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Major-General Thomas Harrison (1616–1660) is one of the most complex figures to emerge during the Interregnum. He was promoted through the ranks of the Parliamentary Army, starting as a trooper at the Battle of Powick Bridge, one of the first engagements of the war in September 1642. He rose to command the Army in Wales, and then in England in 1651 while Cromwell was in Scotland.
Unsurprisingly as a prominent Parliamentarian, Harrison was appointed one of the King’s judges, and was an early signatory of the death warrant which sent Charles to his execution.
But his relationship with Cromwell ended in acrimony when Harrison was associated with the Fifth Monarchist movement. These were radical Puritans who believed in Christ’s imminent return to England. They opposed Cromwell’s appointment as Lord Protector and were forced out of Parliament by soldiers. Harrison was arrested and imprisoned four times.
With the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, Harrison knew that he would be marked out for retribution. As the eminent historian, Dr Stephen Roberts describes, he was the first to suffer the King’s revenge.
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When in October 1660, the newly restored monarchical government inflicted the ultimate penalty against those who had signed the death warrant of Charles I, the first to ascend the gallows was Thomas Harrison. Of all the surviving regicides, in the eyes of the government, none was more capable of invoking renewed resistance to the monarchy. The nervousness of the regime was evident in the arrangements for Harrison’s execution, apparent in the way he had been made to walk on the tops of buildings in the City of London, to avoid attracting a crowd, as part of his progress from prison to scaffold. The accounts of his death, from both sympathetic and deeply hostile quarters, attest to the astonishing cheerfulness and confidence of his demeanour that cold October day.
The diarist Samuel Pepys, as neutral and detached an observer as any, witnessed Harrison’s progress to Charing Cross on the ignominious hurdle dragged behind a cart and the terrible hanging and ritual dismemberment of the prisoner’s body while he still lived. Pepys famously recorded how Harrison conducted himself that day:
“as cheerfully as any man could do in that condition… it is said that he said that he was sure to come shortly at the right hand of Christ to judge them that now have judged him”.
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Pepys picked up on a sub-culture of religious fervour in London that year, a cultural element that was firmly subordinate to the more obvious signs of anti-Puritan celebration surrounding the Restoration of Charles II, but was detectable in the City nevertheless. Indeed, an old woman had interposed herself between Harrison and his guards outside Newgate prison to bestow a blessing on him:
“Blessed be the great God of Hosts that hath enabled you and called you forth to bear your testimony; God of all grace and peace be with you and keep you faithful unto death, that you may receive a crown of life”.
And this was his response when Harrison himself was asked by a jeering individual in the crowd where his good old cause was in these circumstances:
“he with a cheerful smile clapped both his hands on his breast and said, ‘Here it is, and I go to seal it with my blood’.
So who was this most charismatic of men?
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Hostile commentators, during Harrison’s lifetime and afterwards, sought to portray Harrison, and indeed most of the other enemies of Charles I and advocates of a republic, as low-born upstart individuals. Harrison was, in one such account, born of ‘very mean parents’. He was born in Newcastle-under-Lyme in Staffordshire in 1616, but far from being from a poor background, he was of a family that was well-established in business in the town for several generations. The Harrisons had held civic office in the borough for a century, and Thomas Harrison’s father, a butcher and grazier, was an alderman and the mayor in 1644, the fourth time he had taken that role.
Probably educated at a local grammar school, Thomas was sent to London as a youth to work as an attorney’s clerk: his master practised in the court of common pleas, and it was no doubt intended that Harrison himself would in due course enter the legal profession on his own account. He was brought up in a conventional Godly Puritan household, where piety in the home, measured by private devotions and Bible study, would have complemented unfailing church attendance and other public religious observance.
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Newcastle-under-Lyme was a Parliamentary borough, sending two MPs to the House of Commons, but the dominant electoral power there was that of a Puritan-inclined peer, Robert Devereux, third Earl of Essex, Lord Lieutenant of Staffordshire, whose estate, Chartley, was just 12 miles from Newcastle. When two Parliaments in quick succession were called in 1640, after an interval of 11 years, the borough’s choices were uncontentious and perfectly acceptable to Lord Lieutenant Essex. However, as the political temperature quickly rose, divisions were apparent in the town. At the outbreak of Civil War, Harrison, in London, joined the lifeguard of the Earl of Essex, who had become Parliament’s choice as Lord General of its principal army to be put into the field against King Charles. It was a natural choice for a man accustomed to the influence of the Earl in his home town, and who as someone connected to the law was on hand when the lifeguard was raised at the inns of court, London’s legal quarter.
