Fiske Goodeve Fiske-Harrison

Fiske Goodeve Fiske-Harrison (2 September 1793 – 1872) of Copford Hall, Lord of the Manor of Copford was High Sheriff of Essex.

Fiske-Harrison of Copford Hall Coat of Arms, Burke's Armoury (1848)

He was born Fyske Goodeve Harrison on 2 September 1793 at Copford Hall, Essex, to John Haynes Harrison.

John Haynes Harrison had inherited the manor from his first cousin, Hezekiah Haynes, a Major General in the army of Oliver Cromwell. Hezekiah Haynes had inherited it from his father, John Haynes, who had purchased it from the Mountjoy family. However, John Haynes lived mainly in the Americas where he was the first Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and later Connecticut.

John Haynes Harrison married Sarah Thomas Fiske, only child and heiress of Reverend John Fiske of Thorpe Morieux, Suffolk.^[1] The Fiske Family Papers, a history of the family, states that she was heiress to £18,000 on her marriage in 1789.^[2]

Rev. John Fiske was a direct descendant, via the Gosnold family of Otley Hall in Suffolk,^[3] of Margaret Plantagenet, Countess of Salisbury, daughter of Prince George Plantagenet, Duke of Clarence, the younger brother and heir to King Edward IV until he was executed in 1478 and the crown went to his younger brother, the Duke of Gloucester, later King Richard III.^[4][5] The Countess of Salisbury was a peeress in her own right, the fifth richest noble in all England, and the last surviving member of the House of Plantagenet following the Wars of the Roses. Her younger brother, Edward Plantagenet, 17th Earl of Warwick, was the last legitimate male heir to the dynasty until he was executed in 1499 (their maternal grandfather had been Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick, known as 'Warwick the Kingmaker'.) The Countess herself was executed in 1541 as a political and religious threat by her cousin King Henry VIII, and was later beatified by Pope Leo XIII as a martyr for the Catholic Church.

Sarah Thomas Fiske from a portrait reproduced in The Fiske Family Papers

According to Burke's Peerage,^[6] Rev. John Fiske, M.A. (Cantab.), as well as descending from the Plantagenets via the Gosnolds(and thus from William the Conqueror who arrived in England in 1066), the Fiske family themselves first arrived with the Viking surname Fiskr at the Battle of Maldon in 991 A.D.

Fiske-Harrison was educated at Charterhouse School, 1806-1810, and St John's College, Cambridge.^[7][8] He served in the East Essex Regular Militia, rising to the rank of Major (gazetted in 1828).^[9]

He changed his surname to Fiske-Harrison on inheriting his mother's estates after her death, and became Lord of the Manor of Copford on his father's death in 1839.^[10] He married Jane, daughter of James Sparrow, in 1826.^[11]

He served as a magistrate, rising to Justice of the Peace, and as High Sheriff of Essex in 1827.

He died in 1872.^[12][13]

His descendants include A. B. C. Harrison, the former MP for Maldon in Essex, and Lord of the Manor of Copford and owner of Copford Hall, and Clive Fiske Harrison, chairman of the investment bankers Fiske & Co plc.^[14]

References