The Puritan penchant for curious names for their children is well known. For example, Hate-evill Greenhill, a baby girl who may have been related to the Puritan commentator William Greenhill (1591-1671), was baptized in April of 1661 in Banbury. The mother of Edward Polhill (1622-1693/4), another celebrated Puritan author, was Faint-not Polhill, a favorite name, it appears, for girls. Certainly not as bizarre as these girls’ names, but equally fascinating, is the name of the wife of a prominent English Presbyterian, Robert Harley (1579-1656), namely, Brilliana Harley (1598-1643).
The intellectual curiosity of one Puritan mother is emblematic of the Puritans’ love of good books, especially the Good Book.
Brilliana Harley, née Conway, was born in 1598 at the seaport of Brill (Brielle in Dutch), near Rotterdam, the daughter of Edward Conway (1564–1630) and Dorothy Tracy Conway (1563–1612). Her father, Sir Edward Conway (later Viscount Conway), was the governor of Brill at the time of her birth, hence her unique name. Brill was one of three so-called Cautionary Towns, key seaports in the Dutch Republic that had been garrisoned by English troops from 1585 onward when the English aided the Dutch in their fight against the domination of the Spanish in what is known as the Eighty Years War or the Dutch Revolt (1566/1568-1648). They were governed as English colonies—hence Brilliana’s father as the governor of Brielle—and were eventually returned to the Dutch Republic in 1616. Sir Edward was later appointed in 1623 by James I, the king of England, as his secretary of state.
There is much that we do not know about Brilliana’s early years, but her education included French and Latin. Later in life, she tutored her sons in Latin when she felt that the local schoolmaster was unreliable. She acknowledged that she was more at home reading French than English. She was also well read in contemporary theological literature and had what Wallace Notestein, an American historian and professor at Yale University, called “a continental breadth” in her reading interests.
When she was in her mid-20s, Brilliana married Robert Harley (1579–1656) of Brampton Bryan Castle, on July 16, 1623. Her husband’s ancestral home was in the small village of Brampton Bryan in northwestern Herefordshire, close to the Welsh border. The castle, dating back to the 1290s, guarded a vital route into Central Wales and was thus of military importance.
Brilliana moved seamlessly from the concept of divine election to human affections.
Robert Harley had been twice-widowed and, before marrying Brilliana, he had also buried 10 children. His mother, née Margaret Corbett, was a committed Puritan and had taken great pains to pass on her Protestant faith to her family. Shaped by this spiritual heritage, Robert Harley became a prominent and distinguished Presbyterian. At his funeral, for instance, the presiding minister, Thomas Froysell (c.1610-1673), recalled that Harley was “a great saint by grace” and “if other saints are candles, he was a torch.”
Brilliana and Robert had seven surviving children, of whom the eldest was Edward (1624-1700), affectionately nicknamed Ned.
The Harleys were full-throated Puritans, but the county of Herefordshire surrounding Brampton Bryan was largely Royalist, and hostile to the Harley family. In 1641, as the nation began to slide toward civil war, Brilliana stationed guards on the battlements of the castle and brought into the castle a stock of bullets. One of Brilliana’s letters to her son Ned—written in December 1642—describes the climate in northwestern Herefordshire at the time: “They [some of her wealthy neighbors] are in mighty violence against me. … I never was in such sorrows, … I hope the Lord will deliver me; but they are most cruelly bent against me.”
However, despite being surrounded by those committed to the Royalist cause in the civil wars, the gentry in the rest of the county appear to have been reluctant to attack the Harley family home, which was partly out of their personal respect for Brilliana. Nevertheless, eight months after the letter cited above, on July 26, 1643, the castle was attacked and besieged by Royalist forces under the command of Sir William Vavasour, the governor of Hereford, since the castle commanded a major route into central Wales. Vavasour surrounded Brampton Bryan with a mixed force of cavalry and infantrymen of about 700 soldiers. The formidable Brilliana held the castle in the face of this onslaught and siege until September 9.
The Royalists burnt all the buildings in the neighboring village of Brampton Bryan, and the castle was bombarded nearly every day. Although the bombardment left the castle roofless, casualties were low and only one death and a few injuries are recorded. The attackers, on the other hand, lost nearly 70 men who were either killed or injured. At one point, Brilliana discovered that the Royalists were planning to fire on the castle with grenades. In an audacious move, she sent 10 men out of the castle to find the building in which the grenades were being kept. They did so and were able to destroy them all.
