Sir George Carteret - Part 2

When we left Sir George Carteret’s story in Balleine’s Biographical History of Jersey, the year was 1661 and he had just been appointed Vice-Chamberlain of the King’s Household, a Privy Councillor, and Treasurer of the Navy with a house in Deptford Dockyard, as well as being elected M.P. for Portsmouth.

That part can be read here:

https://tonymusings.blogspot.com/2020/06/sir-george-carteret-part-1.html

And his part in the Royal African Company can be read here:

http://tonymusings.blogspot.com/2020/06/sir-george-carteret-and-royal-african.html

So what are we to make of Sir George?

To see of him simply as an investor in the slave trade and just to highlight that is to diminish his other activities and his other often dubious investments – he was clearly not someone who sought only one source of revenue. As Balleine says, “Wherever an investment looked promising, Carteret jumped at it, for acquisitiveness was one strongly marked feature in his character.”

As the Jersey Evening Post noted in 2010 (long before the statue was erected, or the controversy erupted about it): “It is dangerous to judge historical figures by contemporary values, but Sir George Carteret clearly had moral standards which would raise eyebrows today.”

When the statue of Sir George Carteret was erected, BBC news reported that the Constable, Mr Refault said Sir George is a role model for youngsters and should be recognised locally and nationally. I have to say that is something which is certainly not the case!!!

As a role model, his life leaves a lot to be desired, even leaving aside the issue of slavery. When it was mooted at one point (because of the Old Court House connection) that a statue of him should be at St Aubin, I was understandably cautious, because his privateering activities left a lot to be desired, as Balleine points out (see below)..

I understand that St Peter parish officials will be consulted by the Constable about adding a further plaque to the statue of Sir George Carteret to explain his connections with the slave trade.

I hope the plaque goes a bit further and also mentions that he was a seafaring adventurer, a valiant defender of Royalty, but also an investor in the slave trade and also an unscrupulous privateer. We need to see the whole man, warts and all. We should not airbrush him out of history, but we should make it clear his legacy was a mixed one. Statues are important signs of historical legacy, but they also need interpretation. But the history should not be buried away in books. Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

The one historical fact of note, and why the statue should definitely remain, is his renaming the colony state of New Netherland to New Jersey. That is what really made him significant, and yet it was in some ways the slightest of his achievements, which were both good and bad.

There are certain parallels between Sir George Carteret and Sir Walter Raleigh. Both were adventurers, out to seek fame and fortune, both supporters of the Royalty of their day (Charles II, Elizabeth I) and as well as being notable historical people, were also out to make money and curry the Royal favour. And both have a Jersey connection.

But Raleigh's ventures came to grief when he fell out of favour, and he ended up in the Tower. Sir George was more fortunate to have simply died of old age before a change of monarchist dynasty. He might well not have survived the accession of William of Orange to the throne. In their way, both were "Great Men". They left a mark on history. We have Elizabeth Castle and New Jersey. But that does not mean they were always good men.

This is the second section from Balleine’s Biographical Dictionary of Jersey.

CARTERET, SIR GEORGE (d. 1680), Baronet, Bailiff and Lieutenant-Governor, Treasurer of the Navy. (Though a De Carteret, he dropped the De, and his descendants followed his example: so this branch of the family will be entered as CARTERET.)

His main work for the next six years lay in the Navy Office, where he had as Clerk (or, as he would now be called, Permanent Under Secretary) Samuel Pepys; and the diarist gives many intimate pictures of him.

This appointment was for him a misfortune. Charles was desperately short of money. The seamen s pay was in arrears, and the ships were seething with discontent. The war with Holland was going badly, and the Dutch sailed up the Medway. For all this the blame was laid on Carteret’s shoulders. He was obviously a very rich man; and the suspicion spread that he was appropriating money belonging to the Fleet. .In 1666 Parliament called for the Navy Accounts, and appointed a Committee to examine them. Pepys unblushingly confesses that the Accounts had been cooked.

“Strange how we plot to make the charge of this war appear greater than it is”. But this was to squeeze more money out of Parliament, not to enrich the Treasurer. The real trouble was the extraordinarily intricate system of accountancy. The Committee could make neither head nor tail of it; nor could two Commissions of Accounts appointed afterwards. But eventually a Report was presented to the House that more than a million pounds could not be accounted for. Carteret protested that, so far from pocketing a penny, he had borrowed large sums on his own credit to keep the Fleet at sea; but in 1669 the Commons by 138 votes to 129 found him guilty, and deprived him of his seat in the House.

