(1720 – February 1770) was an English dissenting minister and historian who wrote a series of historically significant biographies of the House of Stuart kings of 17th-century Britain.
He married Elizabeth Bovet of Honiton in Devon and became preacher at a Presbyterian chapel in the nearby village of Luppitt, where he was to remain for the rest of his life.
In 1765, Harris's friend and patron, the wealthy philanthropist and fellow-libertarian Thomas Hollis, helped secure for him the degree of Doctor in Divinity from the University of Glasgow and wrote of him: "All his works have been well received, and those who differ from him in principle still value him in point of industry and faithfulness.
[5] After writing a life of the English Civil War regicide Hugh Peters (1751), Harris published An Historical and Critical Account of the Life and Writings of James the First, King of Great Britain (1753),[6] which was to prove his most controversial work because of its very negative but highly detailed portrait of James VI and I as a bad monarch and a deeply flawed human being.
[8] The Cromwell biography joined those by Isaac Kimber (1724) and John Bancks (1739) in giving a nonconformist view, with an appeal probably restricted at that time to dissenters.