on the ruins of the once-dominant interest of Sir Robert Harley and his family.95Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. i. 185; HMC Portland, iii. 189; Whitelocke, Diary, 241.

Harrison was away from Westminster between mid-August and mid-November 1649.96CJ vi. 284a, 323b. By the end of November he was being mentioned as a new high steward for Hereford, suggesting to what extent and how quickly he had acquired a high profile in the west of England. His real military function was to provide security in south Wales while the expeditionary force under Cromwell was being assembled for Ireland. He developed a working relationship with the town councillors of Haverfordwest, the main town in the region of embarkation in Pembrokeshire, from this time. He worked with the civic authorities in Bristol to demolish ironworks in the Forest of Dean, which in their view encroached on timber supplies that should be reserved for naval use.97Add. 70006, f. 124; Cal. Recs. Haverfordwest, 92; CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 406-7, 467, 509, 555, 595. These activities helped Harrison develop some kind of constituency base, which he had previously lacked. There is no evidence, for example, that he ever maintained any active correspondence with Wendover, the borough which had elected him to Parliament. When he returned to the House after his tour of duty in Wales and the west, he was better able to advance his own preoccupations there because there was now a regional interest group with which he could work.

Harrison saw a bill for promoting itinerant preaching in Wales through the House. He took the lead in the case of what became the propagation act for Wales because of his associations with a number of individuals who had worked longer in that field than he had. He is likely to have had contact with the millenarian preacher, Vavasor Powell, by this time, and was certainly working with John Jones I*, a north Walian colonel who had been attached to Harrison’s command in south Wales. It was by these means that what began as a petition from north Wales was converted into a wider brief to introduce a scheme for the whole of Wales. Given Harrison’s conflict with Purefoy in August 1649 over the future shape of the English church, the propagation scheme offered an immediate palliative to the problem of the inadequate or absent clergy in the provinces.98CJ vi. 336a, 348a, 352a; S.K. Roberts, ‘Propagating the gospel in Wales: the making of the 1650 Act’, Trans. Hon. Soc. Cymmrodorion n.s. x. 57-75. Furthermore, the legislation obviated the need to address difficult issues such as the ordination of clergy or presentation rights to livings. The military backgrounds of some proponents of the Propagation Act are visible in the provisions which it contained for the indemnity of those who had been in public service for Parliament.99A.M. Johnson, ‘Wales during the Commonwealth and Protectorate’, in D. Pennington, K. Thomas ed. Puritans and Revolutionaries (Oxford, 1978), 239-40. The principle of special local dispensations was supported enthusiastically by Harrison for other places. Bristol had its own propagation act, and Harrison was said to have been behind the rise to importance in Bristol of Denis Hollister* and George Bishop, two of the act’s proponents. Hollister was a Bristol tradesman, Bishop an army officer, but both were linked to Harrison via their millenarianism.100R. Farmer, Sathan Inthron’d in his Chair of Pestilence (1656), 46. In the case of Herefordshire, Harrison was instrumental in securing a special, but limited preaching scheme, and his authority in 1649 and 1650 is evident there and in south Wales in supervising tax collection.101S. Barber, A Revolutionary Rogue (Stroud, 2000), 101 quoting Brotherton Lib. Leeds, Marten Loder mss, b33/135; Letter Bk. of John Byrd ed. Roberts (S. Wales Rec. Soc. xiv), 38, 51. Finally, Harrison supported Sir Arthur Hesilrige in the project of propagation in the northern English counties.102CJ vi. 374a.

Although Harrison was active in the House in initiating these ventures, and was given charge of the efforts to refine the legal procedures they established, he was too busy elsewhere to play any serious part in making the schemes work locally.103CJ vi. 370a. He seems to have been treated rather as a one-man court of appeal, to whom local proprietors could turn in cases of tithe disputes such as that involving the publicist and writer, John Dury, in 1653.104Salusbury Corresp. 182-3. He was, however, by the summer of 1650 regarded as being at the centre of an increasingly powerful political interest, that of the millenarians. When he wrote to Cromwell in July assuring him that Oliver was engaged in ‘the life or death of the Lord’s people’, he did not mean the English people, or the godly in an ecumenical sense, but the ‘remnant’, the self-identified minority of ‘Saints’ who shared Harrison’s excitement at the prospect of Christ’s imminent return.105Original Letters ed. Nickolls, 10. Those who shared in the millenarian network appealed to Harrison against erring colleagues: for example, local complaints against the Baptist minister John Miles, who was active in setting up churches in south Wales, were forwarded to Harrison, John Jones I and Vavasor Powell in London, but Harrison was disinclined to act against Miles.106The Ilston Book ed. B. G. Owens (Aberystwyth, 1996), 36. Despite the limited impact of the propagators in Wales, and the tide of criticism of its proponents’ probity which began to rise as the commonwealth government moved beyond its inaugural year, the scheme won the enduring respect of radicals; in 1659, the millenarian John Rogers enjoined his colleagues to solidarity: ‘let us ... make haste with the main body (as they begun blessedly in that wing of honourable Wales) to move for the relief of the engaged forlorn!’107[J. Rogers], Jegar-Sahadvtha (1657), 139 (E.919.9).

