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| Berkeley of Berkeley |
As the late Anthony Emery wrote in The greater medieval houses of England & Wales (2006), “The house of Berkeley is as colourful as any in the English peerage, with a more than ample share of eccentrics and cads. Their activities have ranged from the battlefield and royal murder to scientific exploration and diplomacy – from vicious feuds and the last private battle on English soil to an infamous case of bastardy spanning most of the 19th century. They are one of the longest-living families in English history, were responsible for the longest case of litigation in English law (1417-1609), have been the outstanding county name for centuries, and continue to occupy the castle of their ancestors”. The story of their exceptional lineage can be told because of the remarkable legacy of more than eight hundred years of record-keeping that is enshrined in the Berkeley Castle Archives, and because in the early 17th century their steward, John Smyth, used these records to compile an exceptional - arguably a unique - biographical record, published in the 19th century as The Lives of the Berkeleys. Given the survival of these sources, I have departed from my usual practice and recorded their genealogy from the 11th century onwards. This post is divided into two parts: this first part gives my introduction to the family and accounts of the houses which they built or occupied at different times; and part 2, which gives the lengthy genealogy. In addition to the main family line considered here, the Berkeleys produced several cadet branches which will be considered in future posts. One of these, the Berkeleys of Spetchley, actually inherited Berkeley Castle and the core estates in 1942, so my account of the recent owners of the castle will be found in that article.
The story of this family begins with Roger de Berkeley (fl. 1091), a knight in the service of William the Conqueror, who came to England as part of William's invading force and was rewarded with the grant of extensive lands in south Gloucestershire. His grandson, also Roger de Berkeley (d. c.1170), attempted to preserve a position of neutrality during the turbulent period known as The Anarchy, when King Stephen and his cousin, the Empress Matilda, vied for the throne of England, and by refusing to pay the fee-farm for his estates to either side, found them seized by the Crown, although a portion of his property, based on Dursley (Glos) was later returned to him. When King Henry II (Matilda's son) secured the throne in 1154, the Berkeley lands were regranted to Roger's son-in-law, Robert Fitz Harding (c.1095-1171), a wealthy Bristol merchant of Saxon blood who had helped to finance Henry when he was in exile. It was he who built the shell keep at Berkeley Castle later in the 1150s. Robert's father, Harding, had been sheriff of Bristol, and was in turn the son of a leading figure at the court of King Edward the Confessor and King Harold II, Eadnoth the Staller. In addition to acquiring the Berkeley estate, Robert purchased extensive lands south and west of Bristol (based on Bedminster and Portbury) which for many years descended with the Berkeley estates. In 1141, he founded and endowed St Augustine's Abbey, Bristol (now the Cathedral), where many later generations of Berkeleys were buried, and his wife also founded a nunnery in the city. Both of them ended their days as members of the communities they had founded, as was not uncommon for major donors at that time.
The Berkeley estates descended to Robert Fitz Harding's son, Maurice (c.1120-90), who took the name de Berkeley. He was succeeded in turn by his son, Sir Robert de Berkeley (c.1165-1220), kt., who sided with the rebellious barons against King John, and was deprived of his estates and excommunicated. After King John's death he was restored, in 1216-17, to all his possessions except Berkeley Castle, and he was obviously readmitted to the church, since he was buried in a monk's robe in St. Augustine's Abbey. He married twice but had no children, so his property passed to his younger brother, Thomas de Berkeley (c.1170-1243), who recovered possession of Berkeley Castle in 1223. He built a new manor house at Wotton-under-Edge (Glos) which became the seat of his widow, who long survived him, dying only in 1277. At Berkeley, he was succeeded by his son, Sir Maurice de Berkeley (1218-81), kt., who remained loyal to King Henry III during the Montfortian rebellion, and was therefore deprived of his estates in 1264-65 when the Earl of Leicester briefly gained the upper hand. His eldest son and heir apparent, Maurice de Berkeley (d. 1279) was killed in a tournament at Kenilworth Castle in his father's lifetime, so the Berkeley estates descended to his second son, Sir Thomas de Berkeley (1245-1321).
Sir Thomas was employed in military campaigns almost every year for fifty years, and only gave up a military life after he was captured at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314 and obliged to pay a large ransom to recover his freedom. He seems to have been particularly trusted by King Edward I, who raised him to the peerage as Lord Berkeley in 1295. He expanded the estates through purchases and marriage, and in 1301 made over half of his property to his eldest son, Maurice de Berkeley (1271-1326), 2nd Baron Berkeley. He was employed by Edward I and Edward II in various capacities and was summoned to the House of Lords in his father's lifetime, but in 1321 he and his son, Thomas de Berkeley (c.1296-1361), later 3rd Baron Berkeley, joined the Earl of Lancaster's rebellion against Edward II and the Despenser family. In the ensuing fighting they were captured and imprisoned in Wallingford Castle, where Maurice died in 1326. Thomas' wife was arrested in 1324 and sent to Shuldham Priory (Sussex), while the legitimacy of her marriage and offspring was challenged. In 1326, when Queen Isabella rebelled against her husband and invaded England with her lover, Roger Mortimer, Earl of March, Thomas was released from captivity. The king was captured and deposed in favour of his son, Edward III, and was imprisoned at Berkeley Castle, where Thomas was one of his custodians. Although Edward III was king, he was still a boy, and England was effectively ruled by Mortimer, who probably ordered the murder of Edward II at Berkeley, which took place in September 1327. In 1330, Edward III staged a successful coup against Roger Mortimer's rule and established his personal kingship. Mortimer was tried and executed and the custodians of Edward II were also tried for his murder, but Berkeley was able to prove that he had been sent away from the castle while the deed was done and escaped with his life and estates intact, though he did not return to royal favour until the 1340s.
Thomas was succeeded at Berkeley Castle by his eldest son, Maurice de Berkeley (1330-68), 4th Baron Berkeley, who was a military commander in France under Edward III and was severely wounded at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356. Although he survived for a further twelve years, he is said never to have fully recovered from his wounds, and ultimately died from their effects. He had been married as a child of eight to Elizabeth Despenser in a dynastic alliance which may have been aimed at healing the breach between two powerful English families. Their eldest son, Thomas de Berkeley (1353-1417), 5th Baron Berkeley, inherited the estates on his father's death, and was a leading military commander in the late 14th century. He supported Bolingbroke's invasion of England in 1399, was actively involved in the overthrow of Richard II, and remained politically prominent until about 1406. His wife, who died in 1392, was Baroness Lisle in her own right, and this title was inherited by their daughter, Elizabeth de Berkeley (1385-1422), but Lord Berkeley styled himself Lord de Lisle until his death in 1417. His death sparked a crisis in the affairs of the Berkeleys, for he had no son to succeed him. His daughter Elizabeth and her husband, Richard de Beauchamp (d. 1439), 13th Earl of Warwick, mounted a claim to the Berkeley estates, but by 1420 this had been seen off by his acknowledged heir, his nephew, James de Berkeley (c.1394-1463), the son of the his brother, Sir James de Berkeley (d. 1415) of Raglan (Mon.). The Berkeley peerage was regarded as having become extinct on the death of the 5th Baron, and a new creation was made in 1421 when James de Berkeley was summoned to Parliament as Baron Berkeley. By later usage, the earlier barony should have passed to Elizabeth de Beauchamp, but there seems to have been some uncertainty as to whether it was barony by writ or a barony by tenure, and the fact that Elizabeth was not in possession of Berkeley Castle may have inhibited her assumption of the peerage.
