BERKELEY, John (c. 1663-97)

John Berkeley was about one year younger than his brother Charles Berkeley, 2nd Baron Berkeley of Stratton, and like him took to a seafaring career from an early age. He was a volunteer ‘by king’s letter’ in the Navy during the first half of the 1680s, and he appears to have still been a minor when he succeeded to the barony at the death of his elder brother on 6 Mar. 1682. He received favour from the court and was royally pardoned in May 1684 for the murder of a publican who had offended him. Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. ii. 473; HMC Lords, ii. 304; Verney ms mic. M636/38, Dr. W. Denton to Sir R. Verney 24 Apr. 1684. He was commissioned, albeit as a low-ranking officer, in both the land and sea forces in 1684-5. In July 1686 he was promoted to captain of the Charles Galley, part of the fleet that was sent to patrol the Mediterranean under Henry Fitzroy, duke of Grafton, where he proved himself a brave and somewhat reckless commander. HMC Lords, iv. 287.

By this time he had reached his majority, for he was summoned to James II’s Parliament and first took his seat on its first day, 19 May 1685. He was nominated to two select committees and was named as one of the conservators in the bill for Deeping Fen, which was lost at the adjournment on 2 July. Ibid. i. 310. Otherwise he did not make much of a mark on this Parliament as he came to only 15 of its meetings: only four when it commenced in May, and then all 11 sittings in November 1685 before the Parliament began its long series of prorogations. In the years following both English and French observers considered him a client of the king dependent on him for future promotion in the navy, and they therefore assumed he would support the king’s policies to repeal the Test Act and penal laws. Yet when Berkeley returned from his tour of the Mediterranean and was placed in command of the Mountagu on 30 Aug. 1688, part of the fleet under George Legge, Baron Dartmouth, he quickly revealed himself to be one of the leaders of the Williamite conspiracy, ‘one of the most factious and disaffected officers of the navy’, as James II later considered him. He helped to turn the fleet against Dartmouth and persuaded the admiral not to venture forth to intercept William of Orange’s large transport fleet. Life of James II, ii. 233-4; HMC Dartmouth, i. 260-1; Ailesbury Mems. 185, 291; Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. iv. 365-6; EHR, i. 527-8.

Berkeley’s role in preventing the English fleet from engaging William of Orange was quickly rewarded, and on 14 Dec. William made him rear admiral, ‘to the great satisfaction of the fleet’, according to Morrice. Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. iv. 380. From this point began his long career of service to the Williamite regime, so much at odds with the predictions confidently made about his loyalty to his former patron James II in 1687-8. In the Convention in late January and early February he took part in all the important votes on the declaration of the disposition of the Crown, and consistently voted in favour of accepting the words ‘vacant’ and ‘abdicated’ and signed the protests of 31 Jan. and 2 Feb. when this wording was rejected by the majority of the House. Ibid. 517. On 6 Mar. 1689 he further protested against the passage of the trial of peers bill. In total he came to only 44 per cent of the sittings of the first session of the Convention, and was named to two committees (both on the same day, 21 March). He had to divide his time there with military duty, as he served as rear admiral of the blue under Arthur Herbert, earl of Torrington, at Bantry Bay and then moved on to defend Dublin Bay against possible French invasion during May 1689. He returned at the very end of the month in time to vote against the motion to reverse the punitive judgments against Titus Oates on 31 May and sat in the House again the following day before absenting himself from proceedings for the remainder of the session to return to sea.

From this point it becomes increasingly difficult to determine Berkeley of Stratton’s activities in the House, or indeed in public life. Even before that date there were two Lord Berkeleys who appear in the parliamentary records, Berkeley of Stratton himself and his distant kinsman George Berkeley, earl of Berkeley. To further complicate matters, on 11 July 1689 the earl of Berkeley’s son and heir Charles Berkeley, styled Lord Dursley, was summoned to the House during his father’s lifetime as Baron Berkeley of Berkeley and continued to sit under that title during the remainder of Berkeley of Stratton’s career in the House, making it often impossible to distinguish between the two, sometimes three, Lord Berkeleys who appear in the House’s records.