Harrison now had an interest group, the millenarian radicals, behind him in Parliament, and was responsible for encouraging ministers such as Vavasor Powell to preach before it. In February 1650, he was named to various committees involved with managing elections to the council of state, but was not himself elected to the executive body, demonstrating that he was not yet regarded as politically dependable.108CJ vi. 363b, 368b, 374a, vii. 126b; CSP Dom. 1651, p. 222. He was absent from the House all through April, perhaps on military and administrative duties, even though he was reported as being in London still, but returned to Parliament in May. With William Heveningham, he was given responsibility for framing the bill for settling the militia, which confirmed the county basis of organisation and regulated the conduct of commissioners.109CJ vi. 417a; A. and O. ii. 397- 402. This prominence in military administration led to his appointment on 21 June as commander-in-chief of the army, in the absence of Oliver Cromwell in Scotland. A few weeks later, he was appointed lieutenant of ordnance at the Tower of London, an important office which brought him a substantial expectation of over £3,065 in under two years, even if he had to complain that he had not received his due.110CJ vi.428a, 436b, It also reinforced his control over garrisons in London. He was later said to have had 5,000 volunteer soldiers at his disposal in the capital in this period.111Ludlow, Voyce, 199. His military duties included oversight of garrisons and of troop dispositions in the country.112CSP Dom. 1650, pp. 194, 198, 222, 225, 253, 256, 261, 263, 270, 278, 288, 292, 293. Harrison’s direction of the volunteer militia and his growing interest with the congregational churches combined in August when he promoted the churches’ proposal that forces should be raised from them to protect the republic from its enemies, chiefly the Scots. The council of state accepted his suggestion; the ministers Vavasor Powell and Morgan Llwyd were among the millenarians who travelled north in 1651 on commissions given them by Harrison under this initiative.113CSP Dom. 1650, p. 280; Oxford DNB, ‘Morgan Llwyd’; Mercurius Politicus no. 58 (10-17 July 1651), 924 (E.637.11).

Harrison’s parliamentary career during the Rump Parliament was based on an extraordinarily meagre record of attendance. His military duties doubtless curtailed his capacity to appear in the House, but in the whole four years between January 1650 and December 1653, the most attendances he made in any month was 9, in June 1650. Between 1 May and 31 December 1650 he was in the House on an average of 4.5 days per month, but he was able to make an important if sparing contribution nonetheless. On 25 June, he was part of the delegation that assured Sir Thomas Fairfax, (now 3rd Baron Fairfax) that although he had declined their request to command the expedition to Scotland he remained in good standing with Parliament.114CJ vi. 431b; Whitelocke, Diary, 260. He was a teller in a division on 18 July, in which he kept the issue of the excise before the House against those who wanted an adjournment, and on 6 September took the lead in drafting a bill of indemnity for the volunteers who joined the militia, further evidence of his consistent commitment to the principle of encouraging the godly to support the state actively. In Harrison’s mind this approach was a way of encouraging a Fifth Monarchist minority to greater activism, and Members may have been unsympathetic to his language when they voted down some of his committee’s amendments before passing the bill.115CJ vi. 443a, 463b, 469b. Given his prominence in the army, it was natural enough that he should have been added to the Army Committee (10 Sept.), and in the closing months of the year sat on committees on important domestic topics such as those to reform the law, the prisons and poor relief.116CJ vi. 481a, 487b, 488a.