James de Berkeley (c.1394-1463), 1st Baron Berkeley, had relatively straightforward possession of his estates until 1439, when the three daughters of Richard and Elizabeth de Beauchamp renewed their mother's claim. The prime mover was the eldest of them, Margaret (1404-67), Countess of Shrewsbury, who with her son, Lord Lisle, turned increasingly violent in the 1440s. In 1451 Lisle gained access through treachery to Berkeley Castle, captured James and his sons, and forced them to sign bonds to accept legal judgements which the Countess had earlier won. The Countess herself had meanwhile taken James' wife prisoner and held her in Gloucester Castle, where she died in 1452. These machinations established a feud between the two families, and depite James and the Countess being reconciled shortly before his death in 1463, it continued into the next generation. In 1470, James' eldest son, William de Berkeley (1426-92), 2nd Baron Berkeley, was challenged by the Countess' grandson, Viscount Lisle, to settle the issue by combat, and as a result the two families met in what is believed to be the last private battle on English soil at Nibley Green (Glos) on 20 March 1469/70. The result was decisive, for Viscount Lisle was killed in the battle, although the Berkeleys continued to be harried by lawsuits by the Countess' descendants until 1609.
William de Berkeley (1426-92), 2nd Baron Berkeley, secured a viscountcy in 1481, and after inheriting a moiety of the vast estates of the Mowbray family in 1485 was made Earl of Nottingham. He prospered further in the reign of Henry VII, being made Earl Marshal and Lord High Steward. He married three times but his children all died young, and he was faced with the prospect of his property and the Berkeley peerage passing to his only surviving brother, Maurice Berkeley (1435-1506), with whom he had fallen out. One cause of their dispathy seems to have been that William disapproved of Maurice marrying the daughter of a Bristol alderman rather than a noblewoman, but there must have been other causes of disagreement too. To prevent the castle falling into his brother's hands, he came to an agreement with King Henry VII by which he settled the Berkeley estates on himself and the heirs male of his body, with remainder to the king and the heirs male of his body, in return for a Marquessate. Under this extraordinary arrangement, the Crown took possession of the Berkeley estates when he died in 1492 and held them for more than half a century until the death of King Edward VI in 1553. Maurice Berkeley had inherited a small property at Thornbury from his father, but had nothing else, and he never claimed or used the title of Baron Berkeley, probably because of the uncertainty mentioned earlier about whether it was at least partly a barony by tenure, but possibly also because he felt he did not have the means to support a baron's dignity. He did, however, apply himself to recovering as much as possible of his brother's estates by every legal trick in the book, and between 1492 and his death in 1506 he had successfully regained control of forty-one manors. His sons, Maurice, Thomas and James, all pursued military careers. The eldest, Sir Maurice Berkeley (c.1467-1523), de jure 4th Baron Berkeley, was knighted in 1509, and continued his father's efforts to recover the Berkeley estates, although he was also much occupied by a bitter dispute with his brother Thomas over the ownership of the manor of Mangotsfield. He built a new house at Yate (Glos) in about 1518, and created a hunting park there. He had no legitimate issue, so at his death in 1523 the family estates passed to his younger brother, Sir Thomas Berkeley (c.1472-1533), who by rights was the 5th Baron Berkeley. He fought at the Battle of Flodden in 1513 and was knighted afterwards, and was granted the constableship of Berkeley Castle in 1514, marking another stage in the family's recovery of their position in the county. He was summoned to Parliament in 1529, but still did not use the title of Baron Berkeley. He married twice and had two sons and two daughters, and was succeeded at his death by his elder son, Thomas Berkeley (c.1505-34), 6th Baron Berkeley, who although his tenure as head of the family was so short, did use the peerage title and was appointed Constable of Berkeley Castle. At his death, his widow was pregnant, and later gave birth to a son, Henry Berkeley (1534-1613), 7th Baron Berkeley.
In the 16th century, the Berkeleys were unfortunate. The 6th Baron was connected by marriage to the Boleyns and the Berkeleys lost influence at court when the Boleyns fell from power after the execution of Queen Anne Boleyn in 1536. His early death combined with this loss of influence meant that the family were in no position to benefit from the dissolution of the monasteries (as almost every other peerage family did), or even to protect the benefits they had enjoyed as hereditary patrons of several religious houses. In 1554, the 7th Baron's mother arranged what looked like a highly advantageous marriage for him to Lady Catherine Howard (d. 1596), a granddaughter of the Duke of Norfolk, and this did bring important benefits in the short term, as the Catholic Duke was able use his influence with Queen Mary to assist in the recovery of the Berkeley estates when the male line of the Tudors died out in 1553 and the estates were due to revert to the Berkeleys. The 7th Baron proved, however, to be a lazy, weak-willed, unintelligent and improvident man and his wife to be haughty, forceful, stubbon and at least as prodigal as he was. As they peregrinated around their estates in feudal state, with a retinue of at least 150, hunting, hawking and gambling, and giving open-handed hospitality, they steadily spent their way through their rich inheritance. Although the Berkeleys were not apparently recusants themselves, their association with the Howards meant that Queen Elizabeth I distrusted them, and they were foolish enough to make enemies of the powerful Earls of Leicester and Warwick and then of the Queen. As a result, vexatious lawsuits were launched against them, and succeeded in chipping away further at the Berkeley inheritance, and by the time the 7th Baron died in 1613, he and his son and heir apparent, Sir Thomas Berkeley (1575-1611), kt., had lost or sold 39 of the 60 manors which the 7th Baron had inherited on coming of age in 1555.
Sir Thomas Berkeley's widow, Elizabeth (d. 1635) was far more prudent than her husband and father-in-law, and working with John Smyth as steward of the Berkeley estates, she to some extent steadied the ship. By 1617 she was in a position to purchase the Durdans estate in Surrey, which she bequeathed to her daughter, Theophila, wife of Sir Robert Coke (1586-1653), kt., and the following year she also bought the Cranford estate in Middlesex, which she bequeathed to her grandson, George Berkeley (1627-98), 9th Baron Berkeley and 1st Earl of Berkeley. It is noteworthy that she did not leave Cranford to her son, George Berkeley (1601-58), 8th Lord Berkeley, whose extravagance and fondness for foreign travel once again imperilled the Berkeley inheritance: by 1634 he had debts of over £18,000 and the position continued to deteriorate in the following decade. During the Civil War he endeavoured to remain neutral, and while he remained in London and attended Parliament, Berkeley Castle was initially garrisoned by the Royalists, until captured in a damaging siege in 1643. By 1648 he was in desperate financial straits, and he arranged the marriage of his surviving son to the daughter of John Massingberd, a wealthy London merchant who was Treasurer of the East India Company. As a condition of the marriage settlement, Massingberd took control of the management of the Berkeley estates, extirpating the last vestiges of the feudal manner in which they had previously been run, ruthlessly reducing costs and maximising revenue, so as to gradually pay off the accumulated debts, while Lord Berkeley himself was obliged to survive on an annual allowance of £800.
