BERKELEY, Sir Charles (1599-1668), of Bruton, Som.

The epitaph of Sir Charles Berkeley’s youngest brother, John*, 1st Baron Berkeley of Stratton, would assert that they were ‘sprung from Danish kings of brightest fame/Whose blood and high exploits exalts their name’.39B.H. Johnson, Berkeley Square to Bond Street (1952), 49. This reflected the tradition that Harding, a twelfth-century ancestor of the Berkeleys of Berkeley Castle, had been the younger son of a king of Denmark. In fact, Harding’s actual father is more likely to have been Eadnoth the Staller, giving these English Berkeleys the even rarer distinction of a documented non-royal Anglo-Saxon descent. The Berkeleys of Bruton were a cadet branch of the senior Berkeley Castle line. According to Edward Hyde*, they were ‘a very good family in the west’, and Sir Charles’s father, Sir Maurice, had ‘a very fair estate’ and ‘lived with more splendour than his neighbours of his own rank’.40Clarendon’s Four Portraits, ed. R. Ollard (1989), 107. Sir Maurice’s grandfather, the first Sir Maurice†, had served as banner-bearer to Henry VIII and Edward VI, and in 1546 he had bought the ex-monastic manor of Bruton close to the Somerset-Wiltshire border. This became the principal seat of this branch of the family.41VCH Som. vii. 24; Collinson, Som. i. 215. Their house there was said to be a ‘fair and noble habitation’.42Symonds, Diary, 35. Sir Charles had inherited this on the death of his father in 1617.43Sales of Wards ed. Hawkins, 85-6.

His wealth and social standing made him one of the most substantial gentlemen in Somerset. He had been an MP in James I’s final two Parliaments and had then represented Heytesbury in the first three Parliaments of Charles I’s reign. During the late 1630s he had joined his uncle Sir Henry Berkeley* and Sir Robert Phelips† to lead the county’s resistance to the imposition of Ship Money.44Barnes, Som. 215, 216, 218. This had cost him his position as a deputy lieutenant. In the Short Parliament elections of 1640, rather than contest Heytesbury again, he stood aside to allow his youngest brother, Sir John*, to stand there and instead got himself elected for Bath. Nothing is known of his activity in the House. Neither of the Berkeley brothers was re-elected that autumn.

Faced with the deterioration in relations between Parliament and the king during the summer months of 1642, Berkeley, together with Sir Francis Dodington and Sir Ralph Hopton*, began organising an anti-parliamentarian petition in Somerset. Alexander Popham* reported this to his father, Sir Francis Popham*, and their fellow MP, John Ashe*, then raised this in Parliament. On 13 and 14 June the two Houses ordered that Berkeley and Dodington should be summoned.45CJ ii. 261b; PJ iii. 66, 72; LJ v. 130b; Som. RO, DD/HI/B/466: Som. petition, [1642]. Both ignored this command. Once the 1st marquess of Hertford (Sir William Seymour†) had arrived in Somerset to rally military support for the king, Berkeley joined him. The result was that he was among the Somerset royalists impeached by the Commons for treason on 30 August.46CJ ii. 745a-b; LJ v. 360a. In September William Wheler* and one of the Whitakers, either Laurence or William*, asked the Commons for assistance in recovering a debt from him.47CJ ii. 788a.

Berkeley’s brief military career came to an abrupt end in October 1642 when he was captured by parliamentarian forces in Somerset.48C.H. Hartmann, The King’s Friend (1951), 3. By December, when his wife sought permission to visit him and when he was reportedly ‘very sick’, he was being held as a prisoner under impeachment in the Tower of London.49LJ v. 485b. On 28 January 1643 the Lords heard his petition to be transferred to the house of George Kirke†, the king’s gentleman of the robes, at Westminster. This was granted two days later.50LJ v. 576b, 577a, 578b, 579a; CJ ii. 946b, 948b; Add. 18777, f. 136v. Several weeks later permission was given for one of his children to travel from Somerset to Oxford to be touched for the king’s evil.51LJ v. 606a. On 27 February he was instructed to write to his tenants to tell them not to fight against Parliament.52CJ ii. 982b. The following April six of his servants were allowed by the Lords to travel to Somerset to retrieve six horses and a horse litter.53LJ v. 690a. If this was in anticipation of Berkeley’s release, those hopes were dashed. In early August 1643 there was a suggestion that he should be exchanged for John George*.54CJ iii. 189b. That deal fell through, but Berkeley was probably exchanged for another prisoner not long after that.

