Page:The Ancestor Number 1.djvu/18

 4 THE ANCESTOR youthful widow, Mrs. Cicely Sherne, who bore to him a son and heir, Thomas by name, who dwelt at Orcheston St. George in the county of Wilts, and dying left a son, by Praxid his wife, called James, baptized October 6, 1605. For several reasons this James Harris is rather an important person in the family pedigree, since having departed from the paternal roof, he migrated to New Sarum (Salisbury) and, marrying the daughter of the bishop of that diocese, settled there. And there too, for four generations, lived his descendants, without apparently any wish ' to leave in life or in death * that most beautiful of cathedral cities : for while they occupied the same house in its close during their lives, so also their bodies found rest within its great church, when death had come to each in his turn. Of the above-mentioned James Harris however not much more of interest is known, save that he bequeathed a dis- tinctive christian name to his family, which with only two exceptions has been successively borne by its heads ever since ; and one more fact yet about this old James Harris. His hat, a high-crowned headpiece, hardened and stiffened by the flight of years, utterly devoid of all colour — if any colour it ever had — hangs in the old hall at Heron Court. This hat he wore in the year 1643, ^ 7^^^ gravely important in English history ; but whether he actively espoused the cause of King or Parliament it is by no means clearly known, though the tradition clinging to this hat — added to its form — cleaves little room for doubt that he sided with the party opposed to Charles I. Moreover, too, the Harrises were always staunchly Whig, and it was only when the first Lord Malmesbury threw in his lot with the Duke of Portland, Burke and the other leaders of 'the old Whig party' in 1794, that their loyalty to ' Whiggism ' was transferred to the younger Pitt and to the great principles of which he was the champion. Thomas, son of this James Harris, married for his second wife Joan, daughter of Sir Wadham Wyndham of Norrington, one of the judges of the King's Bench in the reign of Charles II., a scion of the ancient and noble house of Egremont. Joan Wyndham, who thus, in 1673, became the wife of Thomas Harris of New Sarum, has left behind her, not only a portrait of herself, but also a quaint and, from its age, curious account-book, an extract or two from which it has been thought worth while to give : —