Berkeley’s father, one of the wealthiest clothiers in Worcester, settled landed estates upon three of his sons at his death in 1611. However, he presumably reserved his highest aspirations for his second son, Robert, then a newly qualified barrister, to whom he granted his main estate at Spetchley, three miles east of Worcester.
The extent of Berkeley’s parliamentary activity is difficult to ascertain, as several Members with the same surname sat in both 1621 and 1624. One of these namesakes, the Shrewsbury lawyer Francis Berkeley, shared many of the Worcester man’s local and professional interests. However, the key issue which attracted Robert Berkeley’s attention in 1621 was the bill to allow free trade in wool, an important concern for a cloth-making town. This trade was theoretically regulated by an Act of 1552, which forbade the purchase of wool for domestic use by any but weavers and clothiers (such as Berkeley’s father). Enforcement had long been mitigated by a variety of licensing measures, but in 1615 all such exemptions were revoked. The resulting turmoil led to a fresh monopoly of the domestic wool trade being granted to the Merchant Staplers, who in 1617 were licensed to operate in 23 towns, including Worcester. Thereafter, any manufacturer who wished to remain in business was expected to pay the exorbitant sum of £110 to join the Staplers’ Company. Added to this, the Worcester clothiers harboured a private grudge against the Shrewsbury stapler Arthur Kynaston, who engrossed supplies of the March wool which provided their raw material.
Under these circumstances, Worcester’s MPs naturally took a keen interest in the 1621 bill intended to revoke the 1552 Wool Act and bar the Staplers from the domestic trade. Berkeley is not known to have spoken at the committee hearing on 16 Feb., when his fellow Worcester MP, John Coucher, attacked the Staplers. However, one or other of the town’s MPs raised fresh protests a week later, and by the time the bill was reported on 13 Mar. Berkeley had been briefed to support Coucher’s motion to allow the clothiers of Worcestershire and Gloucestershire an annual monopoly of the local wool trade from shearing time to Michaelmas.
Although the wool bill was ultimately lost at the dissolution, the Crown conceded the principle of free trade in a Proclamation of 10 July 1621, which revoked numerous contentious patents, including that of 1615 for collection of the fines for ‘brogging of wool’. This offered no pre-emption to Worcester’s clothiers, but the town’s problems diminished over the following years, as Kynaston diverted his energies into an attempt to seize control of the Welsh cloth trade. Meanwhile, nomination to the Privy Council’s advisory committee for decay of trade in the spring of 1622 gave Berkeley a role in the negotiations which ultimately diverted the Staplers from the domestic wool trade into the cloth export trade.
Berkeley clearly made a good impression on the 1622 commission, as he was chosen to pilot key legislation relating to wool and cloth through the following Parliament. When the revived bill for free trade in wool received its first reading on 2 Mar. 1624 he successfully moved that two others, one directed against the export of wool and the second a more general cloth bill, should be allowed to proceed alongside the free trade bill. These additional measures had both been debated in the Commons in 1621 and had received extensive scrutiny before the Privy Council committee in 1622. For all this preparation, the bills impinged upon many rival interests, and Berkeley showed great skill in charting a course between them in his reports (17-21 April).
The other economic question to which Berkeley addressed himself in 1624 was the dispute over Edmund Nicholson’s patent for pretermitted customs. On 6 Apr. he gave the trade committee a cogent report on the origins of the levy, an allowance in lieu of the duty which would have come to the Crown upon the export of an equivalent amount of wool. After investigation by the Commons in 1621, Nicholson had protested that his grant was justified by the Tunnage and Poundage Act of 1604, which set the custom upon wool at £2 a sack. This assertion of the patent’s justification under statute law neatly sidestepped the question of the prerogative basis of impositions - which had hamstrung the parliamentary sessions of 1610 and 1614 - but the audacity of this approach was clearly regarded as an affront by the lawyers of the House, provoking Berkeley’s claim that the levy was ‘not custom nor subsidy, but is a composition’, an assertion endorsed by Sir Edward Coke.
A modest amount of other parliamentary activity can tentatively be ascribed to the Worcester MP. At the second reading of the bill for free trade in Welsh butter on 10 Mar. 1621 it may have been this Member who moved for the relevant patent then in force to be brought before the House: most of the existing trade was channelled down the Severn to Bristol.
Despite having consistently striven to further Worcester’s interests in the Commons, Berkeley was replaced as the city’s recorder by attorney-general Sir Thomas Coventry* in August 1624. Berkeley may have been happy to trade local influence for Court patronage, and his career certainly accelerated rapidly thereafter: he was made a bencher of the Middle Temple in 1625, autumn reader in 1626, serjeant-at-law and king’s serjeant in 1627. Moreover, Coventry and the duke of Buckingham acted as his sponsors upon his elevation to the coif.
Berkeley’s failure to uphold a flawed brief could hardly be held against him: his efforts received due recognition with his appointment as a justice of King’s Bench in 1632, and he was a leading contender for promotion at the death of chief justice Sir Thomas Richardson* three years later. A signatory of the judges’ public endorsement of the legality of Ship Money in February 1637, he was perhaps one of those said to have been offered further preferment in return for his compliance.
when the good and safety of the kingdom in general is concerned, and the whole kingdom in danger, the king may by writ under the Great Seal command all the subjects of the kingdom at their charges to provide and furnish ships for the defence and safeguard of the kingdom, and may by law compel the doing thereof. And that in such case the king is the sole judge of the danger, and when and how the same is to be prevented.
This judgment relied upon the interpretation that the cash to be levied was merely the commutation of a service - the provision of a ship for coastal defence - and could not be construed as a tax, a legal technicality which evaded the multitude of precedents against taxation without consent. If this was so (and several of the judges argued the contrary case), Ship Money became a prerogative levy, and in Berkeley’s opinion, there could be no veto upon its collection: ‘the law knows no such king-yoking policy. The law is of itself an old and trusty servant of the king’s, it is an instrument or means which he useth to govern his people by’.
Berkeley’s judgment comprised an attack on the fundamentals of the Common Law, and consequently he could expect little mercy from the Long Parliament. On 12 Feb. 1641 he experienced the particular humiliation of being arrested in his own court by Black Rod and carried before the Lords for committal to one of the sheriffs of London. Impeachment charges were filed in July, but when the remaining judges joined the king at the outbreak of the Civil War, Berkeley was brought out of prison to preside over King’s Bench for a term. Judgment was finally pronounced against him on 12 Sept. 1643, when he was fined £20,000, barred from public office and imprisoned during pleasure. Prompt payment of half his fine secured the waiver of the rest and release from gaol, a process which may have been assisted by the fact that his wife was cousin to John Pym*.