Thomas Carte: historian; born at Clifton, near Rugby, England, in April, 1686; educated at University College, Oxford. He became a priest and Jacobite. During the rebellion of 1715 a large reward was offered for his arrest, but he escaped to France. His chief work is a “History of England” (4 vols., 1747–55), which is prized for its facts, but is not well written. Many volumes of his manuscripts are preserved in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. Died April 7, 1754.
Personal
About thirty-two years of age, of a middle stature, a raw-boned man, goes a little stooping, a sallow complexion, with a full grey or blue eye, his eyelids fair, inclining to red, and commonly wears a light-coloured peruke.
Carte possessed a strong constitution, capable of incessant labor. He often wrote from early morning until night, taking only a cup of tea in the interval. Then he would eat heartily and enjoy his late dinner. He was gay and jovial, careless in his dress and appearance. In his writings there is little to be praised except their laborious accuracy, and the chief value of his collections and history consists in their having prepared the way for the more gifted Hume.
General
Your history [“Duke of Ormonde”] is in great esteem here. All sides seem to like it. The dean of St. Patrick’s (Swift) honours you with his approbation. Any name after his could not add to your satisfaction. But I may say, the worthy and the wise are with you to a man, and you have me into the bargain.
Carte’s “Life of the Duke of Ormonde” is considered as a book of authority; but it is ill written. The matter is diffused in too many words; there is no animation, no compression, no vigour. Two good volumes in duodecimo might be made out of the two (three) in folio.
Although the author died before the publication of the last volume, in 1755—intending to bring his work down to the Restoration—yet he lived long enough to witness its success, and the victory which he had obtained over its numerous opponents, and the shame attached to those who had withdrawn their original patronage. This work will live long and always be consulted.
Of borrowers from Carte, Hume is one of the largest, and would have acted with more justice by frank acknowledgments of his obligations. It is amusing to observe the cavalier manner in which he incidentally alludes to Carte in his notes as “a late author of great industry and learning, but full of prejudices and of no penetration.” The two authors occupy the same relative position as those of the laborious miner and the skilful polisher of the precious metal, which but for the assiduity of the former might still be undistinguished beneath the clod. But those who wish to gather all the gold must still revert to Carte.
It was not prepossessing in point of style; but it was so great an advance on previous histories, in the extent of the original material used and quoted, that it would have commanded success but for an unlucky note, inserted at p. 291, on a passage concerning the unction of our kings at their coronation. In this note (which his friends vainly pleaded was not by his hand), he asserted his belief in the cure of king’s evil in the case of a man named Christopher Lovel of Bristol, by the touch of the Pretender, or, as he called him, “the eldest lineal descendant of a race of kings who had, indeed, for a long succession of ages cured that disease by the royal touch.” The cure was said to have been effected at Avignon in November 1716. This raised a storm among the anti-Jacobite party. Carte was attacked in several pamphlets, and a writer in the “Gentleman’s Magazine” (1748, p. 13) professed to have investigated the case and found it, of course, entirely false. The man had been temporarily cured by the change of air and regimen, but had suffered a relapse on his return and died when on a second voyage. The practical result to Carte was the withdrawal of the grant from the common council of London by a unanimous vote on 7 April 1748 (Gent. Mag. 1748, p. 185), and an immediate neglect of his work. In spite of such discouragement he persisted in his enterprise, and the next two volumes appeared in 1752, and a fourth in 1755, after his death.
