Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 31.djvu/261

 the 23rd and 24th the cables parted and the ship drove ashore. She was got afloat again, but her rudder was torn off, and she was making a great deal of water. Gorrell, the mate, was sent on shore to look for a place where she could be beached for repairs, and as he was unsuccessful, on the next day, 26 June, Knight went himself with Gorrell and four men. Leaving two men in the boat, Knight and his three companions went inland over a hill, and were never seen again. It was concluded that they were killed by the natives—little people, tawny-coloured, flat-nosed, with thin or no beards. The survivors on board repaired the ship as they best could, not without opposition from the Eskimos, and so reached Newfoundland, whence they sailed on 22 Aug., and arrived at Dartmouth on 24 Sept. 

KNIGHT, JOHN, ‘the elder’ (1612–1683), mayor of Bristol, third son of George Knight, provision merchant, by his wife Anne, daughter of William Dyos, was born in Bristol in 1612. He inherited his father's business in Temple Street, and became one of the most prosperous merchants in the city, and a prominent high church member of the common council. He was knighted by Charles II on 5 Sept. 1663, on the occasion of the king's visit to Bristol, and was elected mayor in the same year. His tenure of office was distinguished by his persecution of quakers, Knight paying large sums to have their houses watched, and concerting measures with Guy Carleton [q. v.], bishop of Bristol, for their punishment. Nine hundred and twenty persons are said to have suffered for their religion during his mayoralty, and many moderate churchmen were scandalised by the mayor's rushing out of church on Sundays in pursuit of recalcitrant nonconformists. Knight's intolerance, however, only increased with years, and in 1669 he denounced the other members of the common council, including his namesake, John Knight [see, fl. 1670, under, ‘the younger’], who was mayor of Bristol in the following year, as ‘fanaticks.’ He took a prominent part in the reception of Queen Catherine in 1677. In 1680, ‘by reason of his infirmity,’ he desired the city to nominate some other persons to take care of their affairs in the common council, but though he no longer had any official status he still occasionally acted as an informer. His antipathy to Roman catholics was quite as strong as that against protestant nonconformists, and in 1681 he was fined for an assault, and for calling several members of the common council ‘papists, popish dogs, jesuits, and popish devils.’

He had in the August of the previous year acted as emissary from William Bedloe [q. v.] to Chief-justice North previous to the latter's receiving Bedloe's dying deposition, and it is apropos of this that Roger North sums him up as ‘the most perverse, clamorous old party man in the whole city or nation’ (Examen, p. 253). Knight represented Bristol during the parliaments of 1661, 1678, and 1679, and was highly indignant at not being re-elected in 1681. He died in 1683, and was buried in the Temple Church, Bristol. By his wife Martha, daughter of Thomas Cole, esq., of Bristol, he left three sons and eight daughters. 

KNIGHT, JOHN, ‘the younger’ (d. 1718), Jacobite, is supposed to have been a kinsman of his namesake, Sir John the elder [q. v.] He was a native of Bristol, and was sheriff of that city in 1681, when he rivalled his relative in his zeal against the dissenters. He was rewarded by being knighted during March 1682. A prosperous merchant, like his kinsman, Knight henceforth took an equally prominent part in the town's affairs, and the politics of the two men being very similar their identity has been inextricably confused. Macaulay seems to have confused them, and Garrard, in his ‘Life of Edward Colston,’ is undoubtedly wrong in attributing to Sir John the elder (who was dead at that time) the information given against a popish priest about which Sunderland speaks with irritation in a letter to the Duke of Beaufort dated May 1686. It appears from local records that on 25 April in this year Sir John ‘the younger’ seized eight or ten papists and their priest who were intending to celebrate mass in a house on St. Michael's Hill, and sent them to Newgate. Knight's anti-papist zeal was doubtless the real cause of his committal to the King's Bench prison in 1686, though the ostensible charge was that he had been in the habit of ‘going with a blunderbuss in the streets to the terrifyeing of his majesty's subjects.’ Elected a member of the convention in 1689 and mayor of Bristol in 1690, he signalised his tenure of the latter office by fostering a demonstration against the judges of assize and refusing to entertain them during their visit to the town (Hist. MSS. Comm. 5th