Randal Thomas Mowbray Rawdon Berkeley, Earl of Berkeley, 1865-1942

Abstract

Randal Thomas Mowbray Rawdon Berkeley, eighth and last Earl of Berkeley, was head of a historic house which is one of the very few that can rightly claim a pre-Norman pedigree, tracing its descent from Eadnoth, a Saxon Thane, who was Staller to Edward the Confessor. Eadnoth’s grandson, Robert FitzHardinge of Bristol, was rewarded for his loyalty to Queen Maud and her son Henry II by the grant of the Berkeley lands, forfeited by Roger de Berkeley of Dursley who supported Stephen. The only outstanding members of the family through the centuries have been fighting men. Three sailors won great distinction—Thomas, the fifth Lord Berkeley, who was Warden of the Welsh Marches in the fifteenth century and held the seas against Owen Glendower and his French Allies to their great discomfiture; James, the third Earl, K.G., who commanded a frigate at the age of twenty-one and was raised to flag rank at twenty-seven; and Admiral Sir George Cranfield Berkeley, the Lord High Admiral of Portugal in the eighteenth century. George, the first Earl was one of the original Fellows of the Royal Society, John Wilkins, the first secretary, having been domestic chaplain to his father. Randal Berkeley was born in Brussels in 1865, and he became Viscount Dursley in 1882 when his father succeeded his cousin in the Earldom. His mother was Cecile, daughter of Louis, Count de Melfort, whose ancestor John Drummond had followed James II into exile in France. He used to speak of his mother as having ‘a first-class reasoning mind’ and this he certainly inherited from her. His parents lived abroad and he was educated at a lycée at Fontaine- bleau and later at Nice, until he came to England to be coached for the Navy, following the family tradition. He joined the Britannia in 1878, having passed in from Burney’s Naval Academy at Gosport.