In 1658 the title and estates passed to George Berkeley (1627-98), 9th Baron Berkeley, and at last the family's financial affairs improved. George had already inherited Cranford from his grandmother in 1635 and Durdans from his uncle, Sir Robert Coke, in 1653. Through his father-in-law he built a portfolio of profitable roles in the City of London, and he was one of the six peers chosen by Parliament to go to King Charles II and invite him to return and resume the throne in 1660. That mission attracted royal favour and he was made Lord Lieutenant of Gloucestershire and Keeper of Nonsuch Palace (Surrey), where he had a suite of rooms that he used from time to time. In 1679 he was promoted in the peerage to be Earl of Berkeley, and in the 1680s, when the main part of Nonsuch was demolished, he bought the building materials and used them in a rebuilding of the house at Durdans. In 1689, he supported William of Orange's invasion and assumption of the throne, although - perhaps because he was ageing - it was his son, Charles (1649-1710), 2nd Earl of Berkeley, who was employed by the new king in diplomatic affairs in the 1690s. Both the 1st and 2nd Earls had scientific interests and were Fellows of the Royal Society, but the 1st Earl was also a man of strong religious views, some of which he committed to print. The 2nd Earl was a more completely political animal, a strong Whig, who succeeded his father in most of his commercial and public offices, and was brought into the House of Lords in his father's barony of Berkeley in 1689 by a writ of acceleration.
The 2nd Earl's eldest son died of smallpox in his lifetime and at his death the estates therefore devolved on his second son, Vice-Adm. James Berkeley (c.1680-1736), who had entered the navy at a tender age and therefore been deprived of the sort of liberal education now normal for the heads of families. He was later described as 'so uncultivated that he was totally ignorant of every branch of knowledge except his profession', but to the latter he was devoted, spending ten years as First Lord of the Admiralty, suggesting that his expertise was real and his accelerated promotion to flag rank not solely the result of nepotism. His career was eventually ended in 1727 when he opposed the policy of Sir Robert Walpole, the Prime Minister. He was married, soon after coming into the estates, to the eldest daughter of Charles Lennox, 1st Duke of Richmond, and his wife was thus a granddaughter of King Charles II. She died of smallpox in 1717 having borne him only one son and one daughter, and when he died in 1736 he was succeded by his son, Augustus Berkeley (1716-55), 4th Earl of Berkeley, who came of age the following year. Augustus was an officer in the army, but although he retained his commission for some years (and indeed raised a regiment against the Jacobite rebellion of 1745), his accession to the earldom and the family estates ended any thought of a serious military career. He married in 1744 and his wife became one of the Ladies of the Bedchamber to Augusta, the Princess of Wales, and over the eleven years before his early death the couple had seven children, of whom four survived to maturity.
His widow married again, to the Earl Nugent, and had a second family, and perhaps because of this, and the loss of their father, the four Berkeley children seem to have grown up with an imperfect understanding of social norms and boundaries, as the careers of the 5th Earl and of their daughter Elizabeth, Lady Craven and later Margravine of Brandenburg-Anspach-Bayreuth, illustrate.
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| Craven Cottage, Fulham: the cottage orné built by Elizabeth, Lady Craven as a private retreat in which she could conduct her affairs after separating from her husband. Image: Roger White. |
The title and estates passed in 1755 to Frederick Augustus Berkeley (1745-1810), 5th Earl of Berkeley, an arrogant rake with an exaggerated sense of entitlement, whose tactics in making Mary Cole his mistress amounted to kidnap and blackmail. His official positions, his rank, and the economic power of his estates, combined to place him, if not entirely above the law, effectively beyond the reach of legal redress by ordinary mortals. It was only when he came to deal with his peers as a group that he was eventually thwarted. Having more or less forced Mary Cole into concubinage in 1785, the couple produced six illegitimate children over the next ten years. During this time, Mary - who though largely uneducated was clearly an intelligent and clever woman - strengthened her power in the relationship and the household to the point where she felt able to demand marriage. In 1796 the earl capitulated and they were married quietly in Lambeth, before going on to produce another three sons and three daughters. The belated marriage gave them a problem, however: the Berkeley peerage would descend to the eldest son born after their marriage (Thomas Moreton Fitzhardinge Berkeley (1796-1882)), whereas the apple of both their eyes was their eldest illegitimate son, William Fitzhardinge Berkeley (1786-1857). They concocted a plan to forge an entry in the Berkeley parish register which purported to record a clandestine marriage in 1785, and routinely referred to William as 'Viscount Dursley' - the courtesy title of the eldest son. When the 5th Earl died in 1810, he bequathed the vast majority of his estates to William, who sought recognition as 6th Earl. The House of Lords Committee of Privileges saw through the forgery and denied the claim, and their lordships were only dissuaded from pursuing charges of perjury against the Countess and her eldest son by the intervention of the Prince of Wales (later George IV). Thomas, the rightful 6th Earl, never claimed or used the title, however, always accepting his elder brother's legitimacy, although he may have been pressured into that position.
William Fitzhardinge Berkeley (1786-1857) was eventually raised to the peerage by William IV as Baron Segrave in 1831 and was made Earl Fitzhardinge in 1841, titles which appear to have been justified only by his status as a major landowner and a sense that the operation of peerage law had dealt rather harshly with the expectations of rank to which he had been brought up. Cast in the same mould as his father, he was described as 'very dissolute' and 'an arrant blackguard' as a young man: he had several mistresses and was successfully sued for adultery in 1821. He never married and is not even known to have sired any illegitimate children, so at his death, the Berkeley estates passed to his next brother, the Rt. Hon. Sir Maurice Frederick Fitzhardinge Berkeley (1788-1867), a much more estimable figure, who had a long career in the navy and as an MP. He was not in the line of succession to his brother's peerages, which died with him, but he revived a claim to the barony of Berkeley, claiming that it was a barony by tenure. This claim was dismissed in 1861 by the House of Lords, but he was made Baron Fitzhardinge of Bristol in compensation later that year.
This Lord Fitzhardinge left two sons, who succeeded him in the peerage and the Berkeley and Cranford estates in turn. His elder son, Francis William Fitzhardinge Berkeley (1826-96), 2nd Baron Fitzhardinge of Bristol, had a very orthodox career as an army officer and MP before inheriting the title, and thereafter as a militia officer and foxhunting squire. In 1891 he again revived a claim to the earldom of Berkeley, which was yet again rejected by the House of Lords after filling many column inches in the press with a detailed analysis of the none-too-edifying history of the 5th Earl and his family. The claim of Randal Thomas Mowbray Berkeley (1865-1942), a great-great-grandson of the 4th Earl, to be 8th Earl of Berkeley was recognised instead, and he took his seat in the House of Lords.
On the death of the 2nd Baron Fitzhardinge of Bristol without issue, his title and the Berkeley and Cranford estates passed to his younger brother, Charles Paget Fitzhardinge Berkeley (1830-1916), 3rd Baron Fitzhardinge of Bristol, who had briefly been Liberal MP for Gloucester. His father had bequeathed him an estate at Bosham in Sussex, where he lived until inheriting the Berkeley properties in 1896. Like his brother, he was married but had no issue, so on his death the earldom and the Berkeley estate were finally reunited in the person of the 8th Earl, a gentleman scientist who had made his home at Foxcombe Hall on Boar's Hill outside Oxford. After the First World War he embarked on a remarkable project to modernise Berkeley Castle - as far as comfort and conveniences were concerned - but also to strip away the evidence of four centuries of post-medieval occupation. To achieve this, he became a buyer of medieval architectural salvage on a large scale, not just from England and Wales but most notably from France, permanently changing the character of the castle. He was married twice but like so many in the later generations of his family, he had no children, and at his death, in the darkest days of the Second World War, there was no surviving legitimate heir to the earldom, and no obvious close relative to inherit the estate. To keep the estate in the Berkeley family, therefore, he bequeathed it to his distant kinsman, Robert George Wilmot Berkeley (1898-1968), of Spetchley Park (Worcs), whose common ancestor with the 8th Earl was the remarkably distant James de Berkeley (c.1394-1463), 1st Baron Berkeley! The Berkeleys of Spetchley, including the recent generations who have owned Berkeley Castle, will be considered in a future post.
