Barbara Berkeley, Viscountess Fitzhardinge

Barbara Berkeley, Viscountess Fitzhardinge (née Villiers; c. 1654 – 19 September 1708) was a lady-in-waiting to Queen Anne of Great Britain and governess to Prince William, Duke of Gloucester.[2] Her sister Elizabeth Villiers (later Countess of Orkney) was the acknowledged mistress of William III of England from 1680 to 1695.

Barbara (left) playing cards with her closest friend, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, by Sir Godfrey Kneller, c. 1702[1]

Born to Colonel Sir Edward Villiers of Richmond and Lady Frances Howard (a descendant of John Howard, 1st Duke of Norfolk), Barbara became a maid of honour to the princesses of York before Mary married William in 1677. Instead of accompanying her sisters Anne, Katherine and Elizabeth to The Hague, Barbara remained in England to join Anne's household, attracting the companionship of Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, and invoking a sense of jealousy and rage within their royal mistress, Queen Anne.[1] Naturally ambitious like the rest of her family, Barbara mixed scintillating wit with devious deception in order to promote dissatisfaction against the Churchills, who came to abhor the reign of William III and Mary II (1689–1702).

Barbara was thought to be a secret Jacobite.

Issue

Barbara married John Berkeley, 4th Viscount Fitzhardinge of Berehaven (1650 – 19 December 1712). They had two daughters, neither of whom inherited their father's title:

Notes
  1. Field, Ophelia. The Favourite: Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2002. (ISBN 0-340-76808-8), pp. ix and 73.
  2. Exhibition of the Royal House of Guelph, Harvard University. 32044012939096X, p. 3.
  3. Burke, John Evelyn. A General and heraldic dictionary of the peerage and baronetage of the British Empire, Volume 1. London: H. Colburn and R. Bentley, 1832, p. 287.

Further reading
  • Hamilton, Elizabeth. The Illustrious Lady: A biography of Barbara Villiers, Countess of Castlemaine and Duchess of Cleveland Readers Union, 1981. (ASIN: B0007B1JXY)
gollark: Try not alcoholing.
gollark: There's no literal Cartesian theatre going on where it has to rotate the image again to project it onto our consciousness.
gollark: I don't think that particularly matters. We define our perceptual up and down and such based on vision.
gollark: Also merging together information from saccades (rapid eye movements to look at more of a scene with the fovea) and correcting for orientation/vibrations/movement.
gollark: And the brain does a lot of fancy stuff to pretend to have a coherent visual field despite the blind spot and the fact that only a small region (the fovea) can actually sense color well.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.