Wifely 'Affection and Disposition': Brilliana Harley and Thomas Gataker's A Wife in Deed (1623)

The sermon Thomas Gataker gave at the wedding of Brilliana Conway and Sir Robert Harley in 1623 was published under the title A Wife in Deed (1623). Gataker defines marriage as an affective contract between two agents with responsibilities to one another, and offers practical and generic precepts for conduct. The dedication to Robert Harley honouring Brilliana Harley as a "mirror" of the ideal wife links those ideals, rhetorically at least, to the Harleys. Harley's extensive extant correspondence (1625-44) allows us to consider the practical day-to-day significance of the sermon's teachings. The essay reviews letters Harley wrote to her husband in the 1620s, early in the marriage; and in the 1640s, later in the marriage. Throughout she employs a deferential tone. During the 1640s, when civil war raged and her husband was absent, Harley governed the household, sheltered a godly community, and withstood a royalist siege justifying her position in terms of natural law. Gataker's sermon provides a fresh lens upon the disjunction between the submissive rhetoric of Harley's marital letters, and the stridency of her defence of Brampton Bryan.