Finally, a word must be said about the barony of Berkeley created in 1421. As we have seen, the 9th Baron was created Earl of Berkeley in 1679 and the two titles descended together until the death of the 5th Earl (and 13th Baron) in 1810. As the various peerage cases in the 19th century made clear, his rightful heir was Thomas Moreton Fitzhardinge Berkeley (1796-1882), who never claimed or used either title. He lived at Cranford House, but seems to have been uninterested in anything except the hunting of game, and he never married. On his death in 1882 the rightful heir to the earldom was his first cousin once removed, George Lennox Rawdon Berkeley (1827-88), a great-grandson of the 4th Earl. He never claimed or used the title either, probably because after a brief career in the army he became chronically indebted and was obliged to live on the continent. In a curious echo of the situation of the 5th Earl he married a lady by whom he had already had two illegitimate sons, who were thereby excluded from the line of succession. It was therefore his third son, Randal, born after his marriage, who emerged from the peerage trial of 1891 as 8th Earl of Berkeley. So much for the earldom; but the barony of Berkeley pursued a different path, passing on the de jure 6th Earl's death in 1882 to his niece, Louisa Mary Berkeley (1840-99), the daughter of the 6th Earl's younger brother, the Hon. Craven Fitzhardinge Berkeley (1805-55). She became Baroness Berkeley in her own right, and her right to the title was recognised in 1893. She married Maj-Gen. Milman (1824-1915), and was succeeded by her daughter, Eva Mary (1875-1964), wife of Frank Wigram Foley. On the death of the 3rd Earl Fitzhardinge of Bristol in 1916, Eva inherited the Cranford estate, but the voracious Octopus that is London was then encroaching and she broke it up by sales and finally in 1932 sold the house and park to the local urban district council. The barony of Berkeley still exists, and is now held by Anthony Fitzhardinge Gueterbock (b. 1939), 18th Baron Berkeley, who is also a life peer as Baron Gueterbock, but no landed estate is now associated with the title.
Berkeley Castle, Gloucestershire
Vita Sackville-West described the castle as “rose-red and grey, red sandstone and grey stone, the colour of old brocade” (English Country Houses, 1941, p.12) and for Gertrude Jekyll “the giant walls and mighty buttresses look as if they have been carved by wind and weather out of some sold rock-mass, rather than wrought by human handiwork”. Berkeley Castle is not only one of the most convincingly medieval of England's stately homes, but also in at least one respect an historical conundrum. Its owners, the Barons, and later Earls of, Berkeley, were the leading Whig family in Gloucestershire, and Berkeley Castle was their principal seat, although they could live with greater comfort and convenience in London or at Cranford House (Middx). It seems curious that at no time did they seriously try to make Berkeley a modern palace, or even to rival the grandeur of their Tory arch-rivals, the Dukes of Beaufort. The changes they made in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries did something to alleviate the austerity of the medieval fortress, but are now difficult to appreciate because of the 8th Earl’s remodelling of the castle in the 1920s, which made it more powerfully medieval than ever before.The story of Berkeley Castle begins around 1070, when a motte and bailey castle was constructed by Fitz Osbern, Earl of Hereford. Then in the middle of the next century, Henry II covenanted with Robert Fitzhardinge, to build a new keep to his own design. Apart from a short break in the Tudor period, Berkeley has remained the property of Fitzhardinge's descendants to the present day. The new keep was constructed in 1153-56, and is the shell keep which still survives. Originally, it had four projecting semi-circular bastions, irregularly placed on the north, east and south sides, but only those to the north-east and south-east have survived later alterations. Building of the keep was followed by the curtain wall enclosing the inner bailey, which probably dates from c.1160-90, although most of it has been altered or rebuilt in later centuries as the buildings placed around the bailey have been constructed and altered.
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| Berkeley Castle: plan before the alterations of the 1920s. |
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| Berkeley Castle: watercolour of the inner bailey (looking north) in 1822 by J.C. Buckler. Image: British Library. |
The long tenure of Henry, Lord Berkeley (from 1553 to his death in 1613) was a period of conservatism, amply attested by his household regulations, and the descriptions of his steward, John Smyth of Nibley. Queen Elizabeth paid a visit in 1572, but came when Lord Berkeley was not here, and her unsporting slaughter of his deer so infuriated him that he ordered the disparking of his home park. Little was done in the way of new building, although the service accommodation was remodelled and the fine kitchen roof dates to c.1600. A stone bridge was made across the moat to replace the previous defensive wooden drawbridge in 1587.
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| Berkeley Castle: a view from the west after the damage inflicted in the Civil War. |
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| Berkeley Castle in the late 17th century. |
Little is known of the castle in the 18th century. A campaign of work was carried out in the 1750s. This included the Batty Langley-style Gothick fireplace in the Housekeeper's Room; and a new ‘evidence house’ for the castle muniments. The castle was damaged by a fire in 1770, and was repaired by Anthony Keck in 1780. The most extensive Georgian remodelling did not take place until 1805-7, however, when the 5th Earl's Countess, would seem to have been the moving spirit. Even her additions were far from radical, being the Gothick block abutting to the bottom of Thorpe's Tower, now used as a tearoom, and probably the Berkeley Hunt kennels across the park to the south of the castle. Inside, the castle acquired a number of fine Gothick chimneypieces, including those in the hall and Long Drawing Room, both removed in 1923.
After the 5th Earl's death in 1810, the title descended to his eldest legitimate son, but the castle was bequeathed to his eldest natural son, who was created Earl Fitzhardinge in 1841. The bias of Lord Fitzhardinge's interests (hunting and women) allowed the early Victorian enthusiasm for over-restoration to pass Berkeley by, and the castle apparently remained unaltered until 1874-6 when Philip Webb carried out some restoration work; a process continued in 1882 when John Middleton restored St Mary’s Chapel.
Lord Fitzhardinge’s one significant contribution to the estate was to rebuild the standing in Whitecliff Park, a mile away from the Castle, as a splendid castellated eyecatcher. It is a three-storey tower with higher octagonal corner towers linked by false machicolation and decorated liberally with cross-loops and arrow-slits; the architect has not yet been identified. It stands on the site of a lodge built in 1329 and reconstructed as a dower house in 1613. The building still houses a deerkeeper and his family in apartments under a large room for the family’s use, and has a flat roof for viewing the chase.
