The last and most curious chapter of the history of the Berkeley honours was opened by Frederick Augustus, the 5th earl of Berkeley (1745-1810). This peer married at Lambeth, on the 16th of May 1796, one Mary Cole, the daughter of a small tradesman at Wotton-under-Edge, with whom he had already lived for several years, several children having been born to them. In order to legitimatize the issue born before the marriage, the earl in 1801 made declaration of an earlier marriage contracted privately at Berkeley in 1785. On his death in 1811 the validity of this alleged marriage was tested by the committee of privileges of the House of Lords, and it was shown without doubt that the evidence for it, a parish register entry, was a forgery.
Under the will of his father, Colonel William Berkeley, the eldest illegitimate son, had the castle and estates, and on the failure of his claim to the earldom he demanded a writ of summons as a baron by reason of his tenure of the castle. No judgment was given in the matter, the king in council having declared in 1669 that baronies by tenure were “not in being and so not fit to be revived.” But Colonel Berkeley’s political influence afterwards procured him (1831) a peerage as Lord Segrave of Berkeley, and ten years later an earldom with the title of Fitzhardinge. He died without issue in 1857. His brother, Sir Maurice Fitzhardinge Berkeley, who succeeded to Berkeley under the terms of the 5th earl’s will, revived the claims, and was likewise given a new barony (1861) as Lord Fitzhardinge, a title in which he was succeeded by two of his sons, the 3rd baron (b. 1830) being in 1909 owner of the Berkeley and Cranford estates. The earldom of Berkeley was never assumed by the eldest legitimate son of the 5th earl, and was in 1909 enjoyed by Randal Thomas Mowbray Berkeley, 8th earl, grandson of admiral Sir George Cranfield Berkeley, second son of the 4th earl. In 1893 Mrs Milman (d. 1899), daughter and heir of Thomas Moreton Fitzhardinge Berkeley, 6th earl de jure, was declared by letters patent under the great seal to have succeeded to the ancient barony of Berkeley created by the writ of 1421; and she was succeeded by her daughter.
Many branches have been thrown out by this family during its many centuries of existence. Of these the most important descended from Maurice of Berkeley, the baron who died in Wallingford hold in 1326. His second son Maurice was ancestor of the Berkeleys of Stoke Giffard, whose descendant, Norborne Berkeley, claimed the barony of Botetourt and had a summons in 1764, dying without issue in 1770. Sir Maurice Berkeley of Bruton, a cadet of Stoke Giffard, was forefather of the Viscounts Fitzhardinge, the Lords Berkeley of Stratton (1658-1773) and the earls of Falmouth, all extinct, the Berkeleys of Stratton bequeathing their great London estate, including Berkeley Square and Stratton Street, to the main line. Edward Berkeley of Pylle in Somerset, head of a cadet line of the Bruton family, married Philippa Speke, whose mother was Joan, daughter of Sir John Portman of Orchard Portman, baronet. His grandson William, on succeeding to the Orchard Portman and Bryanston estates, took the additional name of Portman, and from him come the Viscounts Portman of Bryanston (1873). From James, Lord Berkeley, who died in 1463, descended Rowland Berkeley, a clothier of Worcester, who bought the estates of Spetchley. Rowland’s second son, Sir Robert Berkeley, the king’s bench justice who supported the imposition of ship-money, was ancestor of the Berkeleys of Spetchley, now the only branch of the house among untitled squires.
See John Smyth’s Lives of the Berkeleys, compiled c. 1618, edited by Sir John Maclean (1883-1885); J.H. Round’s introduction to the Somerset Domesday, V.C.H. series; G.E. C(okayne)’s Complete Peerage; Jeayes’s Descriptive Catalogue of the Charters and Muniments at Berkeley Castle (1892); Dictionary of National Biography; Transactions of Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, 3 vols., viii., xlv., et passim; The Red Book of the Exchequer, Chronicles of Roger of Wendover, Matthew Paris, Adam of Murimuth, Robert of Gloucester, Henry of Huntingdon, &c. (Rolls Series); British Museum Charters, &c.
(O. Ba.)
BERKELEY, GEORGE (1685-1753), Irish bishop and philosopher, the eldest son of William Berkeley (an officer of customs who had, it seems, come to Ireland in the suite of Lord Berkeley of Stratton, lord lieutenant, 1670-1672, to whom he was related), was born on the 12th of March 1685, in a cottage near Dysert Castle, Thomastown, Ireland. He passed from the school at Kilkenny to Trinity College, Dublin (1700), where, owing to the peculiar subtlety of his mind and his determination to accept no doctrine on the evidence of authority or convention, he left the beaten track of study and was regarded by some as a dunce, by others as a genius. During his career at Dublin the works of Descartes and Newton were superseding the older text-books, and the doctrines of Locke’s Essay were eagerly discussed. Thus he “entered on an atmosphere which was beginning to be charged with the elements of reaction against traditional scholasticism in physics and in metaphysics” (A.C. Fraser). He became a fellow in 1707. His interest in philosophy led him to take a prominent share in the foundation of a society for discussing the new doctrines, and is further shown by his Common Place Book, one of the most valuable autobiographical records in existence, which throws much light on the growth of his ideas, and enables us to understand the significance of his early writings. We find here the consciousness of creative thought focused in a new principle which is to revolutionize speculative science. There is no sign of any intimate knowledge of ancient or scholastic thought; to the doctrines of Spinoza, Leibnitz, Malebranche, Norris, the attitude is one of indifference or lack of appreciation, but the influence of Descartes and specially of Locke is evident throughout. The new principle (nowhere in the Common Place Book explicitly stated) may be expressed in the proposition that no existence is conceivable—and therefore possible—which is not either conscious spirit or the ideas (i.e. objects) of which such spirit is conscious. In the language of a later period this principle may be expressed as the absolute synthesis of subject and object; no object exists apart from Mind. Mind is, therefore, prior both in thought and in existence, if for the moment we assume the popular distinction. Berkeley thus diverted philosophy from its beaten track of discussion as to the meaning of matter, substance, cause, and preferred to ask first whether these have any significance apart from the conscious spirit. In the pursuit of this inquiry he rashly invaded other departments of science, and much of the Common Place Book is occupied with a polemic, as vigorous as it is ignorant, against the fundamental conceptions of the infinitesimal calculus.