Of greater impact on the direction of the government than any of these was Harrison’s denunciation of Edward Howard*, Lord Howard of Escrick for taking bribes. This was reported from early August 1650, and originated in Howard’s amelioration of cases before the Committee for Advance of Money. Allegations against Howard were fanned by Frances, sister of Edward Montagu I*, but were introduced into Parliament by Harrison, whose comment on Howard’s expulsion on 25 June 1651 was ‘the riddance of such are no loss to us’.117Ludlow, Mems. i. 258; HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, vi. 482; CJ vi. 469a; Worden, Rump Parliament, 243. Harrison’s rigid and uncompromising view of friends and enemies of the republic is also visible in his unhelpfulness towards Col. John Hutchinson*, who was dealing with an estate owned by a Roman Catholic. Harrison’s assurances to Hutchinson that there was nothing personal in his opposition to him cut little ice with Hutchinson’s wife, Lucy. She took a kind of revenge by recording in her biography of her husband how Harrison, having urged his Rumper colleagues to dress soberly to greet the Spanish ambassador, or more probably the Portuguese envoy, himself turned up in a ‘scarlet coat and cloak ... so covered with clinquant [tinsel] that one scarcely could discern the ground’.118Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 197; CJ vi. 516b, 522b.

Despite his undoubted capacity to make enemies, Harrison’s rise to prominence was recognized in his election to the council of state in February 1651, when he appeared prominently, in fifth place, on the list of elected members.119CJ vi. 532b. His attendances at the council followed the same fitful pattern as his appearances in the House; he turned up at 13 sessions in March 1651, but did not sustain that level of commitment, and came only 7 times in April. He was out of the capital for much of 1651, however. In February he was in Bristol, where he was made first a freeman and then a member of the Society of Merchant Venturers, and in April he was in Coventry, enjoying the hospitality of the mayor and burgesses.120CSP Dom. 1651, p. xxxv; Coventry RO, BA/A/A/26/3, pp. 257-8; Bristol RO, 04264/5 p. 17; society of merchant venturers mss, merchants’ hall bk. of proceedings, 1639-70, 189. The leadership of Bristol corporation and the Merchant Venturers was largely identical, conservatively puritan in religion, and certainly not sympathetic to Harrison’s brand of millenarianism. But they shared a similar perspective on relations with foreign powers. Harrison took a sanguine view of the Dutch war, hoping for a decisive sea victory, and opposing Cromwell’s attempts to make peace; and the Bristol merchants were enthusiastic proponents of mercantilism throughout the decade, supportive of the 1651 Navigation Act and advocating an extension of its principles into all areas of trade.121‘Inedited Letters’ ed. Mayer, 217; Capp, Cromwell’s Navy, 130; Bristol Reference Lib. Bristol ms 10160, pp. 239-40; TSP i. 612. Harrison kept in touch with opinion in the provinces by the use of agents who could act as his men-of-business: George Bishop, the Bristol religious radical, secretary to a council of state committee and later Quaker, was one such; Richard Creed, son-in-law of the Welsh minister, Walter Cradock, and Harrison’s clerk at Westminster, was another.122Oxford DNB, ‘George Bishop’; G. Parry, ‘Richard Creed: Mab yng Nghyfraith Walter Cradoc’, National Library of Wales Journal, xxiv. 392-4; A True and Perfect Relation (1654), 11, 12, 13, 14.

Apart from transactions with contacts in Wales and the west of England who shared his religious vision, military duties kept Harrison away from the House and the council of state in 1651. This was particularly the case in the summer, when he was required by Lord General Cromwell to march north to attempt to intercept the forces of Charles Stuart in their march towards London. He was unsuccessful in blocking their progress at Knutsford in Cheshire, and sent regular despatches to Parliament, which were duly read in the House. He pursued the fleeing royalists from Worcester on 3 September, and moved north again, running down the remainder of the Stuart army.123CJ vi. 621b, 622a; vii. 1a, 2b, 4b, 12b, 16a, 18a; Ludlow, Mems. i. 279, 281; ‘Inedited Letters’ ed. Mayer, 180; Oxford DNB. This campaign provided an opportunity for his radical clerical friends, Powell, Llwyd and Cradock, to demonstrate their active commitment to the godly cause, and it was also a vindication of the militia, which Harrison had been strengthening in preparation for the confrontation with the Scots and their covenanted king.124Mercurius Politicus no. 58 (10-17 July 1651), 924 (E.637.11); NLW 11439D, f. 44; CSP Dom. 1651, pp. 97, 99, 102, 156, 187, 191, 293, 339, 447, 513. Once the emergency was over, it was Cromwell who issued orders to reduce the militia which Harrison had sedulously built up.125CSP Dom. 1651, p. 427.