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| Berkeley Castle: the hall in 1840, showing the Gothick fireplace removed in the 1920s, from Marklove's Ten views of Berkeley Castle (1840). |
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| The standing in Whitcliff Park, Berkeley |
In 1916 the Earldom of Berkeley and the ownership of the castle were reunited in the person of Randal, 8th Earl of Berkeley, FRS, who undertook a major but largely cosmetic remodelling of the castle that was designed to install modern conveniences while stripping out 18th and 19th century work and restoring the true spirit of the medieval castle. Clive Aslet has written of the group of patrons who 'looked on the distant past as ... on a beautiful sunset, conscious only of warm, glowing reflections', and Lord Berkeley was certainly one of them. The work on the castle was funded largely from the sale of the family estates in London, including Berkeley Square, for rather less than £2 million (which with hindsight must be judged a disastrous miscalculation) and received a further impetus when Lord Berkeley married a wealthy American, Molly Lowell of Boston, in 1924.
In pursuit of his vision for the castle, Lord Berkeley had no qualms about monkeying with the authenticity of the fabric. His main adviser seems to have been Herbert Keeble of the London cabinet makers, Keeble Ltd., who procured and installed much old fabric imported from France and from other more local sources, but he played a very hands-on role himself, and James Miller has described him as acting as “his own architect, surveyor, archaeologist and even builder”. In 1942, his obituary in the Proceedings of the Royal Society described how “For a time, the inside of the castle was in chaos, and access to some of the rooms was only by high ladders, which Berkeley would shin up as quickly as anyone. He was intent on discovering every bit of old carved masonry and woodwork and he used to carry a small hand-pick to test any plaster he found. Wherever it was hollow, down it came, revealing perhaps an entry to a passage, a garderobe, or a store cupboard... Every detail of work had to be approved by him as his own architect.” The result is that almost wherever the eye rests at Berkeley today one sees features imported or altered between 1920 and 1932, and the recent discovery of the files relating to the remodelling, in the Berkeley estate office, allows the story to be told in some detail.
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| Berkeley Castle: the hall after the changes of the 1920s: compare this view with Marklove's engraving above. Image: Historic England. |
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| Berkeley Castle: the screen in the great hall, imported from Cefn Mably (Glam). Image: Historic England. |
Lord Berkeley's work left the castle much as it is today. Contemporary visitors appreciated his work, which was undoubtedly successful in conjuring a romantic atmosphere. However, after nearly a century the alien imports have not really settled in and the house feels like a stage set or rather a little bit of England that is forever Aquitaine. Certainly it would be a serious mistake to approach the castle thinking that it is an unaltered medieval building which the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries did not much affect.
When Lord Berkeley died in 1942 he left Berkeley Castle to his distant kinsman, Capt. R.G.W. Berkeley of Spetchley Park (Worcs), whose son, John Berkeley inherited it in 1969. When he died in 2017 his elder son inherited the castle, while Spetchley passed to his younger son. The castle has been open to the public on a regular basis since 1956.
Descent: Crown granted to Roger de Berkeley (fl. 1091); to son, Roger de Berkeley (d. 1131); to son, Roger de Berkeley (d. c.1170); forfeited to Crown, c.1152 and regranted to his son-in-law, Robert Fitz Harding (c.1095-1171); to son, Maurice Fitz Harding alias de Berkeley (c.1120-90); to son, Sir Robert de Berkeley (c.1165-1220), kt.; to brother, Thomas de Berkeley (c.1170-1243); to son, Sir Maurice de Berkeley (1218-81), kt.; to son, Thomas de Berkeley (1245-1321), 1st Baron Berkeley; to son, Maurice de Berkeley (1271-1326), 2nd Baron Berkeley; to son, Thomas de Berkeley (c.1296-1361), 3rd Baron Berkeley; to son, Maurice de Berkeley (1330-68), 4th Baron Berkeley; to son, Thomas de Berkeley (1353-1417), 5th Baron Berkeley; to nephew, James de Berkeley (c.1394-1463), 1st Baron Berkeley; to son, Rt. Hon. William de Berkeley (1426-92), 2nd Baron Berkeley, Viscount Berkeley, Earl of Nottingham and Marquess of Berkeley; to King Henry VII (1457-1509); to son, King Henry VIII (1491-1547); to son, King Edward VI (1537-53); reverted to Henry Berkeley (1534-1613), 7th Baron Berkeley; to grandson, George Berkeley (1601-58), 8th Baron Berkeley; to son, George Berkeley (c.1627-98), 9th Baron Berkeley and 1st Earl of Berkeley; to son, Charles Berkeley (1649-1710), 2nd Earl of Berkeley; to son, Admiral James Berkeley (c.1680-1736), 3rd Earl of Berkeley; to son, Augustus Berkeley (1716-55), 4th Earl of Berkeley; to son, Frederick Augustus Berkeley (1745-1810), 5th Earl of Berkeley; to illegitimate son, William Fitzhardinge Berkeley (1786-1857), 1st Baron Segrave of Berkeley and 1st Earl Fitzhardinge; to brother, Rt. Hon. Sir Maurice Frederick Fitzhardinge Berkeley (1788-1867), kt., 1st Baron Fitzhardinge of Bristol; to son, Francis William Fitzhardinge Berkeley (1826-96), 2nd Baron Fitzhardinge of Bristol; to brother, Charles Paget Fitzhardinge Berkeley (1830-1916), 3rd Baron Fitzhardinge of Bristol; to second cousin once removed, Randal Thomas Mowbray Berkeley (1865-1942), 8th Earl of Berkeley; to distant kinsman, Capt. Robert George Wilmot Berkeley (1898-1969); to son, Maj. John Berkeley (1931-2017); to son, Richard Berkeley (b. 1968).
In 1721, work began on an three-storey addition to the house for Admiral James Berkeley, 3rd Earl of Berkeley, probably to the design of his friend, Thomas Coke (1675-1727), an amateur architect, although the surviving plans by Coke of 1720-23, now in the British Library, do not exactly correspond to the house as built. They show the additions he proposed to the west side of the house (marked in red), super-imposed upon the plan of the earlier house, with the parts to be retained marked in yellow and the parts to be demolished shown only in outline. The footprint of the house shown on John Rocque's map of Middlesex in 1757 suggests that the older part of the house was then still standing, but it had gone by the late 18th century when a further plan of the house shows only the early 18th century part of the building. This drawing indicates that a new main entrance with a porte-cochère had been made on the east side of the Georgian block, with a circular carriage sweep in front of it, and that a new top-lit main staircase had been added next to the new entrance, while a canted bow had been built onto the south end of the main range.
Rocque's plan shows the house sitting in a formal landscape, probably also dating from the 1720s (Thomas Coke was responsible for the elaborate and surviving formal gardens at his own house, Melbourne Hall (Derbys)). These seem to have included two walled enclosures west of the house, tree planting creating avenues to frame views to and from the house and River Crane, the widening of the river itself to form a long ornamental canal, and the construction of a bridge over the river. The park was also enlarged at this stage.
In the early 19th century, the 5th Earl extended the house, adding to the projecting servants’ wing at the north end, replacing the projecting staircase and porte-cochère on the east front with a new range parallel to the early 18th century block, and introducing the full-height rounded bays and balconies at the south end. His new east front seems to have incorporated an oval entrance hall behind a rather simple and plain doorcase, although views of the house vary markedly in how far this was expressed externally. The 5th Earl probably also made alterations to the landscape setting of the house, removing some of the formal avenues that existed earlier and creating open parkland dotted with trees. A new temple (still present in 1850, but later renamed as a boathouse) was built at the head of the ornamental lake, and a new bridge over the lake was designed by the architect, Charles Beazley (c.1760-1829), for which designs were exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1806. Beazley may well have been the architect of all the works done at this period.
