Beverley was born about 1740 at his father’s plantation in Essex County, one of two sons and three daughters of William Beverley and Elizabeth Bland Beverley. His brother died young. His father took him to England in 1750 for his education and enrolled him in a school at Wakefield. When Beverley matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge, on May 19, 1757, he gave his age as seventeen. Earlier that year he was admitted to the Middle Temple to study law, and he was called to the bar on February 6, 1761. Beverley returned to Virginia almost immediately to manage the enormous estate he had inherited when his father died in 1756, and consequently he never practiced law.