The king, Charles I, himself wrote Brilliana on August 21, encouraging her to surrender. But she refused. In her reply to the king, she stated that he had made
many solemn promises that he would maintain the laws and liberties of this kingdom. I cannot then think he would give a command to take anything away from his loyal subject, and much less to take away my house … I must endeavor to keep what is mine as well as I can, in which I have the law of nature, of reason, and of the land on my side, and you [that is, the King and his troops] none to take it from me.
The siege was lifted on September 9 when the Royalists left to join an attack on the city of Gloucester.
A second siege took place in the spring of 1644. This time the Royalists prevailed and took the castle after only three weeks. Using mines and more powerful artillery, the Royalists inflicted further substantial damage upon the castle. The siege ended when the castle was surrendered to the attacking forces. The building was sacked and burnt—the ruins are there to this day—and 67 prisoners were taken to Shrewsbury for a year. Brilliana, though, was not alive to witness the surrender of the castle, for she had died the previous autumn, on October 29, 1643.
Brilliana was a prolific letter writer. Approximately 400 of her letters written from 1623 until her death in October 1643 have survived. They provide a detailed picture of her married life, the outbreak of the civil war in Herefordshire, and the life of a family at odds with local political sentiment. The majority of these letters are to her eldest son, Edward (Ned).
Brilliana was a voracious reader with a wide variety of literary interests, ranging from theological treatises to science fiction.
Edward Harley, Brilliana and Robert’s eldest son, went up to Magdalen Hall at Oxford University in 1638, which was to Oxford what Emmanuel College was to Cambridge, namely, a seedbed for Puritanism. He stayed at Oxford for two years, went down in 1640, and when the Civil War broke out in 1642, he fought with the Parliamentary armies. He supported the Presbyterians, and later opposed Oliver Cromwell, and thus fell out of favor with the government of the Commonwealth. He supported the Restoration of Charles II but also the religious toleration of non-Anglicans, known as Dissenters or Nonconformists.
From 1660 onward, Edward was a member of Parliament during the reigns of Charles II and William III. And while he attended the state church, he also went to hear the preaching of Richard Baxter (1615-1691). According to one account of his life, Edward Harley developed “a very Christian temper” and was “a good and religious man, untainted by the evils of that most licentious age.” This was owing, this account continued, to God’s grace and his constant reading of the Scriptures. But one also must think of the way God used the influence of his mother’s piety.
The spirituality of Brilliana Harley was grounded in the Calvinist soil of England’s Puritan world: centered upon the sovereignty of God in salvation and all of life, with its ultimate telos being God’s glory. As she wrote in a “commonplace book” (a kind of diary) in 1622: “It is God that first turns our will to that which is good and we are converted by the power of God only.” Seventeen years later, a prayer for her son revealed the same conviction about the sovereignty of God and the end for which all creatures exist:
I beseech the Lord who has your times in his hand and is the preserver of man, that he would add many years to your life, that you may be full of days and full of grace, that you may live here to the glory of your God, to which end you were made and that after this life you may inherit eternity.
In her convictions regarding these two key elements of the Christian faith, she was only reproducing what had been central to the theology of John Calvin, with whose writings, as has been noted, she was quite familiar.
Brilliana’s conviction of the necessity of the insuperable work of God in conversion was tied to her Augustinian conception of the innate sinfulness of humanity. In her letters to her son, she warned him about the dangers of sin. “Nothing hurts the soul like that deadly poison of sin,” she told him in the summer of 1639. And that fall, she urged him: “Let it be your resolution and practice in your life, rather to die than sin against your gracious and holy God. We have so gracious a God, that nothing can put a distance between him and our souls, but sin; watch therefore against that enemy.” In fact, she asserted, “it was sin that crucified our Lord.”
So dire was this human situation that only divine help could free the will and refashion the affections. It is no surprise, therefore, that Brilliana was strongly committed to the doctrine of unconditional election, which was also central to the debate with both Dutch and English Arminianism. Thus, Brilliana prayed in November of 1638 that her son would be a recipient of those “choice blessings of his Spirit, which none but his dear elect are partakers of; that so you may taste that sweetness in God’s service which indeed is in it: but the men of this world cannot perceive it.” It is significant that Brilliana yokes together here the doctrine of election with the believer’s experience. Her conviction about election did not simply entail an intellectual commitment to the doctrine but was one that was profoundly experiential. Again, she reminded Ned that the experience of the “love of the Lord is not common to all.” To be sure, divine mercies are the common experience for all human beings, but only some, the elect, know their origin. As she put it:
None are partakers of his love but his children; and he so loved them, that he gave his Son to die for them. O that we could but see the depth of that love of God in Christ to us: then sure, love would constrain us to serve the Lord, with all our hearts most willingly.