The Berkeleys did not live in the house after the First World War and the estate was gradually sold off from 1916 onwards. In 1932 the house and adjoining parkland was sold to Hayes & Harlington Urban District Council, which subsequently sold it on to Middlesex County Council in exchange for a 999-year lease. The house was in good condition in 1937, but lay unoccupied during the war, when the park was intensively cultivated for market gardening. In wartime conditions it fell into disrepair and the Council could not find new uses for it, despite many local appeals, so in 1945 it was demolished, along with the southern wing of the adjoining stable block. Recent archaeology suggests the cellar level may largely survive, the demolition rubble having been pushed into it. The 18th century stable block, ha-ha, garden walls and bridge survived, and the site was opened as a public park in 1949. In 1965 the M4 motorway cut through the park, immediately to the north of the house and stables, destroying a number of historic features, including a dovecote. In 1973, the A312 dual carriageway was built just over a hundred yards east of the River Crane, so the site is now surrounded on two sides by the constant roar of traffic.
To the right of the house was an irregular service court, which by the date of the picture was screened from view by a tall single-storey building with a balustraded flat roof, accessed from a brick tower with a complex cupola. The tall rectangular windows in the side elevation of this block, and the arched windows in the end elevation, suggest it may have been a gallery or chapel, but it is probably the 'great hall or new room' referred to in an agreement of 1639 between Sir Robert Coke and Jerome Reed, a London plumber. The construction of this 'new room' was probably part of a wider set of changes to the house, perhaps including the creation of an axially planned hall. The main reception rooms lay to the left of the entrance, and overlooked a walled formal garden, with a central fountain and four lawns surrounded by flowers and separated by broad gravel walks, in the manner favoured by Inigo Jones and Isaac de Caus.
To rebuild the house, Charles Dalbiac employed William Newton (1735-90), a young architect who commenced practice in London in 1764, after being apprenticed to William Jones and a period in the London office of Matthew Brettingham. The work was carried out between 1764 and 1768, and must have been interrupted by Newton's visit to Rome in 1766-67, which was perhaps funded by Dalbiac to add a little Italian polish to his design skills. Dalbiac was obviously happy with the results, for immediately after Durdans was completed, he went on to build Hungerford Park (Berks), again to the design of Newton, which was built to a rather similar design. An engraving of 1816 shows that the new Durdans was a seven bay, two-storey block with a wide central canted bay on the east front, which rose an extra storey. This forms the basis of the present house, although it has been much altered in the 19th and 20th centuries during successive phases of enlargement and reduction.
The house at Durdans was acquired by Sir Gilbert Heathcote MP in 1819 and passed on his death to his youngest son, Arthur (1829-69), who lived for racing and hunting, and for betting on his sport. He was unmarried, and at his premature death it was noted that the house 'was in such a dilapidated condition that the doors were dropping from their hinges, and a paint-pot had not been seen inside from the moment he came into his property'. He left his estate to two elderly cousins, who sold it in 1874 to Lord Rosebery, the cabinet minister and future Prime Minister, who was looking for a seat near the racecourse at Epsom. He brought in first John Hatchard-Smith, a local architect at the beginning of his career, and then the more experienced George Devey, who between 1876 and 1884 extended and remodelled the house, and built a new gatehouse range, stable court, riding house, and entrance railings (said to incorporate the wrought iron gates of c.1720 from Cannons House (Middx), which had been acquired by William Belchier in 1747 and moved here). The entrance was moved from the south end of the building to the west front; the sash windows of Newton's house were taken out and replaced with mullioned and transomed windows, and the original seven bay block was extended to both north and south, while the third storey over the central bow was taken off, giving the house a long, low profile. Inside the house, Lord Rosebery built up one of the most notable private libraries of his time, including over 3,000 books and manuscripts later given to the National Library of Scotland; from the stables, he trained racehorses, two of which were successive winners of the Derby in 1894 and 1895.
Thus the house remained until 1955, when Claud Phillimore was brought in by Lord and Lady Irwin (later the Earl and Countess of Halifax) to reduce the size of the house and return it to something resembling its Georgian appearance, although the third storey of the central canted bow was not rebuilt, and Devey's mullioned and transomed windows were retained.
The house was sold for institutional use in 1934 and was partly rebuilt after a fire in 1935 by Sir Albert Richardson, who took the opportunity to clad the building in limestone and apply Collyweston stone slate roofs. In the early 1960s a large extension to the building was designed by Miles & Deirdre Dove abutting onto the earlier tower. Although this building won a Civic Trust award for environmental design, it was essentially an uncompromising three-storey accommodation block with hideous windows. This wing was given a single-storey extension to the west after 1996, designed by Peter Haddon & Partners. Following the sale of the building to new owners, a site master plan has been developed by Anthony Pettorino for the future development of the building.
Cranford House, Middlesex
There were two manors at Cranford - Cranford Le Mote and Cranford St. John - which both had manor houses in the 16th and 17th centuries. Cranford House represents the manor house of Cranford St. John. The manor house of Cranford Le Mote, sometimes called Temple House, became the rectory in the 17th century and was pulled down in the later 18th century.
Cranford House is first mentioned in 1664, when it was said to have been lately in the occupation of Lady Spencer, and 1666, when it was occupied by 'Serjeant Windham' (presumably Sir Hugh Windham (1602-84), a justice of common pleas), and was taxed on 27 hearths. It seems likely that the house standing then was Jacobean in date. The earliest surviving plan of the house shows an east-facing front with canted bay windows either side of a central entrance. By the date of the plan (c.1720), the front door led directly into an L-shaped hall that stood behind the southern canted bay, but the layout strongly suggests that there was originally a screens passage of the traditional form between the front door and the hall. West of the hall lay a long but irregular range containing three, or possibly four, south-facing reception rooms, while the principal staircase lay at the end of the screens passage. As late as 1937, some vestiges of the Jacobean house remained, for the Royal Commission inventory mentions 'a fireplace and overmantel made up of early 17th-century woodwork; this includes six terminal pilasters, four panels carved with foliage, one with a griffin and three with enriched arches, [while] a small panel bears the date 1644'.
