Letters from an anxious mother
How appetising it is to embark on a volume of literary letters, weighty, well- indexed, heavily annotated! New examples arrive almost every month. The last half year alone has welcomed another install- ment in the meritorious Pilgrim Dickens series, the amorous postal exchanges of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, and sheaves of correspondence from Charlotte Brontë, William Morris and Louisa May Alcoa.
It isn't sheer noseyness which encourages us to fossick pleasurably through these epistolary bundles, unwrapped with all the stakhanovite assiduity of American scholar- ly editing. Somehow we believe that the creative juices which produced Jane Eyre or My Last Duchess will spill over into acknowledging a dinner invitation or send- ing a seaside postcard. Yet there are times when we pine for a little less stylistic self- consciousness, for somewhat fewer reminders that literature, when all is said and done, is only a kind of showing off. Now and then we seek the company of those who wrote letters simply because they had to, and said, in the process, only what they really meant.
Somebody like Brilliana Harley, for example. She was christened Brilliana because her father, Sir Edward Conway, happened to be governor of the Dutch town of Brill, where she was born in 1600. His younger daughter was even more exotically baptised Helengenwagh, nick- named Wacke, but a third had to be content with plain Frances.
Like her sisters, Brill, as they called her, might have entered the decent obscurity of a genteel marriage, ending up as one of those rather mournful half-length portraits found on country-house staircases, all spaniel hair and poached-egg eyes, or else figuring as her alabaster husband's recum- bent consort on a tomb-chest in the parish church. Destiny, however, saw to it that her life was a little less orthodox.
Robert Harley of Brampton Bryan, Herefordshire, the man she married as his third wife, was a singularly well-balanced mixture of political acumen, patriotic altruism and religious zeal. The hackles of certain Spectator readers are likely to rise on reading his Victorian biographer's remark that 'the suppression of the sur- plice, the destruction of altars and crosses, superstitious images and inscriptions, were all highly congenial with his convictions', but he opposed the execution of Charles I and got sacked as Master of the Mint for protesting at the removal of the king's effigy from the coinage. He probably mar- ried Brilliana from desperation to produce an heir, having lost ten children already. She gave him seven, all of whom survived into adulthood, and loved him deeply enough not to complain too much when the Civil War and its preliminary political tussles kept them apart for months or even years.
It was from their castle at Brampton Bryan that she wrote the small surviving handful of her letters. Addressed to her adored eldest son Ned, an Oxford under- graduate and later a fledgling lawyer at Lincoln's Inn before joining Cromwell's army, they are exactly the sort of messages we should expect a somewhat over- anxious mother to send her boy, and the ageless quality in her tone of gentle but insistent fussing is what gives them a special charm.
Brilliana worries, of course, over Ned's health. 'I have sent you some juice of licorich to make use of if you should have a coold', 'I wisch you may not eate to much fisch. I know you like it, but I thinke it is not so good for you.' Be carefull of your- self, keepe a spare dyet, my deare Ned, 0 that I weare with you.' She can't resist a fashion note or two. 'Let your stockens be allways of the same culler of your cloths, and I hope you now weare Spanisch leather showes'. We can read volumes into her laconic warning, 'Be carefull to improuf your time, I know Loundoun is a bewitch- ing place'.
She never stopped fretting about his food. An apparently endless supply of goodies found its way from Brampton to Magdalen Hall and Lincoln's Inn, tuck parcels for the lad she was keen not to be seen spoiling. Off went 'a pigeon pye', 'a box of dryed plumes', a kid pasty with two different seasonings, a packet of lemon biscuits and 'a peace of angelica rooat: you may carry it in your pocket and bite some times of it'.
Now and then, folded in among her news — young Robin's teeth are falling out, Mr Yate's hen has laid an egg which smells of musk, there is 'a great hoole' in the chestnut gelding's hoof and the local schoolmaster has set his bed-curtains on fire — Brilliana drops her maternal guard sufficiently to confide in Ned as a friend:
I should be very glad if your father would be pleased to bye a coach and have horses. I thinke it would not cost him much, I thinke I shall be abell to take the ayre in it and I beleeve it would be much advantage to health. And good Ned, tell your father so.
Sir Robert, alas, had no time to think about buying carriages. Even as she gave him this vicarious nudge, Brilliana braced herself against approaching war, and when the storm broke over Brampton, a little citadel of Puritan godliness in predomi- nantly Royalist Herefordshire, she was left to face it alone. While the Cavaliers drove off her cattle and rounded up such villagers as they could lay hands on, she gathered muskets and shot together, flooded the castle's disused moat and prepared for a full-scale siege. For six weeks, at the head of her makeshift garrison, Brilliana stood firm while the Royalists burned the village, pulled down the church and poisoned the wells. 'I thanke God I am not afraide', she told Ned, 'it is the Lord's caus wee have stood for', but the ordeal proved too gruelling and in October 1643, a few days after the castle's surrender, she died.
Even the most ardent feminist is unlikely to claim literary greatness for Brilliana. She had none of the natural elegance of her contemporaries Lucy Hutchinson and Dorothy Osborne, and though an avid reader she never fancied her chances as an author like Aphra Behn or the ridiculous Duchess of Newcastle. If her letters have the power to move, it is because they lack all artifice or pretension. Their atrociously approximate spelling — guess what `orompotabily', donkeshote' and Insendereis' are? — somehow enhances the feeling that we are at her side as this `most affectinat mother' tempers her love for her dear son with little bursts of Puritan piety and occasional moments of pawky humour. We can hear what she sounded like, which in the end is all anybody needs from a good letter. The preacher at her husband's funeral in 1658 described her as `that noble Lady and Phoenix of Women', and so she was, absolutely Brill.
Jonathan Keates
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