Berwick, Edward (DNB00)
|←Bertram, Roger (fl.1264)||Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900, Volume 04
BERWICK, EDWARD (b. 1750), an Irish clergyman, sometime domestic chaplain to the Earl of Moira, and afterwards to the Marquis of Hastings. He was a native of county Down, and was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, where he gained a scholarship. Berwick was first brought into notice by his successful resistance to certain arbitrary regulations of the provost, who forbade the students to take a public part in electoral matters, whilst he expected them to vote for parliamentary candidates of his own nomination. The provost in question was Major Hely Hutchinson, M.P. for Cork, whose appointment was regarded by the younger members of the college as having a political object, and was resented by them on that ground. His dictatorial sway called forth a number of squibs, some of which (appearing between 1774 and 1776) were collected and edited by Robert Dodsley, under the title of 'Pranceriana.' In 1775 Berwick, in common with several other non-complying scholars, was deprived of his scholarship, ostensibly because he had failed to reside in college as regularly as the statutes demanded. He appealed to the visitors, who were the archbishops of Armagh and Dublin, and after a hearing, which occupied three days in the course of which Provost Hutchinson admitted that his 'unexceptionable character entitled him to every indulgence' he was reinstated. In reference to this trial one of the authors in Dodsley's collection writes:
Proud of imagin'd arbitrary sway,
Prancer long dream'd he safely might display
Imperial pow'r, accountable to none,
Fear'd like a German monarch on his throne.
Subservient to his will the board conven'd,
Submissive, loyal ; Berwick was arraign'd,
Condemn'd, depriv'd, a convict on record ;
Three rebels only disobeyed their lord.
But Robinson and justice interfer'd,
Revers'd the sentence, and the victim spar'd.
After this Berwick took orders and was presented by Bishop Percy, of Dromore, to the vicarage of Tullylish, in his native county; from whence, in 1795, he was preferred to the vicarage of Leixlip, county Dublin, and to the rectory of Clongish, county Longford, on the presentation of the Earl of Moira, who made him his domestic chaplain. In 1810 he published the 'Life of Apollonius of Tyana, from the Greek, with notes and illustrations,' and in the following year 'A Treatise on the Government of the Church.' In 1812 he dedicated to his patron (dating his preface from Esker, near Leixlip) the 'Lives of Marcus Valerius, Messala Corvinus, and Titus Pomponius Atticus.' His next patron, the Marquis of Hastings, commissioned him to edit a number of letters to and from Dr. Bramhall, primate of Ireland in the seventeenth century, which had come into the possession of the marquis through the Rawdon family. The preface to this work is dated 'Lurgan, 1 Jan. 1819.'
[Berwick's "Works, as cited; Pranceriana by the pseudonymous Nathan ben Saddi, Dublin, 1784; Biog. Diet, of Living Authors, 1816.]