ColonelFrancis Brinley (c.1690 – November 27, 1765) was an English-born landowner, philanthropist and military officer best known for being the subject of a John Smibert portrait which is currently owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Though he was born and died in England, Brinley spent most of his life in the British Province of Massachusetts Bay as a prosperous landholder who became involved with several colonization projects throughout the colony.
Born in 1690 in London to American colonists who had moved back to England, Brinley spent the first two decades of his life in Europe before moving back to North America in order to inherit the estate of his grandfather in Massachusetts. In 1719, his grandfather died and left his estate to Brinley, who settled down in Massachusetts and constructed a large colonial mansion for himself known as Datchet House in the Boston neighborhood of Roxbury.
Brinley also became involved in colonization schemes, buying land in Suffield, Connecticut in 1735 and Framingham, Massachusetts in 1742. Upon the outbreak of the French and Indian War in 1754, he was promoted to the rank of colonel in the colonial militia. Brinley served throughout the entire duration of the war, though he personally never saw combat. After the war's end in 1763, Brinley travelled back to England, dying in London in 1765.
In 1710, after living in England for two decades, Brinley returned to British North America in the hopes that he might inherit the vast personal fortune of his grandfather, who lived in Massachusetts and was also named Francis (and for whom the younger Brinley was named).[1] When the senior Brinley passed away in 1719, he left his entire estate in his will and testament to his grandson, which included a sizeable collection of household silverware.[3]
Now in possession of a "considerable fortune", Brinley decided to settle down in Massachusetts as a member of the American gentry.[2] He ordered the construction of a lavish colonial mansion known as Datchet House in the Boston neighborhood of Roxbury using his inheritance, which was "one of the most splendid residences in the colony at that time."[1] One of Brinley's descendants claimed in an 1853 book that the mansion was modeled after an English country house near the Berkshire village of Datchet, which the descendant also claimed the mansion was named after.[4]
Political career and landholdings
In 1718, Brinley married Deborah Lyde, a wealthy and socially influential heiress who was the daughter of a moneyed couple from Boston, Edward Lyde and his wife Catherine. Over the course of their marriage, the couple went on to have seven children together, one of whom, a son, was named Francis after his father. In addition to owning an equivalent amount of wealth as her husband, Deborah maintained connections with aristocratic circles in England, which allowed her to emulate the most recent cultural trends and fashions in Europe, a comparative rarity in North America.[5]
Anglo-Irish philosopher and clergyman George Berkeley made a visit to Britain's North American colonies in 1728.[7] Accompanied by his family, he visited Boston, where his entourage was invited by Brinley to stay at Datchet House for the duration of their stay. Berkeley was attempting to promote the spread of Palladian architecture in British North America, an architectural style that Brinley had ordered his to be built in; historian Margaretta M. Lovell suggested that it was this factor which played a major role in Berkeley's decision to live in Datchet House while staying in Boston.[8]
The next year, Brinley commissioned Scottish-born painter John Smibert, who had accompanied Berkeley to North America, to paint portraits of both himself and his wife and child.[1] Smibert's portrait of Brinley depicted both Queen Anne style furniture that he owned and Brinley's landholdings; the portrait Smibert made of Deborah and her son Francis depicted a small orange tree she owned, an expensive rarity in North America.[5] Lovell argued that given Brinley's wealth and European connections, "[it was] not surprising... that Brinley was one of Smibert's first customers".[8]
Beginning in the 1730s, Brinley started to dabble in colonization projects as well. In 1732, the General Court of Massachusetts issued a land grant consisting of six square miles to a colonist named Christopher Jacob Lawton from Suffield, Connecticut for a sum of money, in line with a boundary agreement negotiated in 1713.[9] Three years later, Lawton divided up the grant and sold a portion of it (consisting of roughly a quarter of what he had purchased in 1732) to Brinley, who subsequently became one of the town proprietors of Suffield alongside Lawton and two other investors.[9]
Later life and death
A 1729 portrait of Deborah Brinley and her son Francis by John Smibert
On February 1, 1742, Brinley purchased a land grant in the town of Framingham, Massachusetts from Colonel Joseph Buckminster and his sons Joseph and Thomas for the sum of 8,600 pounds in public credit.[10] The grant consisted of 860 acres of land, 400 of which had been already colonized. Brinley later issued a surety for a colonist named George Craddock, who purchased portions of Brinley's grant and leased it to Anglo-Irish naval officer Sir Peter Warren.[10]
In November 1747, an attempt by Royal Navy officer Charles Knowles to impress a group of sailors into his squadron led to the eruption of a riot in Boston.[11] After Knowles had sent press gangs into the city, an angry mob responded by taking several British naval officers hostage.[11] One hostage, a Captain Erskine, was briefly held at Datchet House under Brinley's care on the 19th of November before being released; the riot subsided after Knowles released the sailors.[12]
