officers who obeyed the summons; and at the revolution he refused to sign the obligation to stand by the Prince of Orange. Being thus compelled to leave England, he arrived at St. Germains as King James was about to set out on the expedition to Ireland, and received from him the command of a division. After the death of Dundee at Killiecrankie, he was despatched from Ireland, along with Sir Robert Southwell, to the highlands of Scotland, to assist the Earl of Seaforth in organising a resistance to General Mackay. The defeat of the army of James at the battle of the Boyne rendering further efforts in his cause hopeless, Bernardi, after the dispersion of the highland forces, made his escape southwards to London, where, as he was about to set sail for Holland, he was apprehended on a charge of high treason. The bill was, however, rejected, and, after a visit on parole to Holland, he took up his residence near Brentford until the Christmas of 1695, when he began to frequent the Jacobite coffee-houses in London. In 1696 he was arrested in bed in a tavern on Tower Hill on suspicion of being concerned in the 'assassination plot,' but, no tangible evidence being forthcoming against him, he was never put upon his trial. When the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act had expired, a bill was brought in to sanction the imprisonment of him and four others for a year, on the plea that further time was required to collect evidence. The act was renewed at the end of a year, and on its second expiration an act was passed for confining them during the pleasure of King William. Similar acts were issued on the accession of Anne, George I, and George II. The strong Jacobite sympathies of Bernardi, and the fact that he was arrest in company with an old acquaintance, Captain Rookwood, who was convicted, formed indeed strong presumptive evidence against him; but to doom him to hopeless captivity without trial was a gross violation of those very principles of liberty which William of Orange came to vindicate. Bernardi attained the pathetic pre-eminence of surviving by several years all the other prisoners. After nearly forty years' imprisonment, he died in Newgate in his eightieth year, 20 Sept. 1736. Not withstanding that his later years were rendered additionally irksome from frequent suffering caused by the breaking out of his old wounds, he bore his hard fate with great cheerfulness. While in Holland he had married in 1677 a Dutch lady of good family, but she died before his imprisonment, and in 1712 he was married again in Newgate. His second wife bore him ten children, and her care did much to mitigate the evils of his lot.
[A Short History of Major Bernardi written by Himself in Newgate, where he has been for near thirty-three years a Prisoner of State, without any allowance from Government, and could never be admitted to his Trial, 1729; Biog. Brit. ii. 267-74; Thurloe's State Papers; Macaulay's History of England; Gent. Mag. vi. 553, l. 125.]
BERNERS, Lord. [See Bourchier, John.]
BERNERS, BERNES, or BARNES, JULIANA (b. 1388?), writer on hawking, hunting, and heraldry.
The historic and the legendary Dame Juliana Berners are very different persons. 'What is really known of the dame is almost nothing, and may be summed up in the following few words. She nrobaoly lived at the beginning of the fifteenth century, and she possibly compiled from existing, MSS. some rhymes on hunting;' so writes one of the latest and most destructive of Dame Juliana's biographers (Blades, The Boke of St. Albans in Facsimile, 1881, p. 13). Mr. Blades evidently judges from the only mention of Juliana Berners in the original edition of the 'Boke of St. Albans,' 1486, in the colophon of its second treatise. This consists of a rhymed treatise on hunting, and concludes : 'Explicit Dam Julyans Barnes in her boke of huntyng.' In the reprint of the 'Boke' ten years later by Wynkyn de Worde, the colophon is varied, thus: 'Explicit dame Julyans Bemes doctryne in her boke of huntyng;' and the 'Boke' itself ends: 'Enprvnted at Westmestre by Wyukyn the Worde the yere of thyncarnacon of our lorde, m.cccc.lxxxxvj.' Clearly Wynkyn de Worde attributed the authorship of the hunting treatise in the 'Boke' to one Julyans Bernes. This is all that contemporaneous history knows of the lady. 'It must not be concealed that no such person can be found in any authentic pedigree of the Berners family, nor do the county historians of Hertfordshire, nor indeed any other writers, notice her from documents' (Dugdale's Monast. Angic. iii. 363. ed. 1821). She possesses, however, a biography which is more or less mythical, and which is due to conjecture, inference, and perhaps not a little to imaginaticm. Haslewood assigns a distinguished lineage to the dame on the authority of Chauncy (Hist. of Hertfordshire, 1700). She 'is supposed,' he says, 'to have been born towards the latter end of the fourteenth century. The received report is that she was the daughter of Sir James Berners, whose son was created Baron Berners, temp. Henry IV, and that she once held the situation of prioress of Sopwell
