Place Name
John Berkeley, (1602 – August 26, 1678) the 1st Lord Berkeley of Stratton, a Royalist commander in the Civil War, who acquired huge tracts of land following the restoration. Berkeley was the youngest son of Sir Maurice Berkeley of Bruton in Somerset; after Oxford University, he became Ambassador to Sweden and later, in April 1640, Member of Parliament for Heytesbury, in the Short Parliament. But it was war that set him on the path to greater things. For his victory against the Parliamentarians at Stratton, Cornwall, he was given the title Baron Berkley of Stratton by Charles II, then in exile on the Continent. While titles may have lifted his status, it was marriage that made his fortune. Sometime around 1662 he wed the twice-widowed Christiana Riccard, the only daughter of Sir Andrew Riccard, a governor of the East India Company. Her marriages to Henry Rich, Lord Kensington, and John Gayer, further built her own fortune. Meanwhile Berkeley’s influence and support of the king ensured that following the Restoration he would be given many important roles, among them Lord President of Connaught for life, and a Master of Ordinance. In 1665, he began building Berkeley House, a palace in the Italian style, on a field fronting Piccadilly that he had bought the previous year. It cost nearly £30,000 and was completed sometime around 1673. In 1668 Berkeley added to his portfolio buying Twickenham Park. Berkeley’s personal relationships with Charles II and the Duke of York led to him becoming one of the founders of the US state of New Jersey. Then called the Province of New Jersey, a British colony in North America, he held it between 1664 and 1674, before selling his stake to a group of Quakers. He died, aged 72, at Twickenham Park and was buried on September 5, 1678, in the nearby St Mary’s Church. By the time of his death, land along Piccadilly was so valuable that his widow sold two strips of garden on either side of Berkeley House to developers creating Berkeley Street and Stratton Street. John Evelyn, the diarist described, who visited to advise on the sale described the house as a “sweete place” with “by far the most noble gardens, courts, and accommodations, stately porticos, &c. anywhere about the towne” and noting: “Baroness Berkeley’s resolution of letting out her ground also for so excessive a price as as offer’d, advancing neere £1000 per in mere ground-rents; to such a mad intemperance was the age of building about a citty, by far too disproportionate already to the nation I having in my time seene it almost as large again as it was within my memory.” Berkeley House was later sold by his son John in 1696 and renamed Devonshire House by the new owner William Cavendish, 1st Duke of Devonshire, in 1697, the house burned down in 1733 and was replaced by a second Devonshire House.