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| Cranford House: ground floor plan of the old house (in yellow) and of the proposed additions (red), 1721. North is to the left. British Library Add MS 69965. |
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| Cranford House: aerial photograph of the site from the north-west, 1932, showing the Georgian block built in 1720-23 and altered later. Image: Historic England EPW040463 |
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| Cranford House: plan of the house c.1800 or perhaps a little earlier; north is to the left. Image: Berkeley Castle Archives |
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| Cranford House: the site as shown on John Rocque's map of Middlesex, 1757. |
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| Cranford House: watercolour of the house showing the additions made c.1806. Image: Orleans House Gallery, Twickenham. |
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| Cranford House: aerial photograph of c.1950, showing the site after the demolition of the house. |
Descent: Crown granted 1542 to Sir Andrew Windsor (1467-1543), 1st Baron Windsor; to son, William Windsor (d. 1558), 2nd Baron Windsor; to son, Thomas Windsor (d. 1558); to brother, Philip Windsor (d. 1562); to brother, Edward Windsor (1532-75), 3rd Baron Windsor; to son, Henry Windsor (1562-1605), 5th Baron Windsor; sold 1594 to Thomas Crompton of Hounslow... to Robert Knight (fl. 1602); sold to Gideon Awnsham of Isleworth and George Needler; sold 1604 to Sir Roger Aston; to widow, Cordelia and her second husband, John Mohun; sold 1618 to Elizabeth, Lady Berkeley (d. 1635), later wife of Sir Thomas Chamberlain; to grandson, George Berkeley (1627-98), 9th Baron Berkeley and 1st Earl of Berkeley; to son, Rt. Hon. Charles Berkeley (1649-1710), 2nd Earl of Berkeley; to son, Rt. Hon. Admiral James Berkeley (c.1680-1736), 3rd Earl of Berkeley; to son, Augustus Berkeley (1716-55), 4th Earl of Berkeley; to son, Frederick Augustus Berkeley (1745-1810), 5th Earl of Berkeley; to natural son, William Fitzhardinge Berkeley (1786-1857), 1st Earl Fitzhardinge, who settled it for life on his brother, Thomas Moreton Fitzhardinge Berkeley (1796-1882), de jure 6th Earl of Berkeley; to nephew, Francis William Fitzhardinge Berkeley (1826-96), 2nd Baron Fitzhardinge of Bristol; to brother, Charles Paget Fitzhardinge Berkeley (1830-1916), 3rd Baron Fitzhardinge of Bristol; to great-niece, Eva Mary (1875-1964), 16th Baroness Berkeley, wife of Frank Wigram Foley (1865-1949), who sold 1932 to Hayes & Harlington Urban District Council; sold 1935 to Middlesex County Council which leased the estate back to the UDC on a 999-year lease; demolished 1945.
Durdans, Epsom, Surrey
The site has an exceptionally complex history, with a succession of houses being built and remodelled over the last four hundred years. The earliest of which anything is known was probably built in the late 16th century for Sir William Mynne of Horton (Bucks), but just possibly after Lady Berkeley acquired 'a messuage, a dovecote, two gardens, two orchards, 12 acres of land with meadow, pasture, and wood' in 1617. This house is recorded in a bird's eye view by Jacob Knyff (elder brother of the more famous Leonard) of 1673, now at Berkeley Castle, which shows it was an H-plan building, probably of clunch with limestone dressings. It was taxed on 29 hearths in 1664 and 1673. To either side of the central doorcase were gabled two-storey canted bay windows, apparently with timber glazing, and above the entrance was a balcony, accessed through a broad arched doorway. The projecting wings at either side again had gabled, two-storey canted bays, probably with timber windows.
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| Durdans: Jacob Knyff's bird's eye view of the 17th century house, 1673, from the collection at Berkeley Castle. |
This was the house in which George, Lord Berkeley, entertained King Charles II in 1662 and 1664, and in which he gave shelter during the plague of 1665-66 to a notable group of inquiring minds: John Evelyn visited and found
"Dr. Wilkins, Sir William Petty, and Mr. [Robert] Hooke, contriving chariots, new rigging for ships, a wheel for one to run races in, and other mechanical inventions, perhaps three such persons together were not to be found elsewhere in Europe, for parts and ingenuity".Lord Berkeley, however, became dissatisfied with the Tudor and Jacobean house. After his promotion in the peerage to the earldom of Berkeley in 1679, he pulled it down, except for the 'new room', and built a replacement in an up-to-date classical style, perhaps to the design of William Talman, although it would be one of his earliest known works. The house is recorded in an oil painting of 1689 by the Dutch artist, Jacob Scmits (now at Berkeley Castle) and a pen and watercolour sketch firmly attributed to John Talman (now in the Gough Collection at the Bodleian Library). Scmits shows a plain, pedimented, hipped-roof house of seven bays and with two storeys above a basement. The Talman drawing reveals, however, that this was merely the end elevation of a long house with a flat side elevation consisting of two five-bay blocks separated by two middle bays.
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| Durdans: painting by Jacob Scmits of the new house built for George, 1st Earl of Berkeley, 1689 |
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| Durdans: drawing attributed to John Talman of the new house at Durdans, 1702. Note the cupola of the 'new room' of the 1630s on the right-hand edge of the view. |
The materials for the new house seem to have come, at least partly, from the demolition of Henry VIII's Nonsuch Palace, of which Lord Berkeley had been Keeper since 1660, but which had been granted to the king's mistress, Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland, who in 1682 obtained a warrant for the demolition of the house and the sale of the materials. Later that summer, Lord Berkeley purchased from the Duchess for £1800 all the materials of the palace and its ancillary buildings, the fountains, figures, and pavements of marble and stone in the gardens and elsewhere, and the cisterns and pipes of lead both above and below ground. The agreement provided for the swift demolition, within two years, of the grand buildings of the inner court, together with the stables, coach house and gardens, but gave Lord Berkeley a lease of the outer court with all the buildings around it and the cellars beneath for 60 years or the life of the duchess, after which he was to have a further two years ‘for the takeing downe and carrying away all and every the materials and things ariseing and comeing of the said ...court’. From this, and from references in correspondence, it is clear that members of the Berkeley family continued to occupy the outer court at Nonsuch while the demolition and rebuilding of Durdans was carried out. The materials salvaged from Nonsuch were, no doubt, mainly used for walling and rubble, but close study of Scmits' view shows that the front terrace of the house was lined with heraldic beasts like those at Hampton Court, and these statues must surely have come from Nonsuch. In 1697, John Evelyn reported that he had heard that some of the famous plaster stuccoes from the external walls of Nonsuch had been 'translated and ornamentally plac'd' at his 'delicious Villa Durdans', although there is no sign of them in either view: perhaps they were reused internally.
In 1689 the Durdans estate was mortgaged to Sir William Turner MP, of Kirkleatham (Yorks NR), and in 1702 the entire property was sold to the latter's nephew before changing hands several times in the next ten years. In 1729 it came to Francis North (1704-90), 1st Earl of Guilford, who seems to have leased it from 1740 to Frederick, Prince of Wales, for use as a hunting seat, at a time when the Prince also occupied Cliveden (Bucks). The Prince had evidently given the estate up by 1747, when it was sold again, to William Belchier, a London banker. Half a century of at best intermittent occupation had by then evidently left the house in poor condition, and Belchier found it 'a melancholy mansion'. He therefore pulled it down and set about building a replacement, about which nothing seems to be known, for on 25 February 1755, before it was finished, it burned down, leaving only the shell. Perhaps because the incomplete house was not insured, Belchier did not begin rebuilding again, but instead fitted up a nearby farmhouse called Hydes Pit (later Pitt Place) as a temporary residence. Durdans remained a fire-blackened ruin for nearly a decade, until it was sold in 1764 to Charles Dalbiac, a Huguenot silk and velvet manufacturer from Spitalfields (Middx).