The Lords on the other hand decided that “Sir G. Carteret has done nothing contrary to his duty as Treasurer”. The recent publication of the Calendar of Treasury Books has at last settled this question. The Editor, with far more evidence before him than either Commission had, entirely acquits Sir George. “The lasting impression is of an active, capable, honest body of officials struggling vainly against absolutely insuperable financial difficulties. Carteret kept the Fleet at sea by raising yearly a quarter of a million on his own credit at a time when the Treasury Lords were unable to assist him, and when the Fleet would otherwise have had to be laid up”. The King knew this, and would not give him up to the wrath of the Commons. In 1666, when the trouble began, he allowed him to exchange posts with the Earl of Anglesey, and he became Receiver General and Treasurer of War for Ireland with an office in Dublin, a post he held till 1670. In 1673 he returned to the Admiralty as Commissioner.

Part of his wealth came from his colonial ventures. In 1665 he was one of eight Lords Proprietors to whom the King granted all the land between Virginia and Florida, a district to which had been given the name Carolina. In the following year he succeeded in establishing a New Jersey.

In 1664 he and Lord Berkeley presented a detailed Report to the King showing how easy it would be to seize the sparsely populated Dutch Colony of New Netherlands, which divided the two blocks of British colonies on the Atlantic coast. An expedition was sent, which occupied the district, and the two originators of the scheme were rewarded with the part which now forms the State of New Jersey. In 1665 the two Lords Proprietors appointed Philippe De Carteret (q.v.), a distant cousin of Sir George, as Governor and sent out the first shipload of colonists.

In 1670 the King made a grant to six Lords Proprietors, of whom De Carteret was one, of “all those islands commonly called the Bahama Islands with power to appoint Governors, make laws, wage wars, and transport colonists from England”.

Nor did he confine his interests to America In 1672 he became one of the Foundation Members of the Royal African Company, to which the King granted the whole West Coast of Africa from Sallee to the Cape in return for a payment of two elephants to be made whenever he visited those dominions.

Speculations nearer home also attracted him. In 1665 he obtained a licence to dig for coal in Windsor Forest. In the same year he secured permission to try to reclaim many thousands of acres of land in Connaught which were flooded every tide. On 1667 he became one of the farmers of the Chimney Tax; in the following year one of the farmers of the Import Duties into Ireland.

Wherever an investment looked promising, Carteret jumped at it, for acquisitiveness was one strongly marked feature in his character. He was a very shrewd business man. Hyde described him as “the most dexterous man in business I have ever known”: and Pepys said of him. “He is diligent, but all for his own ends and profit”.

When other Royalists lost their all, he came out of the Civil War with a very large fortune. This more unpleasant side of his nature is seen in his reluctance to help Castle Cornet, unless his hard-pressed fellow-Governor would pledge his estates to repay.

His privateering came so near to piracy that at last the King was forced to disown it. At the surrender of Elizabeth Castle he secured far better terms for himself than for his officers. He was allowed to retain his estates and to remove all his furniture and plate to France. They had to compound for their estates by paying two years income.

In his colonial ventures he was the worst type of absentee landlord, contributing nothing toward the colony, but merely drawing his rents.

Yet according to his lights he was no rogue. Pepys, who knew him as well as anyone, said, “I do take him for a most honest man”. He was a tremendous worker. Even his enemy Coventry confessed, “He is a man that do take most pains and gives himself the most to do business of any about the Court without any desire of pleasure or divertisement” (Pepys); and he retained even amid the revels of Whitehall much of his Jersey Puritanism: “He hath taken the liberty to tell the King the necessity of having at least a show of Religion in the Government and sobriety (ibid).

He was proud of his influence over Charles. I have almost brought things to such a pass”, he told Pepys, “as I am to do. that the King will not be able to whip a cat. but I will be at his tail”. Hyde called him the kindest of friends ; but he was a bad man to cross. Pepys described him as the “the most passionate man in the world”, and he was utterly merciless toward conquered foes. But the fine point in his character was his simple, undeviating, almost dog-like devotion to the Crown in its darkest days.

The King was about to raise him to the peerage: when he died on 13 Jan. 1680 at Hawnes, Bedfordshire, in the house he had bought. His widow was granted by royal warrant the same precedence that she would have had, if the promised creation had taken place; and his grandson and heir was creation Baron Carteret of Hawnes.

Sir George had thee sons Philippe (q.v.), James (q.v.), and George ; and five daughters, Anne, who was married to Sir Nicholas Stanning by the Bishop of London in the Savoy Chapel in 1662, Rachel, Elizabeth, Carolina, who married when fifteen Sir Thomas Scott, and Louise Margaretta, who when fifteen married Sir Robert Atkyns. It is noteworthy that in the Marriage Licences his daughters are called De Carteret.

In his will Carteret left to each parish in. Jersey a legacy for its poor. Portraits of Sir George and his wife by Lely are in St. Ouen’s Manor.