Theophila Berkeley, Lady Coke: a Learned Lady of the Jacobean Court

    The Berkeley family had a long tradition of producing well-educated women. Theophila Berkeley, daughter of Sir Thomas Berkeley, was one of the earliest we know about. Her mother was Elizabeth Carey, daughter and heiress of Lord Hunsdon, the patron of Shakespeare's theatre company, and Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream to celebrate the Carey-Berkeley wedding in 1595. It is said that Elizabeth Carey, whose godmother was her father's cousin Queen Elizabeth I, was very accomplished and owned "thousands of books". [1]

   Theophila, born on December 13th 1596, spent much of her childhood as a companion of James I's daughter Princess Elizabeth at Coombe Abbey (the house that later came into the possession of the Craven family). The royal household must have had the best tutors as Theophila was able to read French, Italian, Latin and Greek.

   From a painting by Kityff (1671) at Berkeley Castle, permission of the Earl of Berkeley.

Theophila was one of the most admired women of her time and over the years many poems were addressed to her. Some of the earliest were composed by her younger brother George, and they were preserved in a manuscript collection of contemporary verse compiled by his tutor Henry Stanford.[1] 

  George's first poem written in 1610, when he was nine years old, is evidently a birthday wish, and reveals that he was already getting a classical education:-

Sibylla's time I wish you sister dear,
That you may see full many and merry a year,
My love to you shall alway last,
Though I of Lethe brook should taste.

The next, dated 1612, when he was eleven years old, runs:- 

Deare sister I this New Year's tyde do wish to you such hap,
As flatt'ring nurse to tender childe when she feeds him with pap,
A healthfull, able body and a virtuous minde and true,
And coffers which are stuffed with store of riches of Peru,
And husband you a mother make of many a pretty boy,
Who may procure their countryes good and eke their parents' joy.
Long life and many a happy day, and when death stops your breath,
Your patience, faith and virtue may still triumph ouer death.
These wishes I do send to you as heralds of my heart,
I vow to love you and therefrom my mind shall never start [i.e. move or stir].

  The sentiments are conventional but poignant when we reflect that brother and sister probably saw each other rarely, as she was being brought up at Coombe Abbey while he was mostly at Berkeley Castle or at the Carey household in London.

   Henry Stanford addressed some verses to Theophila Berkeley to accompany his New Year's gift to her in 1612, a book written in French. Stanford's poem is an extravagant compliment to her learning, comparing her to both the Graces and the Muses of classical mythology.

For new yeares guift accept this little booke,
Fayre Nymphe although it make no show of price,
No doubt I make you daign ther on to looke,
For you in wit with mother sympathize.
Here Bertas doth in sugar'd verse indight
The rarest works of God's Creation.
His verse and language surely will delight
And profit yield, with virtuous contentation.
As I from cradle you have wished well
So do I now, and will continue ever.
Proceed in virtue wherein you excel,
And in your studies fear not to persever.
No Ornament can better fit a Grace
Than 'mongst the Muses for to haue a place.

  It is rather a fine poem, throwing in a tribute to Theophila's mother too. The book he presented her with was La Semaine (1578), a poem about the creation of the world, by Guillaume de Salluste, seigneur du Bartas. If she was able to read - and enjoy - this, then Theophila certainly was a good scholar.

  In February 1613 Theophila was a bridesmaid at the wedding of Princess Elizabeth to the Elector Palatine of the Rhine. Soon afterwards she became ill, perhaps from the same illness that caused the death of Prince Henry, heir to the throne, the previous January, as George's next poem to her lamented:-

Sweet sister, you are rich in golden gifts of grace,
In beauty also you are rich, and lineaments of face,
In birth and kindred rich, in wit and learning rare,
Oh, would to God I worthy were with you ther to compare.
In flower of youth you're rich, in tall and goodly stature,
In temperance and modesty and gentleness of nature.
It grieves me for to see you, riche in so great store
Of other things but state of health, this tyme to be so poore.
Modern physicians say, as Chapman doth relate,
The ague from Hungary came which gave our Prince the mate,
Let that be as it may, if I my mind may tell,
I think these pale diseases came from ugly pit of hell,
And thither they return, if patients will use glee
For Diet: quiet, merry mind doth make them hence to flee.
Procure for to be strong, and love me as before,
And I a brother kind will be, both now and ever more.

Theophila recovered and later the same year married Robert Coke, son of Sir Edward Coke, King James I's Lord Chief Justice. The wedding was celebrated on August 12th 1613, at Berkeley Church, near her family home. It is said that Theophila's father was so happy about it that when Henry Briggs, his chaplain who was performing the ceremony, asked, "Who giveth this woman to be married to this man?" her father replied, "That do I, and with right good heart." However, this must have been her grandfather, because her father Sir Thomas, died in 1611, aged only 36, predeceasing his own father, who died in November 1613.

   The young couple's first marital home was Caludon Castle, near Coventry, a late Elizabethan mansion where Theophila's great-grandmother, Anne, Lady Berkeley, had spent her later years. 

     

    Robert became an MP for Coventry and was knighted. His weakness was that he was a spendthrift - he ran up large debts, much to the dismay of his father. Despite this, and the fact that both their children died in infancy, the Cokes' marriage seems to have been a very happy one.

