Thomas Harrison arrived in North America in the very year, 1640, when the remigration of Puritans began in a statistically significant way—a symbolic coincidence perhaps, since he came as a Church of England divine; the standard reference works, Venn’s Alumni Cantabrigienses, A. G. Matthews’s Calamy Revised, Alumni Dublinenses, W. Urwick’s Early History of Trinity College Dublin, and other authorities all state or imply that he came as chaplain to Virginia’s governor, the scholar and playwright Sir William Berkeley. But this is hardly possible as Berkeley did not set foot on the colonial shore until 1642, while the inhabitants of Virginia’s Lower Norfolk County chose Thomas Harrison as their minister “at a Court Held 25th May 1640,” offering him an annual salary of one hundred pounds.11 Whether he did eventually become Berkeley’s chaplain, as rumor has it, is highly doubtful.12 What is recorded is only that he was the minister of Elizabeth River Parish and later (concurrently?) of nearby Nansemond Parish from 1640 until 1648.13 Who was he? The Sidney Sussex College Records give us a relatively full picture of his background:
[1634] Thomas Harrison Eboracensis filius Roberti Harrison Mercatoris natus Kingstoniae super Hull, et ibidem literis grammaticis institutus in
11 Philip Alexander Bruce, Institutional History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century (New York and London, 1910), I, 132, 149; Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, I (1893–1894), 327; J. and J. A. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses (Cambridge, 1922–1954), pt. 1, II, 318, https://archive.org/details/alumnicantabrigipt1vol1univiala
12 See Francis Burton Harrison, “The Reverend Thomas Harrison, Berkeley’s
‘Chaplain,’” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, LIII (1945), 306, n. 4.
13 Harrison, 306–307; Bruce, 256, n. 2; Edward D. Neill, Virginia Carolorum […], Based upon Manuscripts and Documents of the Period (Albany, NY, 1886), 195, https://
hdl.handle.net/2027/ien.35556035110055: “While Daniel Gookin removed from Nansemond, after the nonconformist ministers were silenced, quite a congregation in that region maintained services without the Book of Common Prayer. Thomas Harrison, a minister who had been a friend of Governor Berkeley and approved of the act which had been passed requiring services to be held according to the canons of the church of England, after the Indian massacre repented of the course he had pursued, and went and preached to the Nansemond people, and avowed his sympathy with Puritanism.”
Schola communi sub M[agist]ro Jacobo Burney per quinquennium, dein ibidem sub M[agist]ro Antonio Stephenson per biennium adolescens annorum 16 admissus est pensionarius ad convictum Scholarium discipulorum Apr: 12. Tut. Ri. Dugard SS. Theol. Bacc. solvitq[ue] pro ingressu.14
According to Venn, he received his B.A. in 1638. What he did during the next two years is not known. Nor are we well informed about his doings during the early years in Virginia, other than that the Lower Norfolk County Records show that in 1645 he received a fee of one thousand pounds of tobacco, then worth five pounds sterling, for conducting the burial service over the graves of Mr. and Mrs. Sewell of Lower Norfolk and delivering a sermon in their memory.15 By this time, however, he had done Sidney’s intellectual heritage proud in a more spiritual way.
In April 1645 the County Court registered a complaint against him for nonconformity. The church wardens of his parish:
have exhibited there presentment against Mr. Thomas Harrison Clark (Parson of the Said parish) for not reading the booke of Common Prayer and for not administring the Sacrament of Baptisme according to the Cannons and order prescribed and for not Catechising on Sunnedayes in the afternoone according to Act of Assembly upon wch prsentmt the Court doth order that the Said Mr. Thomas Harrison shall have notice thereof and bee Summoned by the sherriffe to make his psonall appearaunce at James Citty before the Right worrl [sic] the Governor &
Counsell on the first daye of the next Quarter Court and then and there to answere to the Said prsentment.16
Harrison’s conversion to Puritanism had a distinctly New World flavor.