This problem is slightly alleviated by the knowledge that for much of the next few years Berkeley of Stratton was principally occupied by his military duties and seldom attended the House. From October 1689 he commanded a fleet cruising the Channel, at one point threatening the coast of France, and was absent for almost the entirety of the second session of the Convention. Luttrell, Brief Relation, i. 588; ii. 2, 7. He came to the House on 22 Jan. 1690, where he sat for a further two days before the Convention was prorogued on 27 January. He was removed as rear admiral of the red a few days after this, to the bewilderment of Roger Morrice: ‘I suppose it is for some personal prejudice that somebody of interest has taken against him for he was as right disposed for present purposes’. Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. v. 399. He still came to only 12 sittings of the session of spring 1690, perhaps preoccupied with further developments that only bound him tighter to the court. When Prince George of Denmark, decided to accompany his brother-in-law William III on his campaign to Ireland, two of the prince’s servants, Edward Hyde, styled Lord Cornbury (later 3rd earl of Clarendon), his master of horse, and Anthony Cary^‡, 5th Viscount Falkland [S], his groom of the stole, refused to go with him and were consequently dismissed. In their place Robert Sutton, 2nd Baron Lexinton, became the prince’s master of the horse and Berkeley was appointed groom of the stole. Both accompanied the prince on the Irish campaign. Ibid. 454, 513; Luttrell, Brief Relation, ii. 51; Gregg, Queen Anne, 79. After his return, Berkeley did come to 36 meetings (47 per cent) of the House in the last three months of 1690, when he was placed on five committees. From January to October 1691 he acted as captain of the Saint Andrew, on which ship Prince George intended to sail as a volunteer before William III’s prohibition prevented it. Luttrell, ii. 218-19; HMC Portland, iii. 464; Gregg, Queen Anne, 80. Berkeley was able to serve the prince and princess again when in April 1692 he leased his family’s grand house on Piccadilly to their use after they were driven from Whitehall by queen Mary’s antagonism towards her sister and her servants. Princess Anne and Prince George remained in Berkeley House until 1695 when William III gave them the use of St. James’s Palace. During these years, when Berkeley was not at sea, he remained in the princess’s old lodgings at the Cockpit. Gregg, Queen Anne, 90, 95, 97, 103, 107.

Berkeley appears to have been in England for all of the months of the 1691-2 session, although he only came to 47 per cent of the sittings and was named to no committees. A ‘Lord Berkeley’ was a teller in a number of divisions over these months – on the clandestine marriages bill (2 Nov. 1691), the treason trial bill (20 Jan. 1692) and the judges’ commissions and salaries bill (22 Feb. 1692) – but this probably refers to the Baron Berkeley of Berkeley, usually more involved in parliamentary affairs than his namesake. HMC Lords, iii. 254, 326; iv. 79. It was definitely Berkeley of Stratton – for he signed himself ‘Berkeley, S.’ – who subscribed to the protest of 16 Feb. 1692 against the decision that proxies could not be used during the proceedings on the divorce bill of Henry Howard, 7th duke of Norfolk. In March 1692 he further cemented his allegiance to the court by marrying the daughter of the Irish attorney general and Speaker of the Irish House of Commons Sir John Temple, and a maid of honour to the queen. Deprived of his naval command (and thus precluded from participating in the victories of Barfleur and La Hogue), he spent most of the 1692 campaign on land in Flanders, leading the 4th Regiment of Horse whose command he had been given in January 1692. Luttrell, Brief Relation, ii. 343. He was back in England to attend just over half of the sittings in the session of 1692-3. Here he followed the court’s lead in opposing the place bill, voting against both its commitment and its eventual passage on 1 Jan. 1693. In February he found Charles Mohun, 4th Baron Mohun, not guilty of murder. From this session Berkeley became a more assiduous attender of the House and sat in at least half of the sittings of each subsequent session of the House until his death. Regardless of his increased attendance he never became a major participant in the House’s business. It was almost certainly Berkeley of Berkeley and not Berkeley of Stratton who was the ‘Lord Berkeley’ who on 1 Jan. 1693 acted as teller in a series of six divisions in the committee of the whole on the place bill and later told against the passage of the bill. Berkeley of Stratton was not named to a single select committee in any of the three parliamentary sessions between 22 Oct. 1691 and 25 Apr. 1694 and even when he came to two-thirds of the sittings in the 1694-5 session (the highest attendance rate of his career) he was still only named to five committees.