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Harrison quickly saw action: in October 1642 as a trooper in the lifeguard, at the indecisive Battle of Edgehill on the Warwickshire-Oxfordshire border, and when the town of Reading fell to Parliament in April the following year, after a siege of a couple of weeks’ duration. Later in 1643, Harrison was one of a group of soldiers who transferred with their colonel in the lifeguard, Charles Fleetwood, to the army of the Eastern Association, a military unit running parallel to Essex’s army, commanded by the second Earl of Manchester. This was the outfit in which Oliver Cromwell served, and it contained many regiments in which Godly enthusiasm flourished. The departure of Harrison and Fleetwood was a relief to Essex and their arrival in the Eastern Association a tonic to the Godly officers of Manchester’s army.
Complaints about the sluggishness and lack of resolve of Essex’s army were being made by London radicals, but the conservative Parliamentarians surrounding the Earl apparently engineered a quarrel with Fleetwood and Harrison, two of the army’s most radical figures, to provoke them to leave. After the move, Fleetwood remained a colonel, and Harrison, a captain, was soon promoted to major. The regiment was noted for its active piety, and adherence to the principle of religious Independency, the belief that Christian congregations should be autonomous, self-governing and free from compulsion or religious hierarchy:
“Look on Col. Fleetwood’s regiment with his Major Harrison, what a cluster of preaching officers and troopers there is”
- noted one Parliamentarian not of their persuasion.
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By the time of the battle of Marston Moor, in North Yorkshire, on 2 July 1644, Harrison had become a staunch supporter of Oliver Cromwell. He was selected to give a report of the battle to the body that directed military campaigning, the Committee of Both Kingdoms. Despite the suspicions he drew from Presbyterians and their allies, he survived the review of the officer cadre that took place when Parliament passed the Self-Denying Ordinance and in April 1645 established the New Model Army. He remained as Fleetwood’s major, and fought with him at Naseby in June that year. A close observer of Harrison at this time was Richard Baxter, minister at Kidderminster, Worcestershire, serving with the army as a chaplain. Baxter was with Harrison at the battle of Langport, in Somerset, fought soon after Naseby. When the royalist troops began to flee under pressure from the Roundheads, Baxter recorded:
“I happened to be next to Major Harrison … and heard him with a loud voice break forth into the praises of God with fluent expressions as if he had been in a rapture”.
He compared Harrison’s personality to that of someone fortified with alcohol:
“of such a vivacity, hilarity and alacrity as another man when he hath drunken a cup too much”.
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His exploits in combat became noted as he himself gained attention and notoriety in the London press. An incident at the siege of Basing House, in Hampshire, was reported in one account as Harrison killing two men, ‘with his own hands’ during hand-to-hand fighting; in another as his murder of three men after the house surrendered.
The reputation of Cromwell and the New Model Army was by this time in the ascendancy, and it was natural that such an eloquent enthusiast for its cause, with a record of contacts with the Commons as an emissary, should be found a place in the House. Mentioned first of all in connection with a vacant seat at Ilchester, Somerset, he eventually secured a seat at Wendover, Buckinghamshire. In neither of these boroughs did Harrison have any contacts, except with backers and fixers of the Independents in Parliament and army. His only connection with Wendover was that the army was camped in that part of Buckinghamshire when the writ for an election was moved in the Commons.
He was admitted to the Commons as Member for Wendover on 2 November 1646. Within weeks, he had been named to one of the most important committees of the House, the Committee of Privileges, which regulated membership of the Commons by adjudicating on disputed elections. Now a soldier-MP, he did a short tour of duty in Ireland in 1647 and on his return attended the Commons before re-joining his regiment in Saffron Walden, Essex. In the aftermath of the Civil War fighting, this was a period when the soldiery of the army demanded pay and Indemnity from prosecution for actions while engaged in arms. Parliament was less responsive to their representations than the army wished. For his part, Harrison sympathised with the soldiers, and stood with the army to reassure the nervous City of London fathers that the capital should not fear, as the army advanced closer towards it.
