Robert Harley

Robert Harley Harley, Robert, first earl of Oxford and Mortimer (1661–1724), politician, was born on 5 December 1661 in Bow Street, London, and baptized on the following day at St Paul's, Covent Garden. He was the eldest son of Sir Edward Harley (1624–1700) of Brampton Bryan, Herefordshire, and his second wife, Abigail, née Stephens.

Early life and marriage

Harley's father was a prominent Presbyterian who had played a conspicuous part on the parliamentary side in the civil war. Although he conformed to the Anglican church at the Restoration he sent Robert in 1671 to be educated at a school run by Samuel Birch, a dissenter, at Shilton in Oxfordshire. This upbringing led to some distrust later when Harley associated with high-church tories. Thus in 1710 the dean of Christ Church called him the 'spawn of a Presbyterian' (Feiling, 421). After Shilton he attended a school in London established by a Huguenot, Monsieur Foubert, but left it after a year, aged nineteen, apparently appalled at the moral danger he was exposed to there. In 1682 he was admitted as a member of the Inner Temple. On 14 May 1685 he married Elizabeth Foley (d. 1691) of Witley Court, Gloucestershire, the daughter of a whig ally of Robert's father. They had four children: Edward Harley (1689–1741), who succeeded him as second earl of Oxford; Robert, who died in infancy in 1690; Elizabeth, who married Peregrine Hyde Osborne, second marquess of Carmarthen, in 1712 and died in November 1713; and Abigail, who married George Henry Hay, second earl of Kinnoull, who died on 15 July 1750. Harley's second wife, Sarah Middleton, whom he married on 18 September 1694, died on 17 June 1737. This marriage was childless.