George Harris, 1st Baron Harris

George Harris, 1st Baron Harris, was a British Army officer whose career stretched from the American Revolutionary War to senior command in India. Born in 1746, he entered the army as a teenager and fought in North America, where he was severely wounded at Bunker Hill and served through several campaigns. After later service in the Caribbean and Ireland, Harris went to India and gained further experience during the wars against Mysore, including operations connected with the 1792 siege of Seringapatam.

In 1797 Harris became commander-in-chief of the Madras Army, and in 1799 he led the main British and East India Company field army in the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War. His carefully supplied advance culminated in the storming of Seringapatam and the death of Tipu Sultan, ending Mysore’s position as an independent military challenger to Company power. Harris returned to Britain in 1800, became a full general and was created Baron Harris of Seringapatam and Mysore in 1815. He died in 1829.

Anthony Morland’s The Tiger’s Last Roar places George Harris above the British and East India Company forces converging on Tipu Sultan during the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War. William Culpepper’s fictional missions among convoys, patrols and intelligence work take place within the campaign Harris commands from Madras towards Seringapatam. The general therefore appears less as an isolated battlefield celebrity than as the senior officer whose need to move, supply and coordinate a large invasion determines the military world around the protagonist. The approach to Seringapatam and the destruction of Tipu’s final resistance give Harris’s historical command the strategic frame for Culpepper’s smaller-scale dangers.