BERKELEY, Charles (1630-65)

Berkeley was born in 1630 at the family home in Bruton, Somerset. His tutor, Hugh Cressy, was a former chaplain to Thomas Wentworth^†, earl of Strafford, and Lucius Cary^†, 2nd Viscount Falkland. Cressy renounced protestantism in Rome in 1646 while accompanying Berkeley on a European tour. The Berkeley family were committed royalists throughout the civil wars and Berkeley was later sent to Europe to serve the Stuart court in exile. His uncle Sir John Berkeley, later Baron Berkeley of Stratton, governor to the duke of York, secured him a commission in 1652 as cornet in the earl of Bristol’s regiment of English guards, serving under York’s command in the French forces of Turenne. In 1657 he received a commission as captain of the duke’s own Life Guards in the service of the Spanish crown.

Berkeley’s loyal service was acknowledged after the Restoration, and in May 1660 he was among the first to be knighted by Charles II. His loyalty to York led him to claim to have been Anne Hyde’s lover and the father of her child, in an attempt to allow York to disclaim paternity and avoid a marriage. TNA, PRO 31/3/108, pp. 11–18, 58–63, 96–98. The incident did not prevent Berkeley from becoming a great favourite of both the king and York. Various grants and office in York’s household followed, as did army commissions and even a diplomatic mission on behalf of York to congratulate Louis XIV on the birth of the Dauphin. Hartmann, 66. He was returned to the Commons as the court nominee for New Romney in 1661. He was unpopular with many of the king’s ministers and courtiers, being described by Samuel Pepys^‡ as a ‘vicious person’ whose ‘greatness is only his being pimp to the king and my Lady Castlemaine’. Pepys Diary, iii. 227, 282.

In June 1663 it was reported to Louis XIV that the king was ‘very fond’ of ‘young Berkeley’, and in July he was raised to the Irish peerage, with a special remainder in favour of his father. TNA, PRO 31/3/112, p. 32. In October of the same year, now Viscount Fitzhardinge, he was granted forfeited estates in Ireland worth £2,000 per year. Bodl. Carte 43, ff. 257–8, 303–4; Carte 165, ff. 146, 152, 158, 170–1, 173, 199. Berkeley was also heavily involved in the Irish land settlement, being one of several ‘grandees’ named in the Irish Act of Explanation to receive Irish estates. Hatton Corresp. (Cam. Soc. n.s. xxii), 34. Much correspondence followed with James Butler, duke of Ormond [I] (and earl of Brecknock in the English peerage), the lord lieutenant of Ireland, concerning the implementation of this grant and other aspects of the Irish land settlement. Bodl. Carte 214, ff. 554–5, 580–1, 593, 595; Carte 251, ff. 1–2, 13–14, 20, 26, 34, 178–9; Carte 33, ff. 231, 297; Carte 143, f. 228; Carte 68, f. 582.

In September 1663 Fitzhardinge was described as ‘the towering favourite’, with many lampoons circulating about him and ‘the maids of honour’. Bodl. Carte 77, f. 526. These later appeared rather prescient, when Sir Thomas Osborne, the future earl of Danby, noted that on 5 Nov. 1664 Fitzhardinge had owned his marriage of two months to Mary Bagot, one of the maids to the duchess of York. Browning, Danby, ii. 10; Hatton Corresp. (Cam. Soc. n.s. xxii), 42. No sooner had his marriage been made public then he was sent on a diplomatic mission to Louis XIV to discover the French monarch’s attitude to the war that Charles II was planning against the Dutch. Hartmann, 127–8, 133–9, 144, 244–7; Miller, Charles II, 117. Fitzhardinge himself seems to have thought that the king did not have enough money to prosecute the Dutch war. Add. 32094, ff. 28–31.

Fitzhardinge’s promotion to an English earldom seems to have been known for several months before the letters patent were issued. In January 1665 it was reported that he ‘grows daily more potent, opulent, and I had almost said, formidable in the Court. For he hath been lately regaled with new titles and £3,000 p.a. land to maintain them.’ HMC Hastings, ii. 147. In April, news of his elevation saw it predicted that he ‘will be duke of Portsmouth ere long, for he grows greater daily, even to a prodigy’. HEHL, Hastings mss HA 10664.

On 16 Apr. 1665 Falmouth departed post to join York as a volunteer in the fleet, ‘something he told us he would never do until the Dutch put to sea’. TNA, PRO 31/3/114, pp. 223–4. On 21 Apr. he made his will in which he made provision for his unborn child: if a daughter she would have a portion of £8,000, while his father would receive his Irish lands (as he would then inherit the Irish title). His wife was named executor. She was to receive his personal estate, his house in Rutland, revenue from his grant of mooring chains on the Thames and his personal estate.

During the battle of Lowestoft on 3 June, a canon shot killed Falmouth and others who were standing beside the duke of York on board the Royal Charles. One eyewitness suggested that Falmouth’s brains were splattered all over the duke’s face. Bodl. Carte 69, f. 146. Andrew Marvell^‡, in his Second Advice to a Painter, wrote of Falmouth,

His shatter’d head the fearless Duke distains,
And gave the last first proof that he had brains. POAS, i. 44.

Charles II was deeply affected by his death, Louis XIV being informed that the king had ‘wanted to keep [him] by him, but who preferred duty to fortune’. More significantly, for France, Falmouth ‘was the only Englishman in whom we could place our trust’ in the absence of Henry Jermyn, earl of St Albans, ‘and as it seemed to us, he wished nothing more passionately than to see the king his master in perfect agreement with your majesty’. TNA, PRO 31/3/115, p. 42.

Pepys wrote that ‘the king, it seems, is much troubled at the fall of my Lord of Falmouth’, adding uncharitably that ‘I do not meet with any man else that so much as wishes him alive again, the world conceiving him a man of too much pleasure to do the king any good or offer any good office to him’. Pepys did admit, however, that Falmouth ‘is confessed to have been a man of great honour, that did show it in his going with the duke, the most that ever any man did’. Pepys Diary, vi. 123–4. The king told his sister, ‘I have had as great a loss as ’tis possible in a good friend’; the duchess reciprocated, revealing ‘her sorrow at the death of poor Lord Falmouth, whom I regret as much for the sake of the friendship you felt for him, and which he so justly deserved, as for his goodness to me’. My Dearest Minette ed. R. Norrington, 120, 122. Falmouth had been the chief messenger between them.

Falmouth may have seen himself as an important player in the politics of the court. In late June 1665 William Lloyd, the future bishop of Worcester, was told that Sidney Godolphin, later earl of Godolphin, had said that Falmouth

did resolve to fix for himself a real interest by obliging worthy men and that if you were but willing to take the mere title of his chaplain and no more, he would undertake within a very short space, you should be provided with some good dignity, or any other ecclesiastical preferment you could expect … But since this, you know what is fallen out, by which these thoughts are vanished. Glos. Archives, Lloyd Baker mss D3549/2/2/1, no. 7.

Falmouth was given a hero’s funeral and buried with great pomp in Westminster Abbey on 22 June. His English peerage became extinct at his death, but his father succeeded to his Irish honours by special remainder. In 1674 his widow married Charles Sackville, styled Lord Buckhurst, the future 6th earl of Dorset.