The Harleys saw the events of the 1620s and ’30s as a sign that the final struggle between the people of God and the Antichrist had begun. Brilliana wrote to Ned that ‘this year 1639 is the year in which many are of the opinion that the antichrist must begin to fall. The Lord say amen to it.’ The Harleys firmly believed in a sophisticated conspiracy of Catholics who manipulated Charles and would eventually convert him. It was against this background that news of the Ulster Uprising broke in November 1641. The belief that the same things could happen at any moment in England was fuelled when a tailor named Beale claimed on 15 November that he had overheard a design to kill 108 MPs, followed by a general Catholic rising. Robert Harley promptly wrote to John Aston: ‘look well to your town, for the Papists are discovered to have a bloody design, in general, as well as against the kingdom, as elsewhere’. At Brampton they were all in arms in the castle, ‘and took up provisions with them there in great fear’, wrote Brilliana.
To keep abreast of the ‘real’ news, suppressed by the government, the Harleys tried to get hold of printed news-sheets called corantoes and of manuscript news-sheets, called separates, which reported such events as speeches in Parliament and state trials. Sixteen-year-old Ned kept Brilliana supplied with separates during the Short Parliament. But personal letters were still the main source of news. The risk that they might be intercepted encouraged writers to be circumspect, however. Brilliana warned Ned about this risk: ‘when you write by the carrier, write nothing but what any may see, for many times the letters miscarry’. Some letter-writers used codes (Charles was especially fond of them). But the practice increased both paranoia and a sense that one was surrounded by spies and foes, plotting. Brilliana was delighted to hear of the abolition of the Court of High Commission, which had been the instrument of silencing many godly ministers, but not everyone in Herefordshire or the Marches was equally delighted to see godliness return. Brampton’s own vicar, Gower, reported glumly that ‘the vulgar comfort themselves with assured confidence that the bishops will get up again. I tell you but the language of Babel’s bricklayers’, while Thomas Harley, in Brampton, reported to his brother Ned in London that ‘some men jeer and cast forth reproachful words against the Parliament, and others that might forward the work of the Parliament are very backward’.
When Parliament went into brief recess in September 1641 Robert returned to Brampton and tried to enforce the Commons’ resolution to remove all crucifixes and images from churches, not only purifying his own church at Brampton, but all those in surrounding villages. At Leintwardine he broke the windows and smashed the glass with a hammer, throwing it into the Terne ‘in imitation of King Asa 2 Chron 15:16 who threw the images into the brook Kidron’, but at Aymestrey the minister and the parishioners withstood him. Harley wrote angrily to churchwardens in Leominster asking why they had failed to take down the crosses he had seen passing the church.
For most of 1642 to 1644, Robert was away from home, serving as an MP at Westminster. In his absence his wife Brilliana took charge of the Harley estates. She disliked it when he was away because she felt miserably isolated: writing to Ned, she complained that ‘now your father is away, you know I have nobody that I can speak to’. But she knew it was her duty. Robert Harley often criticized her management: ‘what is done in your father’s estate pleases him not, so that I wish myself with all my heart in London, and then your father might be a witness of what is spent: but if your father think it best for me to be in the country, I am well pleased with what he shall think best’. This sounds submissive, but the note of anger is unmistakable.
For Brilliana her connectedness with her son became a way to imagine herself escaping from the dangers that enclosed her more and more tightly. In theory, Oxford was a world that Robert knew and she didn’t, a man’s world. Robert had been to Oxford, to Oriel College in 1597, graduating with a BA in 1599; his tutor Cadwallader Owen was a powerful godly influence on the young man. Robert was also in charge of the boys’ education, searching for a tutor for them in 1631, but they were eventually sent away to school, to Shrewsbury. Ned went up to Oxford in 1638, just before his fourteenth birthday. He went to Magdalen Hall, where the principal John Wilkinson was a solid Calvinist, and where he would be taught by another staunch Puritan, Edward Perkins. Brilliana, however, took a strong interest in Ned’s godly tutors. She was worried when William Whately died and his living became vacant; she feared they might lose the services of Mr Perkins, too, since ‘as soon as any man come to ripeness of judgement and holiness he is taken away, and so they still glean the garden of the ripe grapes and leave the sour ones behind’. She also worried, like any other mother seeing a child off to university, that he would be exposed to moral danger. She wrote in a letter, ‘now I fear you will both see and hear men of nobility and excellent parts of nature abandon themselves to swearing and that odious sin of drunkenness’. Robert also wrote that ‘the universities do too much abound with such pigs’. The larger world beyond the family was menacing. But it was also enticing. Brilliana’s letters betray twin yearnings; to enclose Ned in the safety of family holiness, and to catch a glimpse of his larger world through him. She sent him reams of advice and torrents of home-made medicines:
13 November 1638. I beseech the Lord to bless you with those choice blessings of his spirit, which none but his dear elect are partakers of. I have sent you some juice of liquorice, which you may keep to make use of, if you should have a cold.
17 November 1638. I am glad you find a want of that ministry you did enjoy: Labour to keep a fresh desire after the sincere milk of the word, and then in good time you shall enjoy that blessing again.
She worried all the time about Ned’s health and well-being: ‘Pray send me one of your socks, to make you new ones by’, she wrote; and ‘You did well to take some balsam; it is a most sovereign thing, and I purpose, if it please God, to write you the virtues of it’. Sometimes she was tentative: ‘Dear Ned, if you would have anything, send me word; or if I thought it a cold pie, or such a thing, would be any pleasure to you, I would send it to you. But your father says you care not for it, and Mrs Pierson tells me when her son was at Oxford, and she sent him such things, he prayed her that she would not’ (14 December 1638). But at heart she was a generous provider. She also kept her husband supplied, writing that ‘I have sent your father a snipe pie and a teal pie, and a collar of brawn, or else I had sent you something this week’ (December 1640).
She also liked to supply spiritual food. She urged holy books on Ned, as part of their literary discussions: ‘I believe, before this, you have read some part of Mr Calvin; send me word how you like him.’ With almost every letter a present or a small piece of advice arrives: ‘I have sent you a little purse with some small money in it, all the pence I had, that you may have a penny to give a poor body and a pair of gloves; not that I think you have not better in Oxford, but that you may sometimes remember her, that seldom has you out of my thoughts.’
Ned also sent her things, including books. She wrote to thank him: ‘I thank you for The Man in the Moon. I had heard of the book, but not seen it; by as much as I have looked upon, I find it is some kind of Don Quixote. I would willingly have the French book you write me word of; but if it can be had, I desire it in French’ (30 November 1638).
The Man in the Moon was an imaginative choice. It was actually an early work of science fiction: the hero, Gonzales, is on his way home from Spain when he falls ill, and is put ashore on a desert island. Here he soon trains a pair of swans to be his servants, and eventually through the use of complex machinery they fly him to the moon, where he finds an ideal society in which there is no war, no hunger, a cure for all illnesses. This society does not lack hierarchy, however; there is a system based on height, and the king is the tallest man. There’s an element of Swiftian satire of learning, but also a critique of contemporary politics; if Ned sent his mother this book, it shows that she was herself an adventurous and curious reader, interested in unfeminine topics like political theory. It is also suggestive that Brilliana knew about Don Quixote, that great debunking of the chivalrous romances to which Charles and Henrietta and their court were so addicted.
But Brilliana was no bluestocking; she was keen on the emerging commodity culture of the late 1630s, and wanted to furnish Brampton in style. She often asked Ned to shop for her: ‘If there be any good looking glasses in Oxford choose me one about the bigness