Sir John Knight (died February 1718) was an English merchant and politician who sat in the House of Commons from 1689 to 1695.
[1] Knight was appointed sheriff of Bristol in September 1681, and in this office he persecuted Dissenters, arousing great controversy in the city.
When the news reached the Catholic King James II's court of Knight's behaviour, he was arrested by late May and had to explain himself before the Privy Council.
[2] In 1693 he opposed the Naturalisation Bill which aimed to grant English citizenship to foreign Protestants resident in England.
[4] Knight was called a "violent tory" by Narcissus Luttrell[2] and a "coarse-minded and spiteful Jacobite, who, if he had been an honest man, would have been a nonjuror" by Thomas Babington Macaulay.