Once again, Brilliana moved seamlessly from the concept of divine election to human affections. In this case, she reflected on the fact that personal assurance of Christ’s atoning death for the elect soul should issue in wholehearted service to Christ and to God.
At every turn, Brilliana’s letters bear witness to a passionate soul and an affective piety. First, there is her deep love for her husband. In a letter written in 1628, for instance, she stated: “I much long to hear from you, but more a thousand times to see you, which I presume you will not believe, because you cannot possibly measure my love. … If I thought it would hasten your coming home, I would entreat you to do so.” As Jacqueline Eales has noted, Brilliana “clearly valued her husband’s company and the times when he was absent from her were keenly felt.” When her second son, Robert, was born in 1626, the father was not at home for the christening and his naming. Brilliana informed him that she had called him by the name that “I love best, being yours.” Sixteen years later, her love for her husband was just as ardent and unabated: “You are the great comfort of my life,” she told him in May of 1642. Since we do not have any of Robert’s letters to Brilliana—she may well have destroyed them during the siege lest they fall into enemy hands—historians have been divided over whether the depth of Brilliana’s love was reciprocated. Jacqueline Eales and Anthony Fletcher are of the opinion that Robert’s love for his wife deepened with the passing years. On the other hand, 19th-century students of Brilliana’s letters were not so sanguine. One 19th-century editor of her letters, Richard Ward, commented about Robert’s absence from the siege of Brampton Bryan: “It is difficult for us to understand why he did not either permit her to go away or take some active steps for the protection of his family.” John Webb and his son, T.W. Webb, who compiled a history of the civil war in Herefordshire, reasoned on the basis of the extant correspondence of Brilliana to her husband:
It is difficult to peruse the … letters … without an impression that the course of years and events had somewhat impaired the warmth of conjugal affection which had evidently existed at an earlier and less distracted period. Correspondence between herself and her husband was not indeed altogether intermitted, but “dear Ned” had become the principal depositary of her anxieties and distresses, many important requests were transmitted to the husband through the son, and to him were addressed those sad and touching regrets, chastened by the most devout submission to the Divine Will, which give to these letters their peculiar charm. The fact of her unaided and uncheered desolation at Brampton points in the same direction.
Brilliana’s letters also bear witness to her deep love for her son Ned. They are replete with concern for his physical health, advice regarding his diet and medicine, and notification of gifts of food being sent from Brampton to Oxford. Seamlessly intermingled with such mundane matters are precepts for godly living, nuggets of spiritual advice, and discussion of books the two of them have been reading. The latter are especially intriguing and reveal Brilliana to have been a voracious reader with a wide variety of literary interests, ranging from theological treatises by celebrated authors like John Calvin and William Perkins to Roman Catholic works, from pamphlets containing the latest news to the science fiction of Francis Godwin (1562-1633), The Man in the Moone.
In her spiritual advice to her son, a number of items are especially prominent: the importance of regular communion with God in prayer and the private reading of Scripture, “the sweet waters of God’s Word,” and other devotional works. Brilliana encouraged him to be earnest in observing the Sabbath, though Edward complained that he could not find a preaching ministry as powerful as that which he had enjoyed at Brampton. What is conspicuous by its absence, though, is any reference to the Lord’s Supper.
Finally, there is Brilliana’s love for her God. Rooted firmly in God’s Word and the Augustinian tradition of Puritanism, it was unashamedly affective and experiential. Her use of the word “sweet” and its cognates, for example, provides an excellent window on her conviction in this regard. To open one’s heart in prayer, for God’s elect, is “a sweet thing.” Thus, she prayed for her son that he might “so … taste that sweetness in God’s service which indeed is in it.” “The men of this world cannot perceive it,” she emphasized, for it is one of the choice blessings that accompanies the indwelling of the Spirit. Indeed, she stressed, “the service of the Lord is more sweet, more peaceable, more delightful, than the enjoying of all the fading pleasures of the world.”
In the mid-1630s, one of Brilliana’s siblings, her brother Edward (1594-1655), a loyal Royalist, wrote to Robert Harley that “in your house the order of things is inverted, you write to me of cheeses and my sister writes about a good scholar”! In a nutshell, this captures a key side of Brilliana’s character: her vivacious intellectual curiosity. But, as this essay on her life and piety has sought to show, it was also a vivacity that was ultimately informed by a deep commitment to the Puritan vision of Christian godliness.