In 1707 Berkeley published two short mathematical tracts; in 1709, in his New Theory of Vision, he applied his new principle for the first time, and in the following year stated it fully in the Principles of Human Knowledge. In these works he attacked the existing theories of externality which to the unphilosophical mind is proved by visual evidence. He maintained that visual consciousness is merely a system of arbitrary signs which symbolize for us certain actual or possible tactual experience—in other words a purely conventional language.
The contents of the visual and the tactual consciousness have no element in common. The visible and visual signs are definitely connected with tactual experiences, and the association between them, which has grown up in our minds through custom or habit, rests upon, or is guaranteed by, the constant conjunction of the two by the will of the Universal Mind. But this synthesis is not brought forward prominently by Berkeley. It was evident that a similar analysis might have been applied to tactual consciousness which does not give externality in its deepest significance any more than the visual; but with deliberate purpose Berkeley at first drew out only one side of his argument. In the Principles of Human Knowledge, externality in its ultimate sense as independence of all mind is considered. Matter, as an abstract, unperceived substance or cause, is shown to be impossible, an unreal conception; true substance is affirmed to be conscious spirit, true causality the free activity of such a spirit, while physical substantiality and causality are held to be merely arbitrary, though constant, relations among phenomena connected subjectively by suggestion or association, objectively in the Universal Mind. In ultimate analysis, then, nature is conscious experience, and forms the sign or symbol of a divine, universal intelligence and will.
In 1711 Berkeley delivered his Discourse on Passive Obedience, in which he deduces moral rules from the intention of God to promote the general happiness, thus working out a theological utilitarianism, which may be compared with the later expositions of Austin and J.S. Mill. From 1707 he had been engaged as college tutor; in 1712 he paid a short visit to England, and in April 1713 he was presented by Swift at court. His abilities, his courtesy and his upright character made him a universal favourite. While in London he published his Dialogues (1713), a more popular exposition of his new theory; for exquisite facility of style these are among the finest philosophical writings in the English language. In November he became chaplain to Lord Peterborough, whom he accompanied on the continent, returning in August 1714. He travelled again in 1715-1720 as tutor to the only son of Dr St George Ashe (?1658-1718, bishop successively of Cloyne, Clogher and Derry). In 1721, during the disturbed state of social relations consequent on the bursting of the South Sea bubble he published an Essay towards preventing the Ruin of Great Britain, which shows the intense interest he took in practical affairs. In the same year he returned to Ireland as chaplain to the duke of Grafton, and was made divinity lecturer and university preacher. In 1722 he was appointed to the deanery of Dromore, a post which seems to have entailed no duties, as we find him holding the offices of Hebrew lecturer and senior proctor at the university. The following year Miss Vanhomrigh, Swift’s Vanessa, left him half her property. It would appear that he had only met her once at dinner. In 1724 he was nominated to the rich deanery of Derry, but had hardly been appointed before he was using every effort to resign it in order to devote himself to his scheme of founding a college in the Bermudas, and extending its benefits to the Americans. With infinite exertion he succeeded in obtaining from government a promise of £20,000, and after four years spent in preparation, sailed in September 1728, accompanied by some friends and by his wife, daughter of Judge Forster, whom he had married in the preceding month. Three years of quiet retirement and study were spent in Rhode Island, but it gradually became apparent that government would never hand over the promised grant, and Berkeley was compelled to give up his cherished plan. Soon after his return he published the fruits of his studies in Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher (1733), a finely written work in the form of dialogue, critically examining the various forms of free-thinking in the age, and bringing forward in antithesis to them his own theory, which shows all nature to be the language of God. In 1734 he was raised to the bishopric of Cloyne. The same year, in his Analyst, he attacked the higher mathematics as leading to freethinking; this involved him in a hot controversy. The Querist, a practical work in the form of questions on what would now be called social or economical philosophy, appeared in three parts, 1735, 1736, 1737. In 1744 was published the Siris, partly occasioned by the controversy as to the efficacy of tar-water in cases of small-pox, but rising far above the circumstance from which it took its rise, and revealing hidden depths in the Berkeleian metaphysics. In 1751 his eldest son died, and in 1752 he removed with his family to Oxford for the sake of his son George, who was studying there. He died suddenly in the midst of his family on the 14th of January 1753, and was buried in Christ Church, Oxford.