Renewing the Estate: Mansfield Park and the Berkeley Peerage Affair

Abstract

The Countess of Berkeley was big news in 1811. Her troubles were widely reported in the press, including in Jane Austen’s local paper, The Hampshire Chronicle, and in Leigh Hunt’s The Examiner.¹ Given its political interests, the Examiner was naturally drawn to the murky light into which one of Britain’s most illustrious aristocratic families was now thrown. Not only was the recently deceased Earl of Berkeley a useless drunken rake—a contemporary and confederate of the Prince Regent—but so was his eldest son, recently defenestrated from the House of Lords owing to his illegitimacy. On the death of his father, in 1810, the new Earl tried to take up his seat in the upper chamber having been already elected to the lower. But with the inconclusive results of the 1799 commission on the legality of the previous Earl’s 1785 marriage to the Countess, Mary Cole, fresh in its mind, the House of Lords took upon itself the defense of the rights of the fifth son, born in October 1796, and therefore a minor, but born also after the spring of the same year, when, indubitably, there had been a marriage between the Earl and Mary. The ensuing House of Lords inquiry, of 1811, was extensively covered in the press. The details were sensational, to say the least. While the Countess of Berkeley reluctantly gave evidence, and then, in support of the claims of her eldest son, a different story emerged from the accounts of former friends, servants, and confidants.