Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 04.djvu/369

 words have been every day nothing but contrariety, and his design only to cheat his Majesty and the nation.'

The fleet returned to the Downs, from whence Berkeley wrote a very detailed statement of the case against Meester, who ought, he insisted, to be tried for his life. No such action appears to have been taken; but orders were sent down for the fleet to attempt Calais. Accordingly, they bombarded it on 17 Aug. as long as their mortars held out, though little real damage was done. The fleet returned to England, and was ordered to Spithead; but Berkeley, having received an intimation that Sir George Rooke would be at Portsmouth, left the command to Sir Clowdisley Shovell. The following year his objection to serve under Rooke had been overcome; and through May 1696 he commanded in the second post in the Channel. At the end of the month Rooke, then one of the lords of the admiralty, was summoned to London, and the command-in-chief remained with Berkeley, who at this time was permitted to fly the union flag at the main, and was presently ordered to extend his cruise into the Bay of Biscay, and to threaten the coast of France, in the hope of causing troops to be withdrawn from the French army in Flanders. Contrary winds, however, detained the fleet in the Channel till the end of June. In the early days of July the isle Groix and the smaller islands, Houet and Hoedic, were ravaged, and St. Martin's, in the isle of Ré, was bombarded. Such achievements could not lead to any result, and the most noticeable incident of the cruise was the intrusion into the fleet one night of a French privateer, commanded by Duguay-Trouin, who describes himself as having engaged and overpowered one of the frigates in full view of the English admiral (Mémoires de M. Du Guay-Trouin, Amsterdam, 1748, 41–3; Fraser's Magazine, 1882, i. 509 (April), where the incident is discussed in some detail). By the end of July the fleet returned to Spithead, and no further operations during that summer being intended, Berkeley went on leave, still preserving the command. He, however, never resumed it, being attacked by a pleurisy, of which he died 27 Feb. 1696–7. He had married Jane, daughter of Sir John Temple of East Sheen in Surrey, by whom he had but one daughter, who died in infancy.

 BERKELEY, MAURICE FREDERICK FITZHARDINGE, (1788–1867), admiral, second son of the fifth earl of Berkeley by his alleged private marriage [see  of], was born 3 Jan. 1788. He entered the navy in June 1802, and after six years' service, for the most part in the West Indies or on the Newfoundland station, where his uncle. Vice-admiral G. C. Berkeley, was then commander-in-chief, was made lieutenant 9 July 1808. He was then appointed to the Hydra frigate, with Captain George Mundy, and actively employed on the east coast of Spain during the next eighteen months. In February 1810 he was appointed flag lieutenant to his uncle at Lisbon, and in the autumn had charge of a division of gunboats on the Tagus co-operating with the troops then holding the lines of Torres Vedras. He was promoted 19 Dec. 1810 to the command of the Vestal, in which he continued till the following November. He was posted 7 June 1814, and from 1828 to 1831 commanded the Semiramis frigate, flagship at Cork. In 1840–1 he commanded the Thunderer, 84, in the Mediterranean, and took part in the several operations on the coast of Syria, including the bombardment of St. Jean d'Acre, in acknowledgment of which he was made a C.B., and received the gold medal. With this his service at sea came to an end, though he became, in course of seniority, rear-admiral 30 Oct. 1849; vice-admiral 21 Oct. 1856; and admiral 15 Jan. 1862. On shore, however, he was closely occupied with naval affairs, and held a seat at the admiralty, with few and comparatively short interruptions, from 1833 to 1857. His longest absence from the board was from 1839 to 1846, when he gave up his seat in consequence of a difference with his colleagues on the subject of sending out men-of-war with the insufficient number of men proposed as a 'peace complement,' a practice which, as is now known, placed the English Mediterranean fleet in very serious jeopardy, and in condemnation of which Berkeley published 'A Letter addressed to Sir John Barrow, Bart., on the System of War and Peace Complements in her Majesty's Ships ' (21 pp. 8vo, 1839). With few intermissions he also represented the city of Gloucester in parliament from 1831 to 1857, though in 1833 and again in 1837 he was an unsuccessful candidate.

His elder brother, who had been created Baron Segrave (1831), and afterwards Earl Fitzhardinge (1841), died in 1857,and his titles became extinct. On this Admiral Berkeley put in a claim for the baronry of Berkeley, but failed to establish it. He was, however, raised to the peerage on 5 Aug. 1861 as Baron 