dministration of the
Commonwealth of Oceana.

After his return to England, being of age, James Harrington cared
actively for the interests of his younger brothers and sisters. It was
he who made his brother William a merchant. William Harrington throve,
and for his ingenuity in matters of construction he was afterward made
one of the Fellows of the newly formed Royal Society. He took pains over
the training of his sisters, making 110 difference between sisters and
half-sisters, and treating his step-mother as a mother. He filled
his home with loving-kindness, and was most liberal in giving help
to friends. When he was told that he often threw away his bounty on
ungrateful persons, he playfully told his advisers they were mercenary
and that he saw they sold their gifts, since they expected so great a
return as gratitude.

James Harrington's bent was for the study of life, and he made no active
suit for court employment. But he went to court, where Charles I liked
him, and admitted him as one of his privy chamber extraordinary, in
which character he went with the King in his first expedition against
the Scots.

Because Charles I knew him and liked him, and because he had shown
himself no partisan of either side in the civil war, though he was
known to be inclined, in the way of abstract opinion, toward a form of
government that was not monarchy, the commissioners appointed in 1646
to bring Charles from Newcastle named Harrington as one of the King's
attendants. The King was pleased, and Harrington was appointed a groom
of the bedchamber at Holmby. He followed faithfully the fortunes of
the fallen King, never saying even to the King himself a word in
contradiction of his own principles of liberty, and finding nothing
in his principles or in his temper that should prevent him from paying
honor to his sovereign, and seeking to secure for him a happy issue
out of his afflictions. Antony a Wood says that, "His Majesty loved
Harrington's company, and, finding him to be an ingenious man, chose
rather to converse with him than with others of his chamber: they had
often discourses concerning government; but when they happened to talk
of a commonwealth the King seemed not to endure it."

Harrington used all the influence he had with those in whose power the
King was, to prevent the urging of avoid-able questions that would stand
in the way of such a treaty as they professed to seek during the King's
imprisonment at Carisbrooke