On his return to the south west, Berkeley resumed his support for the royalist cause, although perhaps more discreetly than in the past. He seems to have avoided undertaking any direct military role, but he was certainly in contact with the royalist high command, most obviously on 19 July 1644, when the king and the prince of Wales spent the night at Bruton.55Symonds, Diary, 35. In April 1645 he attended the meeting of the commissioners of the associated south-western counties at Bridgwater.56Mems. of Prince Rupert, iii. 80n. In the spring of 1645, when a council was created for Prince Charles, Berkeley was aggrieved that he was not included on it. Later that year he was one of those around Prince Charles, who, according Edward Hyde*, began spreading rumours that the prince was about to sail abroad in the hope of discrediting the council.57Clarendon, Hist. iv. 22, 80 and n. Berkeley subsequently joined his brother at Exeter and so was present when Sir John surrendered the city to Parliament in April 1646.

Two months later, on 20 June 1646, Berkeley took advantage of the articles of Exeter to apply to the Committee for Compounding for permission to compound. The deal the Committee offered him the following October was that he would be fined £2,000, but that this could be reduced to just £400 if he used his income from the Bruton, Brewham and Pitcombe tithes to endow preaching ministers in each of those parishes.58CCC 1339. Berkeley agreed and made the necessary arrangements in January 1648. Rents totalling £160 a year were transferred to trustees – John Ashe*, Edward Ashe* and Matthew Davies*.59Som. RO, DD/SG/10. Berkeley’s decision to lease some land to the governors of Bruton grammar school for 2,000 years in return for £500 in November 1648 may have been a way of raising the money he needed to pay his composition fine.60Som. RO, DD/FS/60/2/4-5.

None of this diminished Berkeley’s loyalty to the Stuarts. His brother Sir John provided him with one crucial royalist link. However, by January 1648 Sir John Berkeley and John Ashburnham* had been removed from their attendance on Charles I at Carisbrooke and had begun making plans to leave the country. Before doing so, they visited Sir Charles at Bruton.61CSP Dom. 1648-9, p. 7. Meanwhile, Sir Charles had been appointed comptroller of the prince of Wales’s household, in fulfilment of a promise made at least as early of 1645.62Clarendon, Hist. iv. 22. The first reference to him actually holding the position dates from December 1648, in a letter in which the prince also indicated that Sir Charles’s second son, Charles†, was to have the first reversion to any vacancy as one of his carvers, cupbearers or servers.63HMC Pepys, 242. But while this should have been an important position and have become even more so several weeks later when the prince nominally became king, there is no evidence of Berkeley discharging the associated duties during these years and there must be some doubt that he was formally re-appointed by Charles II on his accession in January 1649.64C. Clay, Public Finance and Private Wealth (Oxford, 1978), 11-16; A. Keay, The Magnificent Monarch (2008), 49-50. At most, this appointment gave Berkeley a claim to the office should the monarchy ever be restored. Unlike his second son and his youngest brother, Berkeley never went into exile.

Excluded from public office and constantly under suspicion, he instead spent the 1650s living quietly in Somerset. He was probably briefly placed under arrest in the spring of 1651, when there were fears that the expected Scottish invasion would be accompanied by royalist uprisings.65CSP Dom. 1651, p. 187. In his protracted dealings with the Committee for Compounding, his constant complaint was that, under its control, his lands were being damaged through illicit encroachments and tree-felling.66CCC 1339; CSP Dom. 1652-3, p. 423; 1654, pp. 409-10. His sequestration was discharged only on 27 September 1653.67CCC 1339. His name later appeared on the 1655 register office list of Somerset royalists.68Add. 34012, f. 4.

Berkeley was confirmed as comptroller at the Restoration and was promoted to become treasurer of the household on the death of Sir Frederick Cornwallis* in 1662. In the final eight years of his life he was thus a senior figure at the Restoration court. His second son, moreover, had in exile become one of the duke of York’s most trusted companions and from 1662 Sir Charles junior became equally intimate with the king in his capacity as his keeper of the privy purse. This marked the zenith of the family’s political importance. When in 1663 Sir Charles junior was raised to the Irish peerage as Viscount Fitzhardinge of Berehaven, the patent included a special remainder in his father’s favour.69CSP Ire. 1663-5, p. 123; CSP Dom. 1663-4, p. 201. Berkeley therefore inherited this title (but not his earldom of Falmouth) when his son was killed at sea in 1665. On his own death in 1668 it then passed to his eldest son, Sir Maurice†. It died out with the male line of Berkeley’s descendants when the youngest son, John†, the fourth viscount, died in 1712.