Elizabeth Carey was the only child of
George Carey, 2nd Baron Hunsdon, and
Elizabeth Spencer. Queen
Elizabeth I was one of her godmothers. Her childhood was divided between the
Hunsdon residence at
Blackfriars, London,
Carisbrooke Castle on the
Isle of Wight, and (from 1593) the manor of
West Drayton, Middlesex. She married
Sir Thomas Berkeley on 19 February 1596, probably at Blackfriars, when she was nineteen years old. Her family were patrons of
Shakespeare's theatre company, and her wedding has been put forward as one of the possible occasions when ''
A Midsummer Night's Dream'' was performed for the first time in public. On 5 January 1606, at the wedding festivities of the
Earl of Essex and
Lady Frances Howard, Elizabeth was one of the female dancers representing the "Powers of Juno" in
Ben Jonson's
masque Hymenaei: there is an extant portrait of her dressed in her masque costume. She bore her husband a daughter and a son: • Theophila Berkeley (1596–1643), who married
Sir Robert Coke. Theophila was educated "under the sole direction of her mother", and was later said to be fluent in French, Italian, Latin and Greek. •
George Berkeley, 8th Baron Berkeley (7 October 1601 – 10 August 1658), who was tutored by
Philemon Holland of
Coventry. George married Elizabeth Stanhope, the daughter of
Sir Michael Stanhope, by whom he had issue. Elizabeth and her husband circulated between Berkeley residences including New Park,
Gloucestershire,
Claverdon, Warwickshire (owned by her maternal family), and
Caludon Castle, near
Coventry (the last being the principal home of her father-in-law,
Henry, 7th Baron Berkeley, until his death in 1613). However, Sir Thomas was financially imprudent and ran up enormous debts. In a crisis of 1606–7, Elizabeth took over the management of his affairs (selling her own inheritance at
Tonbridge and
Hadlow, Kent, to minimise the burden); and in 1609 Sir Thomas signed a contract handing over all responsibility for household management to Elizabeth and the Berkeley family steward, John Smyth of
Nibley. When Sir Thomas died (aged 37) in 1611, she paid off the many outstanding debts. In 1618 she bought the estate of
Cranford,
Middlesex for the sum of £7,000 from the co-heirs of Sir Richard Aston. She also acquired the manor of Durdans, near Epsom, Surrey, which was settled on her daughter Theophila. In February 1622, she remarried Sir Thomas Chamberlain (or Chamberland), a
Justice of the King's Bench. When he died on 17 September 1625, her second husband bequeathed a generous £10,000 to her son from her first marriage. ==Learning and patronage==