The Honourable Charlotte F. Berkeley
(1810-1897)
26 July 1861
Volume 4, page 281, sitting number 5193.
The daughter of General Denzil Onslow, Charlotte Onslow married, firstly, in 1829, George Newton, son of Samuel Newton of Croxton, Cambridgeshire. She married, secondly, the Honourable Craven FitzHardinge Berkeley, son of the 5th Earl of Berkeley, on 27 August 1845.
The Honourable Charlotte FitzHardinge Berkeley died on 25 January 1897 at 7 Clifton Terrace, Winchester. She left an estate valued at £28,362.
Her husband appears on the 1851 census, visiting George Litsom Eliot at Stamford House, Cheltenham. He gave ‘ex Member of Parliament’ as his profession. In all, he was returned five times as the MP for Cheltenham, but at the time of the census he was barred from taking his seat, on the grounds that some of the voters at the last election had been provided with refreshments.
On the night of the census, his wife was at Titchfield in Hampshire with two daughters from her first marriage, Emily and Esther. She gave Stoughton House in Hampshire as her place of birth.
The following is an extract from Craven FitzHardinge Berkeley’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography:
‘On 15 July 1842, Berkeley fought a duel with Captain Boldero MP, in Osterley Park, Middlesex. Their encounter arose out of some words uttered by Captain Boldero with reference to the queen, which Berkeley, regarding as disrespectful to the sovereign, immediately called upon him to retract. Each of them fired twice without effect. Once before Berkeley had taken part, as a second, however, not as a principal, in a hostile encounter of a less seemly character. This was when, on 3 August 1836, he guarded the door of a bookseller's shop at 215 Regent Street, London, while his brother Grantley Berkeley attacked James Fraser, the proprietor. Berkeley married twice; first, on 10 September 1839, Augusta Jones (d. April 1841), daughter of Sir Horace St Paul, bt, and widow of George Henry Talbot, half-brother of John, sixteenth earl of Shrewsbury; and secondly, on 27 August 1845, Charlotte, fourth daughter of General Denzil Onslow, of Stoughton, Huntingdonshire, and widow of George Newton, of Croxton Park, Cambridgeshire. Berkeley's daughter of his first marriage, Louisa Mary, married, on 3 April 1872, Major-General Gustavus H. L. Milman RA, and on 27 August 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's stepdaughter, Augusta Talbot (b. 1832?), the only surviving child of his first wife's first marriage, was a ward in chancery, and, on attaining her majority, was to come into possession of £80,000. On the death of her mother, nine years previously, she, being both a Roman Catholic and an heiress, was confided by the court of chancery to the guardianship of her near relations and co-religionists, the earl and countess of Shrewsbury, who in September 1850 had placed their ward in the convent in Taunton, Somerset. Berkeley learned soon afterwards that she was there not as a pupil but as a postulant who would in all probability take the veil, and 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 Augusta Talbot married, on 22 July 1851, the duke of Norfolk's younger brother, Lord Edward Fitzallan Howard, who eighteen years afterwards was summoned to the House of Lords as Lord Howard of Glossop. Berkeley's health declined as he approached his fiftieth birthday, and he went abroad in the hope of recovery. However, his condition worsened rapidly and he died on 1 July 1855 at Frankfurt am Main.’
[From an album compiled by Anna Maria Louisa Barnewall, daughter of Lord Trimleston.]