Patriarchy, Puritanism and Politics: the Letters of Lady Brilliana Harley (1598–1643)

Abstract

Writing in the old Dictionary of National Biography, Sidney Lee described Lady Brilliana Harley as a ‘letter-writer’, and it is largely through the nineteenth-century edition of her letters, published by the Camden Society, that Lady Brilliana is still known today.¹ The majority of the 205 letters in the Camden edition were written from her home of Brampton Bryan in Herefordshire to her eldest son Edward between 1638, when he went to Oxford University, and 1643, when his mother died. They have been widely cited as evidence of the maternal and religious concerns of a seventeenth-century puritan gentlewoman, and Lee described them as ‘chiefly remarkable for their proofs of maternal affection. They abound in domestic gossip, religious reflections and sound homely advice.’² Lee, however, underplayed the fact that a civil war was in the making when these letters were written. As a staunch puritan and parliamentarian, Lady Brilliana was engaged in the religious and political debates that led to warfare and, as I have remarked elsewhere, her letters ‘contain the most detailed information that we have about the outbreak of the civil war in Herefordshire’. They also record the active local political role that could be played by a woman during the civil war period.³