By mid-October, Harrison was back in the House. With his ally Nathaniel Rich, he opposed attempts to delay elections to the council of state (24 Nov.), but failed to retain the seat he had won on it only nine months previously. He attended the conference of MPs and army officers held on 10 December to debate the future direction of public affairs, and doubtless spoke against any re-introduction of a monarchical element into the constitution.126Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 29-30. On 6 January 1652, he unsuccessfully opposed the appointment of the Bristolian and fellow Rumper, Luke Hodges*, as an excise commissioner. An intriguing detail of the relationship between these two was that Harrison, the millenarian, had been made a member of the conservative Bristol Merchant Venturers. Hodges, orthodox in his godly Protestantism, was never a member of that elite mercantile body. Harrison was not in the House again for a month, but when he returned it was to participate in the conference with John Owen* and other ministers, who put forward proposals for a scheme of church government that included a relaxation of the requirement for ministers to be ordained, adumbrated a scheme of ‘triers and ejectors’ in each county and recognised the rights of gathered churches to parity of official esteem with meetings in parish church buildings. Harrison must have listened with interest to some if not all of the proposals in the paper.127The Humble Proposals of Mr Owen ... and other Ministers (1652, E.658.12); CJ vii. 86b. Although a millenarian, Harrison was not unwilling to involve himself in matters relating to the state church, as is evident from his recommendations in 1652 of graduate Presbyterian and Independent clergy for benefices.128Add. 36792, ff. 47v, 51v; Calamy Revised, 70, 111.

Harrison’s failure to win re-election to the council of state, and Cromwell’s directive on scaling down the voluntary militias, showed that there were limitations to his power and influence, even though he remained a formidable figure in the spring of 1652. One commentator found it remarkable that Harrison’s place on the council had been lost, as he had been so ‘active and powerful’ in 1651.129HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, vi. 609. In a letter to Morgan Llwyd, the London Welshman Hugh Prichard opined that the citizens of London were ‘very jealous in their hearts, if not malicious against, honest (as in my conscience I believe he is) M[ajor] G[eneral] H[arrison]’. He reported that articles were to be produced against him to put him out of the House as well as of the council.130NLW 11439D, f. 11. Part of the animus against Harrison may have derived from his involvement (some said his primacy) in driving the case against the merchant Gregory Clement*, which began in February but concluded with his expulsion from the House on 11 May 1652 for adultery.131CJ vii. 93a; Oxford DNB. Harrison’s relations with Cromwell at this point were complex. On the one hand the lord general was sympathetic to Harrison’s brand of godliness, and Harrison felt able confidently to offer Cromwell spiritual advice. Harrison’s fellow millenarians lobbied Cromwell for posts in government. Cromwell criticised Parliament in the presence of Harrison and Rich, whom Edmund Ludlowe II recognised as a ‘party’, for supporting only the interests of clergy and lawyers. On the other hand, Cromwell was willing to confide to others how he felt under too much pressure from Harrison, that he hurried him ‘on to that which he and all honest men will have cause to repent’.132Original Letters ed. Nickolls, 10, 55-6, 86; Ludlow, Mems. i. 346. Harrison was an enthusiast for the Dutch war, which Cromwell was not, and wished to escalate international conflict still further, to demonstrate to the nations of Europe ‘the Lord about his threshing-work’.133‘Inedited Letters’ ed Mayer, 200. Harrison’s friends in Ireland implored him to put in a word with Cromwell on behalf of the sects when a successor to Lord Deputy Henry Ireton was appointed.134‘Inedited Letters’ ed. Mayer, 207-8.

Harrison was struggling to decide where the priorities of the godly nation should lie: in an aggressive foreign policy, ‘to run after Christ to sea, whereon He hath begun to set His right foot’, or in ensuring that ‘men fearing the Lord’ should be placed in positions of authority at home.135‘Inedited Letters’ ed. Mayer, 200. One of his intimates at this time was the Seeker, William Erbery (Erbury), who had renounced his position as a preacher under the south Wales commissioners for propagating the gospel after concluding that tithes, even when put in trust and farmed, were unlawful, and that the condition of Welsh souls was as impoverished as ever.136W. Erbery, The Grand Oppressor: or the Terror of Tithes (1652), 62 (E.671.13); Meyer, ‘Inedited Letters’, 200. For his part, Harrison remained as committed to the Welsh experiment as before. He attended the Committee for Plundered Ministers on 16 March 1652 to lodge an objection to a petition from south Wales against the propagators. His subsequent conduct earned him the obloquy of hostile south Walians, including Edward Freeman*, a former client of the Harley family in Herefordshire, and the minister Alexander Griffith. Harrison allegedly removed the propagation commissioners’ account books from public view, got his clerk, Richard Creed, to draft the wording of an order referring the whole matter to Parliament so that it favoured the commissioners, sat on both the Committee of Plundered Ministers and the sub-committee investigating its conduct, and finally arranged the arrest of the petitioners’ solicitor. 137A True and Perfect Relation (1654), 5, 9, 11, 13, 16-17. Even though Harrison played no part in Wales in the affairs of the propagation commissioners, he was henceforth indelibly associated with its odour of corruption.