He was after all principally a military officer and in late January 1693 he was returned to naval service. He was made vice-admiral of the blue squadron and, after the death of the admiral Sir John Ashby in June, was promoted to full admiral of the blue in early July. This appointment was controversial as it overlooked more senior officers such as Sir George Rooke^‡ and it was reversed in late August 1693, when Rooke took over as admiral of the blue and Berkeley was dropped down once again to being vice admiral. Ibid. iii. 126, 135, 143, 168, 176. Fortunately for him, this meant that he was not involved in the Smyrna fleet disaster, and he escaped unscathed from the House’s examinations in the session of 1693-4, into the naval miscarriages of the previous summer. He attended exactly half the sittings of this session. At one point in January 1694 he was called upon to give his expert opinion on a naval matter under discussion and on 16 Feb. 1694 he helped to introduce to the House his fellow soldier Charles Butler, as Baron Butler of Weston (already earl of Arran [I]). HMC Lords, n.s. i. 96. He profited from the disgrace of the joint admirals. He was given command of the admiral Henry Killigrew’s^‡ regiment of marines in December 1693 and in April 1694 was finally promoted to admiral. That summer he acted as admiral of the blue under Edward Russell* (later earl of Orford), and led the naval forces supporting the attack on Brest. He was in the thick of the fighting at Camaret Bay on 8 June 1694 before being beaten off by the French batteries. Throughout the rest of June and July he coasted in the Channel, constantly threatening and bombarding the French Channel ports of Dieppe and Le Havre, although he did have to come ashore briefly at the end of July to account to the Privy Council for his actions in the summer’s campaign. Luttrell, Brief Relation, iii. 324 et seq; Bodl. Carte 79, ff. 546, 566, 596 et seq.

On 27 Aug. 1694, illness forced him to give up his command to spend the winter in London. Consequently, he was able to attend two-thirds of the sittings of the 1694-5 session and he was involved in the investigation conducted in February 1695 into the state of the fleet. On 11 Feb. the House ordered him to submit a copy of the exact instructions he had received from Admiral Russell for the attack on Camaret Bay and over the following three days it further interrogated the admiralty commissioners on the size and composition of the fleet Berkeley had had with him during the campaign. HMC Lords, n.s. i. 470, 484-6. During that summer’s campaign he was back at sea as admiral of the blue, participating in various naval actions. He came to 56 per cent of the meetings of the 1695-6 session. He was named to only one committee and was appointed to manage a conference on 14 Dec. 1695 on the address against the Scottish East India Company. On 16 Mar. 1696 he signed the Association. He took over as commander-in-chief of the fleet in May in place of Sir George Rooke, leading in July 1696 a series of raids on the French coast in the hope of diverting French forces from Flanders. Ibid. ii. 336-7. But he was increasingly ill with his personal affairs in some disarray and after incessant requests to be given permission to return to London he was finally allowed to leave the fleet in August 1696, never to return to command it again.

The principal trouble concerning him was the disposition of Berkeley House, which he had been trying to sell since Princess Anne and Prince George had vacated it in 1695. Berkeley appears to have agreed to sell it to both John Sheffield, marquess of Normanby (later duke of Buckingham), and to William Cavendish, duke of Devonshire. These two peers fought out their conflicting claims to the house in chancery; Berkeley and his promises were naturally at the centre of the dispute. During the 1696-7 session, Berkeley attended 41 per cent of the sittings but was not named to a single committee. Meanwhile the dispute over Berkeley House came to a head when Normanby petitioned the House on 6 Nov. 1696 that Devonshire be made to waive his privilege in this matter. The matter rumbled on for most of the month until on 9 Dec. all three peers agreed to relinquish their privilege in the cause. Devonshire was eventually able to claim possession of Berkeley House, which later became the site of the celebrated and more long-lasting Devonshire House. Ibid. ii. 259-60. On 23 Dec. 1696 Berkeley also voted in favour of the attainder of Sir John Fenwick^‡.

By the end of February 1697 Berkeley was incapacitated by illness. On 20 Feb. the select committee considering the state of trade and plantations summoned Berkeley, as one of the proprietors of Carolina and the Bahama Islands (ownership of which he had inherited from his father) to attend the committee in two days time. On that same day Charles Boyle, Baron Clifford of Lanesborough (later 2nd earl of Burlington), assigned his proxy to Berkeley. Berkeley, however, was too ill to attend the committee on the 22nd and in turn registered his proxy that day with Clifford of Lanesborough, who consequently returned to the House. Both the proxy and any hope of his appearance before the committee were obviated by Berkeley’s death from pleurisy on 27 Feb. 1697. Ibid. ii. 412. Berkeley left behind no surviving children and the title and estate, such as it was after the sale of both Berkeley House and his other house of Twickenham Park, passed to his younger brother William Berkeley, 4th Baron Berkeley of Stratton, the last of the sons of John Berkeley, Baron Berkeley of Stratton. The third baron’s widow made an advantageous match shortly after his death, marrying in May 1700 Hans Willem Bentinck, earl of Portland, and after his death in 1709, she went on to serve as governess to the daughters of George II until her own death at an advanced age in 1751.