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 of Copies, for the Encouragement of Learning. By R. H.’ The encouragement that Carte received in preparing his History was extraordinary. In October 1738 he says, in a letter to Dr. Zachary Grey, that he already had 600l. a year promised for seven years; that he hoped fifteen Oxford colleges would subscribe (apparently only five did so, see the dedication of vol. i.), and that then he shall try Cambridge. He had, in April of that year (1738), published ‘A General Account of the Necessary Material for a History of England, the Society and Subscriptions proposed for the Expenses thereof, and the Method wherein Mr. Carte intends to proceed in carrying on the said Work,’ 4to. Later in the same year he went to Cambridge to seek for materials and help. Cambridge is not mentioned in his dedication, and therefore he probably got nothing there of material aid. He was the guest of Sir John Hynde Cotton at Madingley, whose great collection of pamphlets of the period of the great rebellion he reduced to order, and had bound in volumes. The next six years (1738–44) were almost incessantly employed in pushing on his work, much of which he carried on in Paris, where he diligently searched the royal archives, then under the care of the Abbé Sullier. This work was varied as usual with controversy. In 1741–2 he wrote a thick pamphlet of 214 pages, 8vo, in answer to ‘A Letter of a Bystander to a Member of Parliament,’ which he called ‘A Full Answer to a Letter of a Bystander, wherein his False Calculations and Misrepresentations of Facts in the Time of Charles II are refuted. By R. A., Esq.’ This was answered again by a ‘Gentleman of Cambridge’ in a ‘Letter to Mr. Thomas Carte,’ London, 1744, in which the writer says: ‘You were so rash as to appear yourself publicly in the support of it at an eminent coffee-house; you there declared you were Mr. Carte, the author of the “Full Answer to the Bystander,” and that you came there on purpose to vindicate it from any observations. You know what followed. You were driven thence with a birchen rod, and abandoned the place with shame and confusion.’ The ‘birchen rod’ refers to arguments of Dr. Thomas Birch, who, among his many books, had written on Charles I and Ireland in opposition to Carte. Carte replied again in ‘A Full and Clear Vindication of A Full Answer to a Letter from a Bystander.’ The year 1744 was again a period of some trouble to Carte. In March he had a lawsuit with his brother Samuel and sister Sarah about a clause in his father's will which removed him from his executorship and inheritance in case he were troubled by the government. He, however, won his cause (, Reports, iii. 174). Shortly afterwards, upon an alarm of a French invasion to support a Jacobite rising, the Habeas Corpus Act was suspended, and Carte was arrested. He was not long retained in custody, being released on 9 May, ‘confined,’ he said, ‘for he knew not what, and released he knew not why.’ His subscriptions, however, went on. In July the common council of London voted him 50l. for seven years, for which, according to Horace Walpole, who ridicules the proceeding, four aldermen and six common-councilmen were to inspect his materials and the progress of his work (Letters to Sir H. Mann, i. 381). In October the Goldsmiths', Grocers', and Vintners' Companies gave 25l. each for seven years. In August (1744) he printed ‘A Collection of the several Papers published by Thomas Carte, in relation to his History of England,’ 8vo. In 1746 he issued proposals for printing his History; and the first volume appeared in December 1747. 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 the 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 1750 and 1752, and a fourth in 1755, after his death. Carte died of diabetes on 2 April 1754, at Caldecott House, near Abingdon, and was buried in the church of Yattendon, near Newbury, on 11 April. He was a man of mean appearance, but of cheer-