The stories of Harrison’s sub rosa activities in defence of the propagation commission suggest that his impact on the proceedings of Parliament could have been more substantial than the modest tally of his attendances would suggest. It was in this significant but unquantifiable sense of influence rather than mere presence that a modern historian may be justified in concluding that Harrison dominated the Rump by August 1652.138Worden, Rump Parliament, 308-9. His more public work in the House during 1652 included arranging the transfer of powers of the various committees easing obstructions in sales of confiscated property. Harrison opposed the proposal that the commissioners for compounding with delinquents should assume these duties, and was first named to the committee that drafted the act of 1 April which consolidated the duties of easing obstructions in seven commissioners, one of whom was the Bristolian, Robert Aldworth*.139CJ vii. 112a; A. and O. ii. 581-2. He was given charge of a committee to review the laws on poor relief and vagrancy (27 Apr.), though no legislation seems to have been forthcoming as a result.140CJ vii. 127b, 129a. Given his bellicose views on overseas confrontations and his hostility to the now-dismantled episcopal state church, it is unsurprising that he supported a move to melt down cathedral bells to make naval guns.141CJ vii. 152b. His continuing closeness to Cromwell is suggested by their pairing as tellers in a division on whether to allow the reading of a petition by Alderman John Fowke, a radical London merchant who claimed compensation for losses incurred in a dispute with the East India Company. Cromwell and Harrison supported Fowke against Algernon Sydney and Harbert Morley, with whom Harrison had clashed on previous occasions.142CJ vii. 115a, 154b, 175a; Worden, Rump Parliament, 284, 311-2.

In purely parliamentary terms, the apogee of Harrison’s standing probably came with his being first named to the committee which reviewed and selected petitions for consideration by the House (27 Aug.).143CJ vii. 171b. Also that month came the petition of army officers to Parliament. Harrison was included in the committee of MPs to receive it, and sympathised with many of its aims. Not only did it call in its first clause for a ministry not supported by tithes, but it echoed many themes that had woven in and out of Harrison’s preoccupations in Parliament, including poor relief, law reform and indemnity.144Mercurius Politicus no. 115 (12-19 Aug. 1652), 1803-6 (E.674.6); CJ vii. 164b; Ludlow, Mems. i. 348-9; Worden, Rump Parliament, 308-9. The petition called for consideration of qualifications for electors, so that only those well affected to the current regime could be returned to future Parliaments. Harrison was himself the object of appeals from the gathered churches on constitutional matters: the congregations of Herefordshire and Gloucestershire, his region of influence, bracketed his name with that of Cromwell in their petitions in the interests of the godly.145Original Letters ed. Nickolls, 123. He continued to promote fiery preachers like Christopher Feake, whose millenarianism was to the taste of few MPs, on occasions of religious observance in Parliament, but by November 1652 had become pessimistic about the capacity of the Rump to perform God’s work. He reported to John Jones I, then in Ireland, his sense of a ‘great ebb’ in the prospects of the godly, but retained some optimism nonetheless that ‘our blessed Lord will shortly work with eminence’.146‘Inedited Letters’ ed. Mayer, 214-5. He scraped home in the November elections to the council of state, only because his name was drawn from a hat, and was named to a number of important council committees, but his attendance record afterwards, both in Parliament and the council, remained as patchy as ever.147CJ vii. 221a; CSP Dom. 1652-3, pp. xxviii-xxxii, 16, 28, 37, 45, 160, 181, 216.

Enthusiast for a New Representative, 1652-3

Harrison looked to meetings of representatives of gathered churches, such as those held at Allhallows the Great, to co-ordinate the effort of congregations to nurture and extend the principle of propagating the gospel, and called upon John Jones I to organize the Saints in Ireland to lend their weight in support.148‘Inedited Letters’ ed. Mayer, 218. This tendency of Harrison to mobilize support from excitable elements outside Parliament should not be taken as evidence of any withdrawal on his part from the mainstream of public affairs. On the contrary, the church meetings at All Hallows prayed specifically for a new public representative body, further proof that by November 1652 Harrison had lost patience with the Rump.149W. Erbery, The Bishop of London (1653), 1-2 (E.684.26). He was at a committee meeting, possibly of the Committee for Plundered Ministers, in November 1652 to back the Congregationalist minister Thomas Brooks in his efforts to stave off critics for refusing to administer the ordinances of the church to the ungodly, and continued to hope for a decisive sea victory over the Dutch.150‘Inedited Letters’ ed. Mayer, 215, 217, 218; Calamy Revised, 79; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 32. Behind Harrison lay his regiment, stationed in London, the power he continued to exercise as lieutenant of the ordnance; and the ‘party’ that he was credited with, which included not only influential MPs and army officers such as Nathaniel Rich, with whom Harrison had been linked earlier in parliamentary activity, but also men like Thomas Westrowe and William Purefoy I, known best for the intensity of their godliness rather than any Fifth Monarchist leanings.151Firth, ‘Cromwell and the expulsion of the Long Parliament in 1653’, EHR viii. 530. It was this strength behind the millenarian outpourings that made Harrison potentially dangerous and lay behind the report that Cromwell, never comfortable with any reports of rivals, had to confront him in March 1653 over rumours that he was building a private army.152‘Inedited Letters’ ed. Mayer, 218; CSP Dom. 1651-2, p. 211; CCSP ii. 189. If this story was true it coincided with a wider and deeper public crisis in the spring of 1653 when Parliament failed to renew the propagation commission.