Brinley was also commissioned into the provincial militia during his time in Massachusetts.[1] When the French and Indian War between the American colonies of Great Britain and France broke out in 1754, Brinley was promoted to the rank of colonel and appointed as the commander of the Roxbury regiment, a unit of the provincial militia.[13] Brinley continued to serve in the provincial militia throughout the duration of the conflict, though he personally never saw any combat.[1]
Brinley's landholdings in Massachusetts were expanded in 1760, when his fourth son Nathaniel leased a plot of land (referred to by historians as the "Brinley Farm") from a merchant and politician in New York named Oliver De Lancey. Nathaniel also personally purchased between fifteen and twenty Black slaves to work on the leased land as farmers.[14][15] In 1761, Deborah passed away at Datchet House, leaving Brinley a widower; he never remarried after her death.[3]
After the French and Indian War ended in 1763, Brinley travelled to England, dying in London on November 27, 1765, the same city in which he had been born.[3] Having accumulated a fortune while in Massachusetts, Brinley left a large estate upon his death, which included several slaves he had acquired and numerous pieces of real estate in Eastern Massachusetts.[13] His mansion at Roxbury continued to stand until 1902, when it was demolished to build a residence for local Catholic clergymen.[16]
Personal life and legacy
As noted by American historian Oswaldo Rodriguez Roque, Brinley "passed [most of] his life rather uneventfully".[1] His personal life and financial activities were supported by Brinley's familial connection to Nathaniel Byfield, an English-born jurist who served as the speaker of the Massachusetts General Court from 1693 to 1694 and was "one of the most important and best-connected men in the colony"; Byfield was the maternal grandfather of Deborah.[5] When Byfield died in 1733, his last will and testament left his estate to Brinley and Deborah, vastly increasing their wealth.[2]
Brinley also engaged in several philanthropic ventures over the course of his life; according to Unitarian clergyman Henry Wilder Foote, he "was of a liberal and hospital nature".[17] In 1724, Brinley became a member of the Boston Episcopal Charitable Society, a charitable organization established to distribute charity to impoverished members of the Church of England living in Boston.[17][18] He also frequently made large donations to King's Chapel, an independent Christian Unitarian church built in 1754, which like Datchet House was also constructed in the neoclassical style.[8][19]
After Brinley's death, the paintings he had commissioned from Smibert and the silverware he inherited from his grandfather were eventually acquired by several prominent museums.[20] In 1962, the Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased the portraits of Brinley and his wife from a New York company; the paintings had been in the Brinley family's possession until 1878.[5] Brinley's personal collection of silverware was sold by his descendants in 1878, and was eventually purchased by the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library estate in Winterthur, New Castle County, Delaware.[21]
John Eliot was a Puritan missionary to the American Indians who some called "the apostle to the Indians" and the founder of Roxbury Latin School in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1645. In 1660 he completed the enormous task of translating the Eliot Indian Bible into the Massachusett Indian language, producing more than two thousand completed copies.
The Boston Brahmins or Boston elite are members of Boston's historic upper class. They are often associated with a cultivated New England or Mid-Atlantic dialect and accent, Harvard University, Anglicanism, and traditional British American customs and clothing. Descendants of the earliest English colonists are typically considered to be the most representative of the Boston Brahmins. They are considered White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs).
Thomas Dudley was a New England colonial magistrate who served several terms as governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Dudley was the chief founder of Newtowne, later Cambridge, Massachusetts, and built the town's first home. He provided land and funds to establish the Roxbury Latin School and signed Harvard College's new charter during his 1650 term as governor. Dudley was a devout Puritan who opposed religious views not conforming with his. In this, he was more rigid than other early Massachusetts leaders like John Winthrop, but less confrontational than John Endecott.
Joseph Dudley was a colonial administrator, a native of Roxbury in Massachusetts Bay Colony, and the son of one of its founders. He had a leading role in the administration of the Dominion of New England (1686–1689), which was overthrown in the 1689 Boston revolt. He served briefly on the council of the Province of New York, from which he oversaw the trial which convicted Jacob Leisler, the ringleader of Leisler's Rebellion. He then spent eight years in England in the 1690s as Lieutenant-Governor of the Isle of Wight, including one year as a Member of Parliament for Newtown. In 1702, he returned to New England after being appointed governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay and Province of New Hampshire, posts that he held until 1715.
Increase Sumner was an American lawyer, jurist, and politician from Massachusetts. He was the fifth governor of Massachusetts, serving from 1797 to 1799. Trained as a lawyer, he served in the provisional government of Massachusetts during the American Revolutionary War, and was elected to the Confederation Congress in 1782. Appointed to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court the same year, he served there as an associate justice until 1797.
John Smibert was a Scottish-born painter, regarded as the first academically trained artist to live and work regularly in British America.
Nathaniel Smibert, was an American colonial artist in Boston, Province of Massachusetts, active in the mid-18th century. He is considered to be the first portrait painter in America.
