Forbidden Families - Episode 3

Bettany Hughes tells the stories of remarkable women denied their families by the march of history. Brilliana Harley was an aristocrat whose husband's Parliamentarian sympathies led to her being besieged in her own castle home on the Shropshire borders during the English Civil War. She died emaciated and ill, but wrote 375 letters, smuggled out in vegetable boxes, describing her hopes, her frustrations and her faith in her absent husband and son. Throughout her ordeal, her faith in the power of love and the delight of having a family never wavered.