Harrison played a major part in the dissolution of the Rump in 1653, and influenced the shape of the settlement that immediately succeeded it. In January 1653, with the beseechings of the London congregations still fresh, he was given charge of a committee to bring in a bill for a new Parliament, but seems not to have taken any initiatives of his own in acting upon the brief, and the lead passed to Sir Arthur Hesilrige, who did not share Harrison’s Fifth Monarchist outlook or his pessimism about the Rump, and who was at this time described as being of Cromwell’s camp rather than Harrison’s.153CJ vii. 244b; Firth, ‘Cromwell and the expulsion of the Long Parliament’, 527, 530; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 54. Years later, a claim was made that meetings between the leading army officers and MPs took place in early April 1653, in which Members were invited to adopt the more radical policies of the army. Discussions broke down when the Rump moved from its initial refusal to countenance elections at all to a precipitate rush towards hasty elections that would betray the godly cause and an element in the crisis was undoubtedly the failure of Parliament to renew the propagation commission in Wales.154A Faithfull Searching Home Word (1659), 8-9 (E.774.1). Edmund Ludlowe II believed that Cromwell manipulated Harrison into supporting him for his own ends, but asserted that Harrison himself told Ludlowe that he knew fully what the implications were of dissolution. ‘Sir, the work is very great and dangerous, therefore I desire you seriously to consider of it before you engage in it’, Harrison apparently recalled telling Cromwell.155Ludlow, Mems. i. 350, 352. On 20 April, Harrison was attempting to persuade the House not to proceed with the bill for elections before Cromwell arrived. He and Harrison sat briefly together, and conferred, before Cromwell set about dissolving the Rump. It was Harrison who helped the Speaker down from his chair (probably not manhandling him as some hostile sources reported) before joining Cromwell and John Lambert* in dismissing the council of state.156Ludlow, Mems. i. 354, 357; A Compleat Collection of the Lives (1660), 3; Whitelocke, Diary, 286; HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, vi. 615; Oxford DNB.

Harrison’s political influence was at its zenith during the immediate aftermath of the dissolution of the Rump. He wanted a Jewish-style Sanhedrin of 70 members to assume supreme power, as against the preferences of others for a small executive council or a body representative only of counties. At a session on 30 April of the interim council, Harrison presented a communication from his Fifth Monarchist ally, John Jones I, which evidently had an influence on the course of the meeting, and soon afterwards Cromwell announced to his intimate colleagues, including Harrison and Walter Cradock, that anyone ‘faithful to the Saints’ would now be promoted over others to positions in government.157Ludlow, Mems. i. 358; ‘Inedited Letters’ ed. Mayer, 226; A Faithfull Searching Home Word, 14. The eventual dispensation under the new regime was the council ruling with an assembly nominated by army officers and church congregations, although the nominations had to be approved by the council. During this process, Harrison was busy conferring with Vavasor Powell in order to compile a list of suggestions for seats in north Wales, and sought the views of John Jones I on his choices. The suggestions of the gathered churches in Gloucestershire and Herefordshire went a long way towards shaping the final picture of representation in those counties, and doubtless Harrison’s voice was heard in the process. Harrison meanwhile continued in his eagerness for foreign war, now against France.158‘Inedited Letters’ ed. Mayer, 227. Despite his apparent ascendancy, however, there is a hint of tension between him and Cromwell; otherwise the tale that he had been required to renounce his army commission would not have been worth repeating.159TSP i. 306.