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There is nothing to suggest that Harrison enjoyed close relations with the Levellers, or even that he was particularly sympathetic to them as a body. Their attention to the electoral Franchise, the plight of small traders and the re-distribution of political power, allowed little space for the essentially religious perspective of Harrison. Politically, in 1647 he was above all an ally, a henchman even, of the so-called army Grandees: Cromwell, his son-in-law Henry Ireton and others, and was behind them in support of the Heads of the Proposals, an army officer inspired attempt at a constitution that would have invested power firmly in the hands of Parliament, and enshrined liberty of conscience for a wide variety of religious opinion, albeit of a Protestant variety.
The summer of 1647 saw Harrison achieve command of a New Model Cavalry regiment, confirming that he continued to make more of a mark on the army than on the Commons. He was rather late in joining the celebrated debates in Putney Church in October that year. This was the meeting at which the Leveller-inspired Agreement of the People was on the table, forming the basis of the impassioned discussions between the junior officers of the army and their much senior commanders.
A pre-eminent historian of the period, Christopher Hill, has compared these inclusive debates to those held by Russian Soviets during the Bolshevik Revolution. William Clarke, secretary to the army council, recorded the speeches in near-verbatim prose, but captured no intervention of Harrison’s. Given the irrepressible character of Harrison, it seems unlikely therefore that he was present during the opening debates; but on 11 November at a committee of officers he began proceedings by a memorable, hardline pronouncement denouncing the King and arguing that the army had no moral duty to discuss any constitutional settlement with him:
“The King was a Man of Blood, and therefore the Engagement taken off, and that they were to prosecute him.”
He doubted whether the House of Lords had any right of a veto:
“If the Lords had right … he would not go against it, but if they had usurped it 100, 200 or 1000 years, the greater was the wrong, and they to be debarred of that power.”
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Harrison would be associated with the Man of Blood speech for years to come. It was an allusion to an Old Testament passage condemning the unlawful shedding of blood by a transgressor:
blood shall be imputed unto that man; he hath shed blood; and that man shall be cut off from among his people.
Cromwell chose to respond to Harrison’s forceful intervention by offering some alternative scripture passages for discussion, drawing out different inferences from Harrison’s, but without denying he had a case.
The outbreak of the serious of revolts against Parliamentary rule in 1648, known to historians as the Second Civil War, only deepened Harrison’s hostility to the King’s continued rule. Harrison, like Cromwell, was an unwavering believer in God’s Providence – the notion that things happened for a purpose, God’s purpose, and that in defying the will of Parliament, and the people, God’s people, the King was defying God himself, and bringing unnecessary further misery to the country he claimed to rule through the will of God.
In the north of England, Harrison was himself badly wounded in suppression of the Royalist incursion from Scotland, which could only intensify his alienation from the monarchy. By May 1648, Harrison’s uncompromising perspective was shared more widely among the soldiery of the New Model Army. The Levellers claimed him as a supporter of their radical manifesto, the Agreement of the People: they reported his judgement that the Agreement was ‘as just, as rational, and as equitable, as possibly could be’. However unbending and unambivalent were Harrison’s principles, his personal demeanour was said always said to be verbally conciliatory, friendly and emollient. In one of the stranger encounters of the period, Charles and Harrison, his nemesis, came face to face in December 1648, when the colonel’s task was to convey the captive King from the Isle of Wight to Windsor castle. Charles thought Harrison had come to assassinate him, but fancied himself an expert reader of faces to discern character. Having peered at Harrison on horseback, he pronounced that the colonel, or major as he persisted in calling him:
“Looked like a Soldier; his Aspect was good, not such a one as was represented; having some Judgment in Faces, if he had observed him so well before, he should not have harboured that ill Opinion of him; for oft-times the Spirit and Disposition may be discerned by the Countenance; yet in that, one may be deceived.”
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At one point, the two men spent half an hour in private conversation, the King quizzing him about his rumoured regicidal intentions. For his part, faced with such a direct, if courteous, challenge, Harrison responded in a way that satisfied his interlocutor, but to say the very least left some ambiguity for those pondering his words:
“The Law was equally obliging to great and small, and Justice had no respect to Persons.”
By the time Harrison’s task of escorting the King to Windsor had been completed, Colonel Thomas Pride’s men had purged the Parliament of men hostile to the army; the Commons had brought in an ordinance to put the King on trial; and had declared that all sovereign political power lay in the people of England. Naturally, Harrison was behind these developments, and had now come fully to embrace Fifth Monarchist principles.
