Bill was under consideration in committee, Berkeley indiscreetly said in the House of Commons that Cheltenham showed a greater mortality than any other place of the same size in England. On 30 July 1847 he was thereupon for the first time defeated by a majority of 108. On 28 May 1848, however, the successful candidate, Sir Willoughby Jones, bart., was unseated upon petition, and on 28 July 1848 Berkeley was elected, being returned by 1,028 votes. On 24 Aug. this election was also declared void, on the ground that some of the voters had been supplied with refreshments. Incapacitated by that decision from sitting in parliament until after the next dissolution, Berkeley had to bide his time until July 1852, when, with an aggregate of 999 votes, he was for the sixth and last time returned as M.P. for Cheltenham.
Berkeley was twice married. First, on 10 Sept. 1839, to Augusta Jones, daughter of Sir Horace St. Paul, bart., and widow of George Henry Talbot, half-brother of John, sixteenth Earl of Shrewsbury; she died in April 1841. By her he had a daughter, Louisa Mary, who married, 3 April 1872, Major-general Gustavus H. L. Milman, R.A., and on 27 Aug. 1882 became Baroness Berkeley, succeeding to the barony on the death of her uncle, Thomas Moreton Fitzhardinge, who refused to avail himself of the decision of the House of Lords on the alleged marriage of his father. Berkeley married secondly, on 27 Aug. 1845, Charlotte, fourth daughter of the late General Denzil Onslow, of Stoughton, Huntingdonshire, and widow of George Newton, Esq., of Croxton Park, Cambridgeshire.
The only surviving child of Craven Berkeley's first wife by her former husband, Miss Augusta Talbot, was nineteen in 1851. She was a ward in chancery, and on attaining her majority would come into possession of 80,000l. On the death of her mother, nine years previously, she, being both a catholic and an heiress, was confided by the court of chancery to the guardianship of her near relations and coreligionists, the Earl and Countess of Shrewsbury. By them, in the September of 1850, she had been placed in the convent at Taunton in Somersetshire. Her step-father learning soon afterwards that she was there not as a pupil but as a postulant, and understanding that in all probability she would take the veil, peremptorily interposed by presenting petitions to parliament and to the lord chancellor, in each of which documents charges were directed against the earl and countess and the spiritual advisers of the young heiress. Public opinion meanwhile was exasperated against the catholics by reason of the establishment of their new hierarchy, and much excitement was aroused, which subsided when Miss Augusta Talbot married, on 22 July 1851, the Duke of Norfolk's younger brother, Lord Edward Fitzallan Howard, eighteen years afterwards summoned to the House of Peers as Lord Howard of Glossop.
Berkeley's health failing him shortly before the completion of his fiftieth year, he went abroad m the hope of its renovation. Becoming worse, however, he rapidly sank, dying on 1 July 1855 at Frankfort-on-Maine.
[Grantley Berkeley's Life and Recollections, 4 vols. 1865; Goding's History of Cheltenham, 1863, pp. 85–94, 365–8; Annual Register, 1805, p. 440, 1851, p. 82, 1855, p. 290; Berkeley Pedigree, Minutes of Evidence, &c., ordered to be printed 1811, pp. 85; ditto, with Appendix, pp. 882; Berkeley Peerage, Minutes of Evidence, &c., ordered to be printed 1829, pp. 269; Fosbroke's History of Gloucestershire, 1807, Berkeley Hundred, i. 410–501.]
BERKELEY, ELIZA (1734–1800), authoress, was born in 1734 at the vicarage of White Waltham in Windsor Forest. Her father, the vicar, was the Rev. Henry Frinsham, M.A., a man universally admired, and called 'the fiddle of the company' (Preface to Poems, p. 167), who had previously been curate at Beaconsfield; her mother was a daughter of Francis Cherry of Shottesbrook House, Berks (Nichols, Hist. of Hinckley, p. 174), who left a considerable fortune, which Mrs. Frinsham and her sisters, known as Duke Cherry, Black Cherry, and Heart Cherry, enjoyed as coheiresses. The Cherry sisters lost much over the South Sea Bubble (Gent, Mag. lxix. i. 462). Lord Bute rented Waltham Place on purpose to be near Mr. Frinsham, and he frequently played cards at the vicarage, notwithstanding it was an old clayed barn, with small rooms off it on each side, with a kitchen paved with curious Roman
bricks, and a sitting-room whose ceiling was so low that the top of the vicar's wig just touched its middle beam (Preface to Poems, p. 130, and 170, note). Here Eliza Berkeley passed her childhood, for her father would not accept preferment on condition of voting against his principles (ibid. 171). At the age of six she would climb trees like a boy. At eleven she wrote two sermons, and she and her sister Anne were placed at Mrs. Sheeles's school, Queen Square, London. After one year at this school the girls were removed, in consequence of their father's death, and this seems to have given a serious turn to Eliza. She read Hickes's 'Preparatory Office for Death' every Thursday, and attended prayers at church every afternoon. 'My dear,' said her mother, 'you will never get a husband; you hold yourself up as a
