Francis Brinley

Colonel Francis Brinley ( – November 27, 1765) was an English-born landowner, philanthropist and military officer best known for being the subject of a John Smibert portrait now owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Brinley, though he was born and died in England, spent most of his life in the Province of Massachusetts Bay as a prosperous landholder who became involved with several colonization projects throughout the region. 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. In 1718, Brinley married a wealthy heiress from Boston named Deborah Lyde. Over the following decades, Brinley established himself as a prominent member of the American gentry, acquiring landholdings and slaves along with sponsoring charitable organizations. He also served as an official in the colonial government of Massachusetts, being successively appointed as an assistant-surveyor, a deputy surveyor-general and a justice of the peace. 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.