In the Nominated Assembly, to which Harrison was co-opted by the Parliament, he did not deviate from his usual pattern of a high impact on the proceedings in relation to the light amount of effort he put into attending. In divisions in July, ominously, he in effect demonstrated his impatience with the continuation of tithes, although he had been first-named to the committee on that topic.160A List of the Names of all the Members (1653, 669.17.45); CJ vii. 285b, 286a. Among the other committees on which he sat were those on Scottish affairs (9 July), for the various state treasuries (12 July), and for law reform.161CJ vii. 283b, 287a, 304b, 346a. He was a member of the body which allocated the business of the House to appropriate committees, and for the sales of woodlands, a topic in which he had previously been interested, both in a public capacity in the Forest of Dean, and privately with regard to his own acquired former crown estates.162CJ vii. 285a, 322a; CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 467; 1652-3, p. 25; 1653-4, p. 14; SP18/17/71. But very quickly divisions in the Assembly were visible to the members of Harrison’s party, as early as mid-August, when he and John Jones I attributed parliamentary contentions to ‘our lusts’.163‘Inedited Letters’ ed. Mayer, 238. This is unsurprising, if newsletter stories of the previous May were correct. Then it was said that Harrison attributed the opportunities offered by the Parliament wholly to God

The Lord had now at last made the General instrumental to put the power into the hands of his people (meaning the fanatic gathered churches) contrary to his intentions; that it was the Lord’s work and no thanks to his Excellency.164Firth, ‘Cromwell and the expulsion of the Long Parliament’, 529.

By October, Harrison was reported to be ‘under a cloud’ as the rift between reformers and conservatives, by now numbering Cromwell among them, deepened.165HMC 15th Rep. VII, 158. Harrison led the group advocating the removal of chancery, a new model for the law, reform of ecclesiastical presentations and hostility to the preferences of the committee on tithes. He was active in shaping the commissions of the peace, particularly the Welsh ones. In one county, there were complaints that ‘by the means of Harrison all the honestest, ablest and most understanding gentry are put out of commission’.166TSP ii. 129. By early November, Robert Harley* was reporting to his father, Sir Robert*, that Cromwell was allowing Harrison to build a party against him while he himself prepared to take some regal authority. Harley also reported that the Independent minister Hugh Peter had begun to preach in favour of tithes, and it was this topic which eventually precipitated the resignation of authority by the conservatives. On 7 December Harrison was reported by Edward Cooke* to have announced in the House that he would rather surrender his judgement on tithes than persist against a better judgment, a comment that should probably be taken as an indication that Harrison had given up hope of steering through permanent reform.167HMC 15th Rep. VII, 159. Harrison was said to have announced that he would ‘leave this place [Parliament] and come no more’.168TSP i. 589, 612.

Alienation and Final Years, 1654-60

The demise of the Nominated Assembly saw the immediate collapse of Harrison’s standing in legitimate politics. Under the protectorate, he became an object of suspicion to the new government. It was rumoured in January 1654 that he might raise an army against Cromwell, and at the end of that month, there were reports of desertions among Harrison’s former regiment, quartered in Scotland, particularly among the troop that had been raised in Wales.169Faithful Scout no. 163 (27 Jan.-3 Feb. 1654), 1293 (E.223.33); Perfect Diurnall no. 215 (30 Jan.-6 Feb. 1654), 3098 (E.223.35). His military commission was taken away, and he lost his place in the commissions of the peace.170A Faithfull Searching Home Word, 30; TSP i. 632, 641, 642. Even so, some of this evaporation of power must have taken place beyond public gaze, because some radicals still believed Harrison to be in the lord protector’s council as late as March 1654.171NLW 11439D, f. 38. This was impossible; Cromwell was now Harrison’s implacable enemy. Ludlowe reports that Cromwell sent for Harrison, Rich and John Carew*, and accused Harrison of designs on his office of lord general while he was in Scotland and Harrison was commander in England. Harrison was confined to his property in Staffordshire, but inevitably he became a focal point for the discontents among radicals. In July 1654, against persistent reports that he would work to undermine the army, Harrison was said to have been returned in eight constituencies for the first Protectorate Parliament, but there was no serious prospect of his election taking place.172TSP i. 414; HMC Egmont, i. 546.