Andrew Oliver was an American-born merchant and colonial administrator in the Province of Massachusetts Bay. Born into a wealthy and politically powerful merchant family, he is best known as the official responsible for implementing the provisions of the Stamp Act, for which he was hanged in effigy. He never actually carried out those duties and was later commissioned as the province's lieutenant governor.
William Tailer was a military officer and politician in the Province of Massachusetts Bay. Born into the wealthy and influential Stoughton family, he twice married into other politically powerful families. He served as lieutenant governor of the province from 1711 until 1716, and again in the early 1730s. During each of these times he was briefly acting governor. He was a political opponent of Governor Joseph Dudley, and was a supporter of a land bank proposal intended to address the province's currency problems. During his first tenure as acting governor he authorized the erection of Boston Light, the earliest lighthouse in what is now the United States.
Peter Pelham was an American portrait painter and engraver, born in England.
Thomas Hancock was an American merchant and politician best known for being the uncle of Founding Father and statesman John Hancock. The son of an Anglican preacher, Thomas Hancock rose from obscurity to become one of the wealthiest businessmen in colonial Massachusetts, accumulating a 70,000 pound fortune over the course of his lifetime and becoming the proprietor of his own mercantile firm.
The Basilica and Shrine of Our Lady of Perpetual Help informally known as The Mission Church is a Roman Catholic basilica in the Mission Hill neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, United States. The Redemptorists priests of the Baltimore Province have ministered to the parish since the church was first opened in 1870. The shrine is dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary under the title of Our Mother of Perpetual Help.
Charles Apthorp was an English-born merchant and slave trader in Boston, Massachusetts. Apthorp managed his import business from Merchants Row, and "in his day he was called the richest man in Boston." He also served in the employ of the British government for various schemes it attempted to implement in North America.
George Henry Hall (1825–1913) was an American still-life and landscape artist. He studied art in Düsseldorf and Paris and he worked and lived in New York City, the Catskills of New York and in Europe. His works are in museum collections in the United States and Europe. Over the course of his career he sold 1,659 paintings.
Thomas Edwards was a prominent silversmith active in colonial Boston, Massachusetts. He was a son of silversmith John Edwards, and advertised in the Boston Weekly News-Letter, May 18, 1746, that he would carry on his father's business "at the shop of the deceased." His younger brother, Samuel Edwards, was also a silversmith, as was his son, Joseph Edwards Jr. Edwards served over time as Third Sergeant (1729), Ensign (1747), Lieutenant (1750), and Captain (1753) of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Massachusetts. His work is collected in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Brooklyn Museum, and Winterthur Museum.
Nathaniel Byfield was an American jurist and Speaker of the Massachusetts General Court.
Ezekiel Goldthwait was an American merchant and landowner. Born in Boston, the capital of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, he rose to become on the city's leading citizens in the years leading to the American Revolution.
Jacob Hurd was a leading American silversmith, active in Boston, and father to silversmiths Nathaniel Hurd (1729-1777) and Benjamin Hurd (1739-1781), as well as grandfather to Benjamin Hurd Jr. (1778-1818).
Lawrence Park was an American art historian, architect, and genealogist who authored pioneering critical and biographical studies of portrait painters Gilbert Stuart, Joseph Badger, and Joseph Blackburn, active during the colonial and early federal periods of the United States. Park's four-volume treatise on Stuart was published posthumously in 1926. Park's papers are held at the Winterthur Library and the Frick Art Reference Library.
Benjamin Tompson was an American Puritan poet, author, educator and physician from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who is widely considered by historians as the "first native-born poet in America". He is also noted for his poems and writings involving King Philip's War and related conflicts between the colonies and Massachusett Indian Nations in 17th-century southern Massachusetts. In the aftermath of Indian attacks and the burning of entire towns and churches, Tompson saw this as an occasion to memorialize the tragic loses incurred in the conflicts through poetry and other writings in the hopes that it would also inspire other writers who were generally silent to take up the cause. His poem, Harvardine Quils, is the definitive example, directed at Harvard's scholars and other writers.
Caldwell, John; Roque, Oswaldo Rodriguez; Johnson, Dale T. (1994). American Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art: A Catalogue of Works by Artists Born by 1815. Vol.1. Princeton University Press. ISBN978-0-6910-3795-0.
Foote, Henry Wilder; Edes, Henry Herbert; Perkins, John Carroll; Warren, Winslow (1882). Annals of King's Chapel from the Puritan Age of New England to the Present Day. Vol.1. Little, Brown and Company.
Gardner, Albert TenEyck; Feld, Stuart P. (1965). American Paintings: A Catalogue of the Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Vol.1. Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Hardesty, Jared R. (2016). Unfreedom: Slavery and Dependence in Eighteenth-Century Boston. NYU Press. ISBN978-1-4798-7217-6.
Sabine, Lorenzo (1979) [1864]. Biographical Sketches of Loyalists of the American Revolution, with an Historical Essay. Vol.1. Genealogical Publishing Company. ASINB00HPZ9V8A.
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