JAMES HARRINGTON, eldest son of Sir Sapcotes Harrington of
Exton, in Rutlandshire, was born in the reign of James I, in
January, 1661, five years before the death of Shakespeare. He was
two or three years younger than John Milton. His great-grandfather
was Sir James Harrington, who married Lucy, daughter of Sir
William Sidney, lived with her to their golden wedding-day, and
had eighteen children, through whom he counted himself, before
his death, patriarch in a family that in his own time produced eight
dukes, three marquises, seventy earls, twenty-seven viscounts, and
thirty-six barons, sixteen of them all being Knights of the Garter.
James Harrington's ideal of a commonwealth was the design,
therefore, of a man in many ways connected with the chief nobility
of England.
Sir Sapcotes Harrington married twice, and had by each of his
wives two sons and two daughters. James Harrington was eldest
son by the first marriage, which was to Jane, daughter of Sir
William Samuel of Upton, in Northamptonshire. James
Harrington's brother became a merchant; of his half-brothers, one
went to sea, the other became a captain in the army.
As a child, James Harrington was studious, and so sedate that it
was said playfully of him he rather kept his parents and teachers in
awe than needed correction; but in after-life his quick wit made
him full of playfulness in conversation. In 1629 he entered Trinity
College, Oxford, as a gentleman commoner. There he had for tutor
William Chillingworth, a Fellow of the college, who after
conversion to the Church of Rome had reasoned his way back into
Protestant opinions. Chillingworth became a famous champion of
Protestantism in the question between the Churches, although
many Protestants attacked him as unsound because he would not
accept the Athanasian Creed and had some other reservations.
Harrington prepared himself for foreign travel by study of modern
languages, but before he went abroad, and while he was still under
age, his father died and he succeeded to his patrimony. The
socage tenure of his estate gave him free choice of his own
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