Polish historian and writer Józef Ignacy Kraszewski wrote a novel under the title Count Brühl, in which he described Heinrich as an oppressive and stubborn dictator, who, with greed, but also great determination, unsuccessfully attempted to gain control of the entire nation.

Under Duke Christian of Saxe-Weissenfels von Brühl was first placed as page with the dowager duchess, and was then received at her recommendation into the court of the Electorate of Saxony at Dresden as a Silberpage on 16 April 1719.

[2] He was at Warsaw when his master died in 1733, and obtained the confidence of the Prince-Elector Frederick Augustus II, who was at Dresden at the time, by acquiring the papers and jewels of his late father and bringing them promptly to his successor.

Reichsgraf since 27 November 1737, he had to acquiesce to the influence of old servants of the electoral house for a time, but after 1738 he was in effect sole minister, a position for which he actually had neither the skills nor the knowledge.

Brühl had cunning and skill sufficient to govern his master and get rid of his rivals and succeeded in keeping everybody at a distance from the king.

"Yes, sire," was the continual answer, and to satisfy the king's demands, Brühl exhausted the state, plunged the country into debts and greatly reduced the army.

However he was wholly responsible for a ruinous fiscal policy which decisively weakened the position of Saxony within the Holy Roman Empire between 1733 and 1763; for the mistaken ambition which led Frederick Augustus II to become a candidate for the throne of Poland, which led to a civil war and did sustainable damage to the Polish sovereignty; for the engagements into which he entered in order to secure the support of Emperor Charles VI of Habsburg; for the shameless and ill-timed tergiversations of Saxony during the War of the Austrian Succession; for the intrigues which entangled the Electorate in the alliance against King Frederick II of Prussia, which led to the outbreak of the Seven Years' War; and for the waste and want of foresight which left the bankrupt country utterly unprepared to resist the immediate attack of the Prussian king.

Nothing could shake the confidence of his master, which survived the ignominious flight into Bohemia, into which he was trapped by Brühl at the time of the Battle of Kesselsdorf, and all the miseries of the Seven Years' War.

His fortune including large palaces at Pförten (present-day Brody), Oberlichtenau and Wachau-Seifersdorf was found to amount to a million and a half talers, and was sequestered but afterwards restored to his family.

In 1736 the architect Johann Christoph Knöffel had begun to build a city palace and terrace for the count on the bank of the Elbe in the heart of Dresden.

His youngest son, Hans Moritz von Brühl (1746–1811), was before the Revolution of 1789 a colonel in the French service, and afterwards general inspector of roads in Brandenburg and Pomerania.

By his wife Margarethe Schleierweber, the daughter of a French corporal, and renowned for her beauty and intellectual gifts, he was the father of Carl von Brühl who as intendant-general of the Prussian royal theatres was of some importance in the history of the development of drama in Germany.