Cardinal" (Mazarin), "lest the bait of those two islands, which the king could have put into his hands when he would, should tempt him to give his majesty any assistance. But the king was so strict and punctual in his care of the interests of England, when he seemed to be abandoned by it, that he chose rather to suffer those places of great importance to fall into Cromwell's power than to deposit them, upon any conditions, into French hands; which he knew would never restore them to the just owner, what obligation soever they entered into." Remembering the French subsidy and the sale of Dunkirk, we may take this assertion with a pinch of cautionary salt. It is evident, none the less, that the defence of Elizabeth Castle was the great achievement of Carteret's life, and the remembrance of it his chief consolation during his eight years of exile, except the hope of having his revenge upon the Puritans, which sustained those of the exiles who did not take to drink. Sir George gratified this aspiration to that degree that he was expelled from the House of Commons in 1669 for malfeasance in the office of treasurer of the navy, to which he had been reappointed after the restoration, in having paid money without warrant, presumably for those personal expenses of the merry monarch which would not bear audit. However that may be, it was natural enough that he should have remembered Elizabeth Castle in naming Elizabeth Town; and in that case the shire town of Union County owes its designation not to Lady Carteret at all, but to the Virgin Queen, in whose time Castle Elizabeth was built on the site of a ruined abbey, and in whose honor it was named.
The name of Carteret connects the history of New Jersey with general history in another way. The grandson, namesake, and successor of Sir George was created Baron Carteret, and it was his son John, Lord Carteret, and afterward Earl Granville, the rival of Walpole, "the rash and impetuous man of genius," the champion of the Pragmatic Sanction, who gained an ascendency over George II. as the only English statesman who could talk German or knew anything of Germany, who, although his ministry was thrust out of office after two days by "the Noodle of Newcastle," impressed contemporary observers so different as Horace Walpole and Lord Chesterfield as the greatest man of his time, and who, in our time, has excited the admiration of writers so wide apart as Carlyle and Macaulay.
In the province which he bought of the king and which his executors sold to the Quakers the name of Carteret scarcely survives, except in that of a street on Jersey Heights; nor is there anything left in Elizabeth Town to remind us of its founder or of his times. Unlike Bergen, Elizabeth has been in the direct line of progress, and has found better use for its land than to preserve upon it picturesque memorials of its early history. Sir George, indeed, never saw Elizabeth nor any other part of his purchase, having been represented in its government by "Honble. Capt. Phillip Carteret, Esq."
The political importance of Elizabeth Town was suspended with the change of the charter from proprietary to royal. The division under the proprietors into East and West Jersey was retained in so far that there were two capitals, one at Burlington for the West and one at Perth Amboy for the East, with an itinerant legislature and an absentee governor, who, being also Governor of New York, only visited New Jersey when he needed money for his personal expenses. This, the first royal governor, also connects the province with general history, for Edward Hyde, Viscount Cornbury, was a grandson of the great Earl of Clarendon, and so Queen Anne's own cousin. One can understand and sympathize with her majesty's anxiety to remove this "unspeakably unexemplary" kinsman of hers from court.
What murdered Wentworth, and what exiled Hyde,
By kings protected, and to kings allied?
Johnson inquires, in one of the most