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The beliefs of the Millenarians, or Fifth Monarchy Men, as they were sometimes called, were based on a close reading of both Old and New Testaments of the Bible. If one text of the Bible was paramount in informing their view of the world, it was the Book of Daniel, which in obscure, allusive language and imagery, ripe for speculative interpretation, identified four Kingdoms or eras that provided a framework for interpreting the history of humanity. For the most radical of Protestant believers, the ferment and political upheavals of 1640s England appeared in January 1649 to be a process rather than a chapter of accidents, reaching a culmination in the downfall of a monarchy which had occupied the English throne since the Norman Conquest.
What would follow? For those who discerned the hand of God at work among these political developments, and whose devotions seemed to be rewarded with military victories and the overthrow of enemies, the world seemed on the threshold of a new reign, the fifth world order or monarchy, that of King Jesus. Fifth Monarchism or Millenarianism is best thought of as a strand within radical Protestant thinking. No congregation or sect called itself a Fifth Monarchy church, but those ideas seeped into the membership of a range of independent congregations from the late 1640s onwards, stimulated by the revolutionary turn of events.
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For Harrison personally, God had granted a front-row seat at monarchy’s downfall. Within weeks of his extraordinary conversation with the King, he was acting as one of his judges in Westminster Hall. He also attended concurrent meetings of the Army Officers’ Council in nearby Whitehall, where his speeches were laden with excitement at the prospect of revolution:
“The Word of God doth take notice, that the powers of this world shall be given into the hands of the Lord and his Saints; that this is the day, God’s own day, wherein he is coming forth in glory in the world, and he doth put forth himself very much by his people, and he says in that day wherein he will thresh the mountains he will make use of Jacob as that threshing instrument … “
What was meant by ‘the Saints’ were all living true Christian believers, and ‘Jacob’ in this context the New Model Army and its supporters, together constituting the prevailing civil power. A little over two weeks after making this speech, with its strictly biblical interpretation of political events, Harrison was among the officers charged with arrangements for the King’s execution and burial. The reign of King Jesus was about to begin.
Harrison had been one of the most regular attenders at the King’s trial, eager to further the cause of the people of England, in whose name the prosecution of the King had been brought. But for some years it had been increasingly evident that underlying Harrison’s thinking, even if only as yet partially formed, was the view that the people of England and the people of God were not, after all, really synonymous. It was obvious who the people of England were: England’s citizens, the former King’s subjects; but the people of God were the Saints, the true believers, those who sought to organise themselves into independent congregations in fellowship. In other words, the people of God were a people set apart from the godless majority.
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Springing from this intellectual dichotomy lay a divergence between on the one hand the Levellers, with their emphasis on extending political rights and widening the concept of citizenship; and on the other, Harrison’s commitment to a rule of the Saints. The Levellers had entertained high hopes of help from Harrison, but they had misread their man, as indeed in a different sense had Charles. Harrison’s words at the Whitehall Officers’ Council in December 1648 had been ominous: when assessing the value of the Levellers’ manifesto he had not given it more than a qualified endorsement, with potential danger in it for God’s people:
“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.”
The Levellers looked for support from Harrison’s regiment, but none came. He did nothing personally to help the Leveller-inspired mutineers of the army in their last stand against Cromwell at Burford, Oxfordshire, in May 1649. In fact, his regiment helped suppress the mutiny, and he himself was rewarded, as was Cromwell, with an honorary degree from Oxford University.
[25.47]
A few months after this, Harrison was given a military promotion, to be major-general over Wales and the adjacent marcher counties of Herefordshire and Gloucestershire. His brief included securing the peace in a part of the country that had been notoriously loyal to the late King. His command gave him authority in important cities such as Bristol and Gloucester, and brought him into contact with independent, like-minded congregations, for which he became an attentive patron. Harrison thus acquired a personal following, and with a seat in the single chamber Parliament and access to the ear of Commander-in-Chief Oliver Cromwell, upon whose support rested the entire Republican edifice, his political reach was extensive. Harrison soon used it to advance the interests of the Saints. He was a main backer of a scheme to support itinerant ministers in Wales, and his hand is detectable in similar projects to provide preachers and promote religious evangelicalism in Bristol and Herefordshire. He gave every support he could to a parallel endeavour in the north of England.
