"CARTE," says Mr. Hallam, "is the most exact historian we have;" and
Daines Barrington prefers his authority to that of any other, and many
other writers confirm this opinion. Yet had this historian been an
ordinary compiler, he could not have incurred a more mortifying fate;
for he was compelled to retail in shilling numbers that invaluable
history which we have only learned of late times to appreciate, and
which was the laborious fruits of self-devotion.
Carte was the first of our historians who had the sagacity and the
fortitude to ascertain where the true sources of our history lie. He
discovered a new world beyond the old one of our research, and not
satisfied in gleaning the _res historica_ from its original writers--a
merit which has not always been possessed by some of our popular
historians--Carte opened those subterraneous veins of secret history
from whence even the original writers of our history, had they
possessed them, might have drawn fresh knowledge and more ample
views. Our domestic or civil history was scarcely attempted till Carte
planned it; while all his laborious days and his literary travels on
the Continent were absorbed in the creation of a _History of England_
and of a _Public Library_ in the metropolis, for we possessed neither.
A diligent foreigner, Rapin, had compiled our history, and had
opportunely found in the vast collection of Rymer's "Foedera" a rich
accession of knowledge; but a foreigner could not sympathise with the
feelings, or even understand the language, of the domestic story of
our nation; our rolls and records, our state-letters, the journals of
parliament, and those of the privy-council; an abundant source of
private memoirs; and the hidden treasures in the state-paper office,
the Cottonian and Harleian libraries; all these, and much besides, the
sagacity of Carte contemplated. He had further been taught--by his own
examination of the true documents of history, which he found preserved
among the ancient families of France, who with a warm patriotic
spirit, worthy of imitation, "often carefully preserved in their
families the acts of their ancestors;" and the _tresor des chartes_
and the _depot pour les affaires etrangeres_ (the state-paper office
of France),--that the history of our country is interwoven with that
of its neighbours, as well as with that of our own countrymen.[78]
Carte, with these enlarged views, and firm with diligence which never
paused, was aware that such labours--both for the expense and
assistance they demand--exceeded the powers of a private individual;
but "what a single man cannot do," he said, "may be easily done by a
society, and the value of an opera subscription would be sufficient to
patronise a History of England." His valuable "History of the Duke of
Ormond" had sufficiently announced the sort of man who solicited this
necessary aid; nor was the moment unpropitious to his fondest hopes,
for a _Society for the Encouragement of Learning_ had been formed, and
this impulse of public spirit, however weak, had, it would seem,
roused into action some unexpected quarters. When Carte's project was
made known, a large subscription was raised to defray the expense of
transcripts, and afford a sufficient independence to the historian;
many of the nobility and the gentry subscribed ten or twenty guineas
annually, and several of the corporate bodies in the city honourably
appeared as the public patrons of the literature of their nation. He
had, perhaps, nearly a thousand a year subscribed, which he employed
on the History. Thus everything promised fair both for the history and
for the historian of our fatherland, and about this time he zealously
published another proposal for the erection of a public library in the
Mansion-house. "There is not," observed Carte, "a great city in Europe
so ill-provided with public libraries as London." He enters into a
very interesting and minute narrative of the public libraries of
Paris.[79] He then also suggested the purchase of ten thousand
manuscripts of the Earl of Oxford, which the nation now possess in the
Harleian collection.
Though Carte failed to persuade our opulent citizens to purchase this
costly honour, it is probably to his suggestion that the nation owes
the British Museum. The ideas of the literary man are never thrown
away, however vain at the moment, or however profitless to himself.
Time preserves without injuring the image of his mind, and a following
age often performs what the preceding failed to comprehend.
It was in 1743 that this work was projected, in 1747 the first volume
appeared. One single act of indiscretion, an unlucky accident rather
than a premeditated design, overturned in a moment this monument of
history;--for it proved that our Carte, however enlarged were his
views of what history ought to consist, and however experienced in
collecting its most authentic materials, and accurate in their
statement, was infected by a superstitious jacobitism, which seemed
likely to spread itself through his extensive history. Carte indeed
was no philosopher, but a very faithful historian.
Having unhappily occasion to discuss whether the King of England had,
from the time of Edward the Confessor, the power of healing inherent
in him before his unction, or whether the gift was conveyed by
ecclesiastical hands, to show the efficacy of the royal touch, he
added an idle story, which had come under his own observation, of a
person who appeared to have been so healed. Carte said of this unlucky
personage, so unworthily introduced five hundred years before he was
born, that he had been sent to Paris to be touched by "the eldest
lineal descendant of a race of kings who had indeed for a long
succession of ages cured that distemper by the royal touch." The
insinuation was unquestionably in favour of the Pretender, although
the name of the prince was not avowed, and was a sort of promulgation
of the right divine to the English throne.
The first news our author heard of his elaborate history was the
discovery of this unforeseen calamity; the public indignation was
roused, and subscribers, public and private, hastened to withdraw
their names. The historian was left forlorn and abandoned amid his
extensive collections, and Truth, which was about to be drawn out of
her well by this robust labourer, was no longer imagined to lie
concealed at the bottom of the waters.
Thunderstruck at this dreadful reverse to all his hopes, and
witnessing the unrequited labour of more than thirty years withered
in an hour, the unhappy Carte drew up a faint appeal, rendered still
more weak by a long and improbable tale, that the objectionable
illustration had been merely a private note which by mistake had
been printed, and only designed to show that the person who had been
healed improperly attributed his cure to the sanative virtue of the
regal unction; since the prince in question had never been anointed.
But this was plunging from Scylla into Charybdis, for it inferred
that the Stuarts inherited the heavenly-gifted touch by descent. This
could not avail; yet heavy was the calamity! for now an historian of
the utmost probity and exactness, and whose labours were never
equalled for their scope and extent, was ruined for an absurd but
not peculiar opinion, and an indiscretion which was more ludicrous
than dishonest.
This shock of public opinion was met with a fortitude which only
strong minds experience; Carte was the true votary of study,--by
habit, by devotion, and by pleasure, he persevered in producing an
invaluable folio every two years; but from three thousand copies he
was reduced to seven hundred and fifty, and the obscure patronage of
the few who knew how to appreciate them. Death only arrested the
historian's pen--in the fourth volume. We have lost the important
period of the reign of the second Charles, of which Carte declared
that he had read "a series of memoirs from the beginning to the end of
that reign which would have laid open all those secret intrigues which
Burnet with all his genius for conjecture does not pretend to account
for."
So precious were the MS. collections Carte left behind him, that the
proprietor valued them at 1500_l._; Philip Earl of Hardwicke paid
200_l._ only for the perusal, and Macpherson a larger sum for their
use; and Hume, without Carte, would scarcely have any authorities.
Such was the calamitous result of Carte's historical labours, who has
left others of a more philosophical cast, and of a finer taste in
composition, to reap the harvest whose soil had been broken by his
hand.