From a modest Lancashire background, Harrison should not be confused with Capt. John Harrison, sent to the Barbary coast as diplomatic agent in 1626, or with the man who served as groom to Prince Henry and was licensed to travel abroad in 1613. Nor was he the Leeds clothier cited in Parliament as an associate of Sir John Savile* in June 1626.
I have little knowledge of my father’s relations more than the families of Aston [?Assheton], Ireland, Sandys, Beaumont and Curwen, who brought him to London and placed him with my lord treasurer Salisbury [Robert Cecil†], then secretary of state, who sent him into Sir John Wolstenholme’s family and gave him a small place in the custom house to enable him for that employment.
There is no independent evidence to link Harrison with these families, or with Salisbury. Harrison’s daughter also claimed that ‘besides his education’, her father ‘never had but 20 marks which his father gave him when he came to London’, and she recalled his facility as ‘a great accountant [of] vast memory, [and] an incomparable penman’.
In April 1624 Harrison testified before the Commons about bribes offered to lord treasurer Middlesex (Sir Lionel Cranfield*) by the holders of the great farm of the customs and the French and Rhenish wine farm. He and several others claimed gratuities had been paid, and while Middlesex insisted these payments had been for shares in the great farm, the House was in no mood to accept his excuses.
In his 1640 memorandum Harrison recalled that in 1628, ‘the Act of the subsidy of Tunnage and Poundage [was] not passed’. It was clearly the need to secure the passage of this bill which moved Harrison and Wolstenholme (whose return was eventually overturned by the House) to seek election to Parliament in that year. Harrison wrote to the Scarborough corporation for a seat on 31 Jan., professing ‘a desire to do my country service, and particularly (in respect of some friends amongst you) to dedicate my best endeavours to the good of your corporation’. The friends he referred to were probably the 1625 MP William Thompson* and the latter’s son Francis, customer of Scarborough. Despite this undertaking, the only evidence that he became involved in local interests while in Parliament was his appointment to a committee to investigate the attempts of the London-based Greenland Company to exclude the Hull whalers from their hunting grounds (17 May).
Harrison left no trace on the debates over constitutional issues which dominated much of the 1628 session. The Tunnage and Poundage bill received two readings in the opening weeks, but on 11 Apr. it was resolved that the customs rates should be revised, a decision which promised endless delays but offered the faint prospect of an end to 20 years’ worth of disputes over impositions. On 17 May Sir Dudley Digges* called for a progress report, whereupon the imposition on currants and the Newcastle coal duty (the latter farmed by Wolstenholme) came under fire. Harrison named Sir Edmund Sawyer* as the author of a new draft of the Book of Rates which proposed the introduction of fresh impositions, an issue which was always contentious during this period. Sawyer, an Exchequer auditor whose work superseded a similar project by Harrison’s colleague Abraham Dawes, was subsequently expelled from the House (21 June). Harrison’s motives in naming Sawyer are difficult to discern. Perhaps he feared that his own activities would be investigated, or maybe he was prepared to sacrifice Sawyer in order to establish customs revenues on a wholly statutory basis, a development which would have delighted the farmers, if not necessarily the Crown.
Harrison was named to committees to interrogate Sawyer (17 May), to investigate sundry minor customs matters (4 June, 20 June) and to assess the prospects for completion of the Tunnage and Poundage bill (13 June). Moreover, on 19 May he delivered up Wolstenholme’s patents for coal levies, which were referred to the same committee as Sawyer’s book of rates but remained unexamined at the prorogation.
The customers’ seizure of John Rolle’s* goods shortly before Parliament reassembled in January 1629 dashed any realistic hopes of passing the Tunnage and Poundage bill; in his 1640 memorandum, Harrison recalled that the session ended ‘without effecting anything that was hoped for either for the good of [the] King or kingdom’.
Writing in 1640, Harrison claimed to have become increasingly disillusioned with the customs farmers during the 1630s for using procedures ‘conducing to their most profit and advantage’. He allegedly considered resignation, ‘which I had absolutely done if the persuasion of some intimate friends together with some danger threatening me from the court, by means of ill offices from some of our envious partners warning me to look to my safety had not stayed my resolution’. However, he may have exaggerated his objections in hindsight to win the sympathy of the Long Parliament, and indeed, far from resigning when his scheme for direct administration was ignored, he joined the petty farm syndicate.
In about 1637, probably to prevent Lord (formerly Sir George) Goring from taking control of the great farm from the existing syndicate, Harrison took his plan for direct administration to Digges, now master of the Rolls, and Sir Henry Vane*, who persuaded lord chamberlain Pembroke (Sir Philip Herbert*) to show it to the king. However, when the project was referred to a sub-committee of the Privy Council, Goring clinched the contract by raising his tender to match the income guaranteed by Harrison’s scheme.
‘Sick and weak in body’, Harrison was ‘above eighty years of age’ when he drafted his will on 21 Sept. 1669; he died a week later.