Cromwell summoned Harrison to an interview, and released him, but further serious intelligence suggesting Harrison’s involvement in plotting led to his arrest and imprisonment in Carisbrooke castle (22 Feb. 1655).173A True Catalogue; or an Account of the Several Places and Most Eminent Persons (1659), 12-13 (E.999.12); Ludlow, Mems. i. 380. Other millenarian radicals, laymen and ministers, joined him in captivity. Harrison was still in Carisbrooke at the end of November, when he, John Carew, and the preacher, John Rogers, prayed together. Rogers recorded various kindnesses that Harrison performed to make the minister’s detention more bearable.174Ludlow, Mems. i. 380; A True Catalogue, 12-13; [J. Rogers], Jegar-Sahadvtha, 29 (2nd pagination). 38, 43, 44, 54. A head of steam was building up to secure Harrison’s release – in Lewes, Sussex, for example, the gathered churches insisted that nothing less than his freedom would suffice – and Cromwell eventually relented. In February, Harrison, Carew, Hugh Courtney* and Nathaniel Rich were released, but in a game of cat-and-mouse, it was not until April that people could ‘flock’ to hear Harrison hold forth at a meeting in Highgate, Middlesex, where his late father-in-law had lived.175TSP iv. 151, 161, 590, 593, 624-5, 698; CSP Dom. 1655-6, pp. 190, 215. Unbowed, Harrison was still proclaiming that ‘the Saints shall take the kingdom and possess it’.176[J. Rogers], Jegar-Sahadvtha, 113; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 6-8. In response to John Jones I’s encouragement in July that he should make his peace with the lord protector, Harrison hoped that Cromwell would ‘retreat from the evil of his ways and myself from mine’, but insisted that the government had ‘turned aside’.177‘Inedited Letters’ ed. Mayer, 257-8. In August he was once again said to have been elected to the new Parliament that was due to meet in September, but he was returned for no constituency.178CSP Dom. 1656-7, p. 67.

Venner’s aborted rising in the spring of 1657 was followed by another round-up of those implicated, among them Harrison.179CSP Dom. 1656-7, pp. 344, 351; Clarke Pprs. iii. 106; TSP vi. 185-6. In 1658 he was in the Tower, feared to be at the centre of another plot, and indeed in 1659 even royalists began to talk with interest of his potential in their own machinations, though nothing was ever acted upon.180CCSP iv. 85, 164, 169, 176, 192, 202, 220, 222, 404. In December 1658, he was again said to have been elected to Parliament, for Stone in Staffordshire, even though that place was not a parliamentary borough, and such was the power of his name among rumour-mongers that fictitious reports were fed back to exiled royalists of the vigorous contribution he was alleged to have made in Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament.181Clarke Pprs. iii. 171, 172; CCSP iv. 133, 157; TSP vii. 590. In fact, Harrison was by this time a completely spent force, both in politics and the army, and took no part in the public events of 1659, to everyone’s evident puzzlement. In September of that year, the restored Rump Parliament disabled him for not turning up to any of its sittings. Harrison instead stayed in Staffordshire, to the disappointment of his friends. One of his allies, Nathaniel Rich, attributed the downturn in the fortunes of the sovereign Parliament to the way it had treated Harrison.182HMC Leyborne-Popham, 169. He was arrested at his house in May 1660 by agents of the restored monarchy, and was sent again to the Tower. 183CJ viii. 22; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 268, 271.

After Harrison had suffered another three months’ imprisonment, his trial on 11 October 1660, for high treason, as one of the most vigorous and irrepressible of the regicides, offered a great propaganda opportunity to the new monarchical government. He reluctantly pleaded not guilty, and repudiated the court’s suggestion that he knew the ways of the law.184A Complete Collection of State-Trials (1730), ii. 305. After challenging 35 of the jurors, Harrison listened to evidence that he had urged his colleagues during the framing of the charge against Charles I to find ways to ‘blacken’ the king.185Complete Collection of State-Trials, ii. 309, 313, 315. He asserted that the regicide was ‘not a thing done in a corner’, and was interrupted when he tried to point out that many who sat in judgment in the court were formerly as active against the late king as he had been. He was defiant: ‘Maybe I might be a little mistaken, but I did it all according to the best of my understanding’, and insisted he had done his best to interpret the word of God in scripture, and to act upon the supreme earthly authority of Parliament.186Complete Collection of State-Trials, ii. 315-6. His sentence was inevitable, and he died on 13 October with great courage.187Observations upon the Last Actions and Words of Maj. Gen. Harrison (1660), 15; Ludlow, Voyce, 214-6. As Edmund Ludlowe II put it, Harrison ‘was in every way so qualified for the part he had in the following sufferings, that even his enemies were astonished and confounded’.188Ludlow, Mems. ii. 269. After his death, his sufferings and example elevated him to the status of martyr among the Protestant and republican dissenters, and his former colleague and fellow-millenarian, the minister Vavasor Powell, dreamt just before his death in 1670 that he was in heaven with Harrison and the other Saints.189CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 569; 1661-2, pp. 80, 614; B. Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men, 197, 200.