For it seems to have taken place under the impression of the 1644 massacre of white settlers by Indians led by Chief Opechancanough, which in Puritan circles was widely held to be God’s retribution for the persecution of Puritans in Virginia.17 By 1647, when the Virginia Assembly under Berkeley had passed an act declaring that ministers refusing to read the Book of Common Prayer were no longer entitled
14 MR 30, 231.
15 Bruce, 160.
16 The Lower Norfolk County Virginia Antiquary, ed. Edward W. James, II (Baltimore, 1897), 12.
17 Bruce, 255; Harrison, 306–307.
to receive their parishioners’ tithes,18 Harrison’s position was officially heretic. He made no bones about this himself in three letters written between 1646 and 1648 to Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop. The initial contact between the two men is no doubt connected with the presence of three Puritan pastors from Massachusetts in Virginia, sent there by Winthrop in 1642 at the request of local dissenters, but obliged to return the following year.19 Writing on 2 November 1646, Harrison thanks Winthrop profusely for an unspecified “signall favour” which must indicate at least spiritual support; he also says that Winthrop has encouraged him to “giue you an account of our matters,” and assures him of his willingness to “seke and take directions (and if you please commands) from you.”20 On 14 January 1648 he proudly announces, amid a hodgepodge of political news from Old England, “74 haue ioyned here in Fellowship, 19 stand propounded, and many more of great hopes and expectations.”21 At home, Charles’s kingdom still, the Levellers are cause for concern, as he tells the Governor of his spiritual home-in-exile on 10 April 1648; all the more reason to rejoice that the true Kingdom lies to the West: “Sir whether it be true or false, the Saints in these goings downe of the Sun had never more light to see why their Father hath thus farre removed them, nor ever more strong engagements to be thainkfull for it.”22
With these sentiments, Harrison’s days in Virginia were numbered.
He was banished from the colony in the summer of 1648. By October, he
“is cam to boston.”23 As Adam Winthrop writes to his brother John, Jr.
at the Pequod plantation on 1 November 1648: “Mr. Harrison the Paster of the church at verienya being banished from thence is arrived heer to consult about some place to settle him selfe and his church some thinke
18 Bruce, 256, n. 1; Neill, 198–199. See also The Statutes at Large; Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia […], ed. William Waller Hening, I (New York, 1823), 277, 341, https://archive.org/details/statutesatlargeb01virg
19 Harrison, 306; Morton, I, 151. Morton states also that one of them, William Thompson, was instrumental in converting Harrison, who had previously “aided in expelling the Puritan ministers” (152).
20 Winthrop Papers, V (The Mass. Hist. Soc., 1947), 116—117.
21 Winthrop Papers, V, 198.
22 Winthrop Papers, V, 213.
23 Winthrop Papers, V, 273. Morton reports that when Harrison appeared before the Quarter Court, the Governor and Councillors allowed him to remain another three years in Virginia (152).
that youer plantation will be the fittst place for him, but I suppose you haue heard more amply before this.”24
Opposition against Harrison’s banishment for not conforming to the Book of Common Prayer soon arose not only among Harrison’s parishioners and in the Virginia Council of State but also in Cromwell’s Whitehall.25 To the latter’s protest there was a staunchly loyalist reply in March, 1651: “’Tis true, indeed, Two Factious clergy men chose rather to leave the country than to take the oaths of Allegeance and Supremacy, and we acknowledge that we gladly parted with them.”26
The case was still not settled in July, 1652.27 But by that time, Harrison could probably not have cared less. In 1651 he had assumed the ministry at Dunstan-in-the-East in London, “a large and important parish. Oliver Cromwell was occasionally before him as he preached.”28 Eventually, when Henry Cromwell became Commander-in-Chief of the Irish army, Harrison became his Chaplain, and his career continued with distinction until his death in Dublin in 1682.29
Personally, Harrison seems to have been the most pleasant of the four Sidneyans in America. According to Calamy:
he was extreamly popular, and this stirr’d up much Envy. He was a most agreeable Preacher, and had a peculiar way of insinuating himself into the Affections of his Hearers; and yet us’d to write all that he deliver’d: and afterwards took a great deal of Pains to impress what he had committed to Writing upon his Mind, that he might in the Pulpit deliver it Memoriter. He had also an extraordinary Gift in Prayer; being noted for such a marvellous fluency, and peculiar Flights of Spiritual Rhetorick, suiting any particular Occasions and Circumstances, as were to the Admiration of all that knew him. He was a compleat Gentleman, much Courted for his Conversation; free with the meanest, and yet fit Company for the greatest Persons. My Lord Thomund (who had no great Respect for Ecclesiasticks of any sort) declar’d his singular value of the Doctor, and would often discover an high Esteem of his abilities. He
24 Winthrop Papers, V, 277.
25 See the documents printed in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, XVII (1909), 19–20, 286.
26 Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, V (1898), 230.
27 Virginia Magazine, XVII (1909), 286.
28 Harrison, 308.
29 For the rest of his career, see Harrison, 308–311.
often us’d to say, that he had rather hear Dr. Harrison say Grace over an Egg, than hear the Bishops Pray and Preach.30