His father was great-grandson of St. Pol le Berthon, the only son of the Huguenot Marquis de Chatellerault, who escaped the persecutions that followed the revocation of the edict of Nantes in 1685.
Peter Berthon was an army contractor, who was reduced from wealth to comparative poverty by the wreck of a number of his ships and the end of the war on the downfall of Napoleon.
[3][4] In 1856, Berthon unsuccessfully trialled an india-rubber mortar raft off Southsea Castle, which split open and sank with the loss of one man drowned after firing the fifteenth round.
[6] A scathing editorial in 'The Engineer' issue of Friday January 18, 1856, read: "The Reverend Mr. Berthon offers himself as another example of the consequences of a man mistaking his vocation.
This gentleman resigns his incumbency that he may be the better enabled to turn all his attention to, and occupy all his time in, the construction of a mortar-raft, which failed altogether to withstand the concussion consequent upon the discharge of the ordnance it was intended to sustain.
War is, at best, in its strictest necessity, an appalling alternative; and from the preparation of its death-dealing machinery it seems peculiarly advisable and proper that the clergyman should keep his hands aloof."