Berkeley’s family claimed a distant kinship with the noble family of Berkeley Castle, Gloucestershire, but his immediate ancestors came from southern Shropshire. In 1609 he inherited property in Shrewsbury and 750 acres in the north-west of the county from his father, a Shrewsbury draper, by which time he was already well on the way to qualifying as a barrister.
Despite the Shrewsbury corporation’s general inclination to return local lawyers to Parliament, Berkeley was by no means an obvious choice for a seat when first returned for the borough in 1614. However, other likely candidates were ruled out of contention for various reasons: recorder Richard Barker was shortly to retire from public life; Serjeant Thomas Harris had unnecessarily provoked a bruising election contest in 1604; while the attorney Roger Pope had recently irritated the corporation with a lawsuit concerning town lands.
In the years following the Addled Parliament, Berkeley improved his network of clients in Shrewsbury. During 1616-17 he acted for the corporation in further suits with the troublesome Roger Pope, while in 1619 he was retained by the Drapers’ Company to represent them to lord president Northampton in a dispute with the Mercers’ Company over infringement of the Drapers’ monopoly of the Welsh cloth trade.
Despite this confusion over identity, it is clear that Francis Berkeley’s primary concern during the 1621 session was a bill to overturn the Shrewsbury Drapers’ monopoly of the Welsh cloth trade, which received a first reading in the Commons on 26 February. The Drapers initially looked to Berkeley and the town’s other MP, (Sir) Richard Newport, to defend their privileges against this assault, and the two men sustained a dogged resistance to the bill for two months. When a second reading of the bill was called for on 2 Mar., Berkeley complained ‘it concerneth but the moiety of two shires, and that they have put in a petition of grievance for which counsel appointed to be heard, and that time not yet come’. These objections notwithstanding, the bill was read, whereupon Berkeley offered a forest of complaints against the precise wording of the draft, and moved to exclude MPs for Wales and Shrewsbury from the committee on the spurious grounds that this would ensure an impartial consideration of the bill’s merits. The motion was ignored, and his detailed objections were referred to the committee, the meeting of which he failed to attend four days later, probably wisely, as it was packed with Welsh MPs.
The bill was quickly reported, and recommitted to add a clause banning the export of cloths which had not been dressed, a small concession to the Shrewsbury interest. It returned to the floor of the House on 26 Mar., when Berkeley moved to specify the forfeiture of the value of any unfinished cloths exported. This added teeth to the legislation, but if Berkeley hoped to get the bill recommitted once again he was disappointed, as it was amended at the Clerk’s table and ordered to be engrossed.
Berkeley seems to have done very little during the 1624 session of Parliament, perhaps largely because the Shrewsbury Drapers had managed to resolve their differences with the Welsh clothiers. In 1625 he was replaced by Sir William Owen of Condover, a local man who had served as senior bailiff of the town in 1621-2. Active as a barrister until the end of his life, Berkeley died on 3 Oct. 1628 and was buried at St. Chad’s, Shrewsbury on the following day. No will or administration has been found, but in a settlement made shortly before his death he provided his younger sons with property from his manor of Hadnall, Shropshire and his daughters with portions of £200 each, none of which suggests he was a man of great means.