Family and Education

b. c.1656, o.s. of John Harris, barrister, of the Inner Temple and Silkstead, Hants by Mary, da. and h. of John Taverner of Soundess. educ.New Coll. Oxf. matric. 3 Nov. 1671, aged 15; I. Temple, entered 1671. unm. suc. fa. 1661.1

Offices Held

Commr. for assessment, Oxon. 1679-80, j.p. 1680-1; freeman, Woodstock 1680.2

Biography

Harris’s grandfather, of Buckinghamshire origin, became warden of Winchester college in 1630. A Presbyterian, he sat in the Westminster Assembly. Harris’s father, a lawyer, took no known part in the Civil War. He acquired a small estate seven miles from Wallingford by marrying a cousin. During the exclusion crisis, Harris himself became a member of the Green Ribbon Club and a friend of Thomas Tipping and Lord Lovelace (John Lovelace). With their support he was returned for Wallingford in 1681, but left no trace on the records of the Oxford Parliament. He was removed from the commission of the peace in June. He died of smallpox on 11 July 1685 and was buried at Compton, Hampshire, the only member of his family to enter Parliament. In his will he directed that his lands in Oxfordshire and Berkshire should be sold.3

Ref Volumes: 1660-1690

Authors: Leonard Naylor / Geoffrey Jaggar

Notes

• 1. Wood’s Life and Times (Oxf. Hist. Soc. xix), 239-40.
• 2. Wood, (xxi), 544; Woodstock council acts (7 July 1680).
• 3. Wood, (xix), 240; (xxvi), 154; Ath. Ox. iii. 455; Prideaux Letters (Cam. Soc. n.s. xv), 105; PCC 87 Cann.