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| Durdans: engraving of 1816 showing the house built by William Newton in 1764-68 |
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| Durdans: the house from the south-west after its remodelling by George Devey for Lord Rosebery |
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| Durdans: the house from the east after its remodelling by George Devey, from an old postcard |
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| Durdans: the house as remodelled by Claud Phillimore in 1955-56. Image: Norman Wigg/Historic England |
Descent: Sir William Mynne sold 1617 to Elizabeth, Lady Berkeley (d. 1635); to daughter, Theophila (1596-1643), wife of Sir Robert Coke (1586-1653), kt., who bequeathed it to his nephew, George Berkeley (c.1627-98), 9th Baron and 1st Earl of Berkeley; to son, Rt. Hon. Charles Berkeley (1649-1710), 2nd Earl of Berkeley; sold 1702 to Charles Turner (1652-1719) of Kirkleatham (Yorks NR); sold 1708 to John Campbell (1680-1743), 2nd Duke of Argyll and 1st Duke of Greenwich; sold before 1712 to Francis North (1673-1729), 2nd Baron Guilford; to son, Francis North (1704-90), 3rd Baron Guilford and 1st Earl of Guilford, who loaned or leased it to HRH Frederick, Prince of Wales (1707-51); sold by 1747 to Alderman William Belchier (1713-72); sold 1764 to Charles Dalbiac (1726-1808); sold 1799 to George Blackman; sold 1819 to Sir Gilbert Heathcote (1773-1851), 4th bt., MP; to son, Arthur Heathcote (1829-69); to cousins, Rev. Thomas Heathcote (c.1810-83) and Frank Heathcote (1811-79), who sold 1874 to Archibald Primrose (1847-1929), 5th Earl of Rosebery and 1st Earl of Midlothian; to daughter Lady Sybil Primrose (d. 1955), wife of Gen. Charles Grant (d. 1950); to niece, Ruth Primrose (1916-89), wife of Charles Wood (1912-80), 2nd Earl of Halifax; sold 1973 to Bruce Andrew McAlpine (b. 1947) and his wife Ingrid (1939-2018).
Foxcombe Hall, Boar's Hill, Berkshire
The house begun as a picturesque cottage in substantial grounds designed by H.W. Moore of Oxford in 1887-88 for the President of Trinity College. It was enlarged into a country house by Sir Ernest George & Yeates 1902-06 for 8th Earl of Berkeley, who added a large hall and a billiard room, although plans for a south-facing morning room were not carried out. He also either built or adapted a building (known later as The Old Dairy) as a detached laboratory in 1898.
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| Foxcombe Hall: design by Sir Ernest George & Yeates for the additions built in 1902-06. From The Builder, 10 May 1902. |
Descent: built for Rev. Henry George Woods, president of Trinity College, Oxford; sold 1893 to Randal Thomas Mowbray Rawdon Berkeley (1865-1942), 8th Earl of Berkeley; sold 1934 to Ripon Hall Training College; sold 1976 to The Open University; sold 2017 to Beijing University.
Principal sources
Burke's Peerage & Baronetage, 2003, pp. 347-53; Sir H. Barkley, 'The earlier house of Berkeley', Transactions of the Bristol & Gloucestershire Archaeological Society (TBGAS), vol. 8 (1884), pp. 193-223; J. Maclean (ed.), John Smyth's The lives of the Berkeleys, 1883 (3 vols); G.E. Cokayne, The complete peerage, vol. ii, 1912, pp. 118-49; Country Life vol. 40, 1916, p. 126; RCHME, An inventory of the historical monuments of Middlesex, 1937, pp. 11-13; Earl of Berkeley, 'Excavations at Berkeley Castle', TBGAS, vol. 60, 1938, pp. 308-39; H. Costley-White, Mary Cole, Countess of Berkeley, 1961; VCH Middlesex, vol. 3, 1962, pp. 179-81; Archaeological Journal, cxxii, 1965, pp. 197-200; L. Stone, Family and Fortune: studies in aristocratic finance in the 16th and 17th centuries, 1973, pp. 243-67; J. Harris, The artist and the country house, 1979, pp. 61-62; C. Aslet, The Last Country Houses, 1982, p. 156; J. Harris, 'Draughtsmen's Contracts: Villa Durdans', Country Life, 8 September 1983; J. Allibone, George Devey, 1991, p. 172; A.R. Warmington, Civil War, Interregnum and Restoration in Gloucestershire, 1640-72, 1997; N.W. Kingsley, The country houses of Gloucestershire, 1500-1660, 2nd edn., 2001, pp. 51-54; T. Mowl, Historic gardens of Gloucestershire, 2004, p. 20; B. Wells-Furby, A catalogue of the medieval muniments at Berkeley Castle, 2004 (2 vols), especially the introduction; J. Miller, ‘Berkeley Castle’, Country Life, 2-9 December 2004; M. Biddle, Nonsuch Palace, 2005, pp. 61, 478; A. Emery, The greater medieval houses of England & Wales: Southern England, 2006, pp. 58-65; J. Harris, Moving Rooms, 2007, pp. 81-4; B. Wells-Furby, The Berkeley estate, 1281-1417: its economy and development, 2012; J. Gasper, Elizabeth Craven, 2018; C. Williams, The Cravens, 2022, pp. 82-180; C. O'Brien, I. Nairn & B. Cherry, The buildings of England: Surrey, 3rd edn., 2022, pp. 287-89; Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entries on 5th Earl of Berkeley and Hon. Grantley Berkeley;
Location of archives
Berkeley family, Barons Berkeley and Earls of Berkeley: deeds, manorial records, legal, estate and household papers, 12th-20th cents relating to properties in Gloucestershire, Middlesex and Sussex; Severn fishery papers; Berkeley family and genealogical papers; papers of the 2nd Baron Hunsdon (1547-1603) and John Smyth of Nibley (1567-1641); papers for other counties mainly 12th-17th cent, incl Berkshire, Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Huntingdonshire, Kent, Leicestershire, Norfolk, Oxfordshire, Somerset, Warwickshire and Yorkshire; records of the abbeys of St Augustine's Bristol and Croxley (Leics) and the chantry of St Andrew's Berkeley 13th-14th cents. [Berkeley Castle Muniments]; estate maps, 1739-1970 [Gloucestershire Archives, D650, D9061]; Gloucestershire, London, Middlesex and Berkshire deeds and papers, family settlements and probates [Gloucestershire Archives, D4462]; deeds, legal, estate and enclosure papers, c.1840-70 [Gloucestershire Archives, D177]; estate and household papers of John Smyth, steward [Gloucestershire Archives, D8887]; legal and estate papers, c.1580-1732, including inventory of Berkeley Castle, 1653, and early deeds, 12th cent. [Gloucestershire Archives, D225]; papers relating to garden works at Cranford, 1720-23 [British Library Add MS 69965]; Sussex estate deeds, manorial and estate records, 1342-1931 [West Sussex RO, Iveagh MSS]; London and Middlesex estate papers and plans and pedigree of the Earls of Berkeley, 1805-1960 [London Metropolitan Archives Acc/0867]; miscellaneous deeds and manorial records collected by John Smyth [Birmingham Archives, MS3549]; letter book of 8th Earl of Berkeley, 1900-17 [History of Science Museum, Oxford, MS Museum 53]
Coat of arms
Berkeley of Berkeley Castle: Gules, a chevron argent between ten crosses pattée six in chief and four in base of the second.
Can you help?
- If anyone can offer further information or corrections to any part of this article I should be most grateful. I am always particularly pleased to hear from current owners or the descendants of families associated with a property who can supply information from their own research or personal knowledge for inclusion.
Revision and acknowledgements
This post was first published 21 July 2024 and was updated 23 July 2024. I am grateful to David Smith, formerly archivist to Berkeley Castle, for his comments on my account of the castle when this was first drafted nearly forty years ago, and for his assistance with locating relevant documents in the muniment room; and also to Dart Montgomery for introducing me to relevant printed sources.
I am sure that Julian Berkeley and his Partner, Tony Scotland would be fascinated by this.Also they may have yet more information.His Father was Sir Lenox Berkeley, the Composer
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