John Bernardi

Major John Bernardi (1657 – 20 September 1736) was an English soldier, adventurer and Jacobite conspirator. Bernardi is best known for his involvement in an assassination plot against William III, and his subsequent forty-year imprisonment, without proper trial, in Newgate prison.

Early life

Bernardi was born in Evesham into a wealthy family of Genoese origin. His grandfather, Philip, and father, Francis, had both served as Resident of the Republic of Genoa, though after a disagreement the latter had retired permanently to Evesham.

John Bernardi's "restless" After some time staying with Sir Clement Fisher, he eventually came to enlist as a common soldier in William of Orange's service, later exchanging into English service and eventually rising to the rank of Captain due to his bravery and "uncommon talents".

Jacobitism

Bernardi married in 1677, to a Dutch woman from a respectably wealthy family. He was recalled from Holland in 1687 by James II, but at the 1688 Glorious Revolution he remained loyal to James and was therefore compelled to again leave the country, being given command of a Jacobite division on his arrival in France. and Biographia Britannica stated that out of clemency Blackbourn was subsequently moved to the more comfortable King's Bench Prison.

Bernardi and the other conspirators at Newgate were anonymously depicted, in complimentary terms, in the 1717 pamphlet The History of the Pressyard, supposedly written by an imprisoned participant in the Jacobite rising of 1715. Amongst other scenes "Mr. B[lackbour]n" and "the Major" (Bernardi) are shown earnestly discussing the tactical implications of the Battle of Preston, using a map drawn by Blackbourn. Their detention without trial was unprecedented in the period, and Bernardi was later suggested to have perhaps known some state secrets which, out of loyalty to James, he refused to divulge.

Life in prison

Bernardi's life in prison was made difficult by effects of the old wounds he had sustained in the 1670s. Bernardi also complained that his confinement in the "dismal and loathsome" gaol had cost him "above seven hundred pounds for his lodging". Surprisingly, however, in 1712 not only did he marry again in Newgate at the age of sixty-eight, to a woman around forty-eight years younger (his first wife having died many years before) but he and his new wife went on to have ten children. was said to have borne imprisonment with great constancy of mind and even published his autobiography, A Short History of the Life of Major Bernardi by Himself, regarded as fundamentally accurate if somewhat vain and boastful, in 1729. The autobiography includes an engraved portrait by Gerard Vandergucht after W. Cooper, as well as copies of his various petitions and those of his wife Abigail Bernardi.