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Such was Harrison’s authority and influence by the summer of 1650, that in June that year he was appointed commander-in-chief of the entire army while Cromwell was away fighting in Scotland. He spent little time in Parliament, but this proved no obstacle to election to the Council of State, the principal executive committee of the Commonwealth, the following year. By this time he had acquired something of a swagger, no doubt buoyed up by continued evidence of God’s continued favour. His appearance did not always match the conventional image of the dour, sober Puritan. Lucy Hutchinson, in her biography of her husband, Colonel John Hutchinson, has left us a memorable report of Harrison’s vanity. On the eve of a conference between leading English politicians and the Portuguese ambassador, Harrison exhorted his colleagues to:
“shine … in wisdom, piety, righteousness and justice, and not in gold and silver and worldly bravery, which did not become Saints.”
His colleagues took note of his urgings, and turned up for the conference in sombre, black cloaks; Harrison himself however, appeared in:
“a scarlet coat and cloak, both laden with gold and silver lace, and the coat so covered with tinsel that one scarcely could discern the ground.”
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His expensive tastes in clothes had previously been noticed by the King’s entourage on the Isle of Wight, and indeed by the King himself when he first encountered Harrison:
“gallantly mounted and armed; a velvet montero [hunting cap] … on his head, a new buff-coat upon his back, and a crimson silk scarf about his waist, richly fringed.”
Harrison’s flamboyance and exuberance were as likely to earn him enemies as well as friends, and Godly zeal did not necessarily translate into successful policies. The scheme for propagating the gospel in Wales soon became mired in controversy surrounding its finances, and more importantly, the Parliament failed to introduce the reforms which Cromwell, who was by 1653 almost as enamoured of millenarian notions as Major-General Harrison, had hoped for. Even Harrison detected a ‘great ebb’ in the prospects of the Saints, but optimistically held to the belief that:
“’our blessed Lord will shortly work with eminence.”
In April 1653, Cromwell lost patience. The major-general assisted the supreme army commander in expelling the assembly, Harrison personally encouraging Speaker William Lenthall to quit the chair and the chamber.
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The political influence of the Fifth Monarchists was evident in what followed. Supreme power now rested with Cromwell, who moved quickly to establish a new regime of a council ruling with an assembly, chosen by Godly army officers and independent congregations: the Nominated Assembly or Barebones Parliament, as it is often called. Harrison’s hand was evident in the size of the assembly, which he wanted to be modelled on Old Testament precedents, and in the predominant say of religious radicals in the counties, many of them actively conferring with the major-general. Ominously, signs of strain in the relationship between Harrison and Cromwell, who was always wary of political rivals, began to appear. These intensified when the assembly failed after a mere six months. A disillusioned Cromwell began to doubt God’s plan for England, and took upon himself the title of Lord Protector.
For Harrison, after 1653, came years in the political wilderness. Refusing to go along with Cromwell’s loss of confidence in the capacities of the Saints, he lost his army commission and any place in Cromwell’s government or his Parliaments. He was now a rallying-point for increasingly embittered radicals in the churches, and for disenfranchised Republicans. Opposition to Cromwell’s rule bubbled up in the form of risings, both planned and occasionally acted upon, and Harrison spent time in detention: in the Tower, and in Carisbrooke Castle – on the Isle of Wight, where he had encountered the King in a condition he himself now experienced. He was a spent force politically.
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At his trial in 1660, to all intents and purposes a show trial, Harrison stood his ground, knowing the guilty verdict and death penalty for treason were inevitable. His principles remained uncompromised, his defence a Christian’s witness to what he believed to be God’s Truth, and a reassertion of the Good Old Cause of the English republic. Let Harrison himself have the last word. He was at pains to assert that the Regicide was:
“Not a thing done in a corner. I believe the sound of it hath been in most nations. I believe the hearts of some have felt the terrors of that presence of God that was with His servants in those days … and are witnesses that the things were not done in a corner. I have desired, as in the sight of Him that searcheth all hearts, whilst this hath been done, to wait and receive from Him convictions upon my own conscience, though I have sought it with tears many a time, and prayers over and over, to that God to whom you and all nations are less than a drop of water of the bucket; and to this moment I have received rather assurance of it …. I do believe ere it be long it will be made known from Heaven there was more from God than men are aware of…. I humbly conceive that what was done was done in the name of the Parliament of England; that what was done was done by their power and authority; and I do humbly conceive it is my duty to offer unto you, in the beginning, that this court, or any court below the high court of Parliament, hath no jurisdiction of their actions.”
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