   Many books owned by Theophila survive. There is an edition of Chaucer's complete works, auctioned at Sotheby's, inscribed on its title-page, "Theo. Coke", i.e. Theophila Coke (1596-1643); [2]

   Another book that was dedicated to her suggests she may have had Catholic tendencies:  

The Femall Glory: or, the Life and Death of our blessed Lady, the holy Virgin Mary, Gods owne immaculate Mother. Lond. 1635, small 8vo. Dedicated to the Lady Theophila Coke. [4]

   Apparently Theophila reproved the author for comparing her to the Virgin Mary. 

   When her mother died in 1634, Theophila inherited Durdans, an old Tudor house near Epsom in Surrey, which Lady Berkeley had bought in 1617. The Cokes were very pleased to have this spacious home near to, but not in, London. They greatly enlarged the house, adding grander reception rooms, a gallery and formal gardens, intending it for the entertainment of King Charles I. He never went there, though Charles II would do so much later.[5]

Durdans, in the early 17th century.

   Theophila was said to delight in gardens, and to have rare taste in architecture, designing an admirable private chapel at Durdans (another detail that suggests possible Catholic leanings).

    There was a performance of Beaumont and Fletcher's tragi-comedy Philaster in the early 1640s at Durdans, with Samuel Pepys, then still a boy, playing the heroine, Arethusa. Pepys's uncle worked for the Cokes as an agent, which is how they recruited the future diarist. Pepys was born in 1633, so assuming this performance took place before the Civil War and during Theophila's lifetime, he cannot have been more than nine years old.

  When the Civil War broke out in 1642, Sir Robert Coke fought on the Royalist side. Before long he was captured and held in the Tower of London. His wife contrived to visit him there, but in 1643 she fell ill of smallpox (possibly contracted in the unhealthy surroundings of the Tower) and died. Edward Salmon, a lecturer at Cambridge and friend of the Coke family, wrote two Elegies in her memory, one of which is entitled “Pastoral Elegy on the death of the noble, learned and most religious lady, Lady Theophila Coke, who died the beginning of this Spring, 1643.” It observes,

Some glory in their ancestors, thy Grace
Did add Nobility to Berkley’s race,
Thy Virtue struggled to outshine thy Birth,
Ordained by Heaven to cheare the drooping           Earthe.

He called her "as sweet a Lady as e’er the sunbeams saluted," and said she was known by a classical Greek epithet meaning "the pre-eminent, outstanding lady". [6]

   There are two portraits of Theophila in existence, one preserved at the Coke family home of Holkham, and the other at Berkeley Castle. 

   Theophila died at The Durdans, and is buried in Epsom Church. She left her valuable collection of books to her husband, who left it to her nephew, George, Lord Berkeley, on his death he bequeathed it to Sion College. He also named his own daughter Theophila, as a compliment to his sister.

[1] Smyth, The Berkeley Manuscripts: The Lives of the Berkeleys, Lords of the Honour, Castle and Manor of Berkeley, in the County of Gloucester, from 1066 to 1618, 1883 (2:918).

[2] MS in Cambridge University library. (Item 93 : 13-14) . The poems have been edited by Steven W. May and published as Henry Stanford's Anthology: An Edition of Cambridge University Library Manuscript Dd. 5.75, by Garland Publishing, in 1988. 

[3] https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2022/books-manuscripts-from-medieval-to-modern/chaucer-the-workes-london-1598-contemporary-calf

[4] Bibl. Anglo-Poet. 722, 21. 12s. 6d. Heber, pt. vi. 118. Bliss, June, 1858, 11. 68. LARGE PAPER, the dedication copy, with Lady Coke's autograph, morocco, tooled, Sotheby's, Dec. 4, 1861,

[5] https://eehe.org.uk/29595/durdans/

[6] From Chief Justice Coke: His Family & Descendants at Holkham, p.52 — “ Hints for Verse upon the Death of the most accomplished Lady Theophila Coke, only sister to Lord George Berkeley, one of the ancientest extracts of Nobility in these Kingdoms: Her Father son and heir of the old Lord Berkeley of Berkeley in Gloucestershire, her Mother, the immediate heire-general of Queen Elizabeth : her ancestor having married the sister of Q. Ann of Bulloigne: her Vertue so inexpressible that poetry cannot flatter her: while as Wife, as the Lady of a Family or otherwise (only not fruitful) every way Heroine : so admired by all those knowing her, that she was deservedly called the Lady Kat’ exoche. Skilled in no lesse than foure Tongues, besides her Mother, French, Italian, Latin, Greek, and yet which is most admirable, known by none, but by those who desired to be instructed from her. . . . There was One, her Goodness, instead of Rewarding, slighted him, for being so bold in an Epistle dedicatory to compare her to the Blessed Virgin. Think what you can of Woman, under that pitch, and you do but reach her. She was the sole Comforter of Sir Robert Coke, her husband, now a loyal prisoner in the Tower. She died of the small-pox at the age of forty-five, [inaccurate] being as sweet a Lady as e’er the sunbeams saluted. She miscarried of two children, the one a male, the other a female, Nature perhaps being unwilling to communicate such goodness as might have been derived from her, lest thereby she might have spent her stock, and become a bankrupt to future ages. . . . She was born on St. Lucy’s Day, the shortest of the year, educated and brought up with the Queen of Bohemia. She delighted in Gardens and was rarely Judicious in Architecture, in which, if she had come sooner to affluence in estate, she had bestowed more; She built and adorned the neatest chapel e’re I saw in a private family.”