Modena, and thus began his intimate relations with James's family which remained unbroken till his death. Early in 1687 he was, with other Roman catholics, put into the commission of the peace (Luttrell, Relation of State Affairs, i. 392). At the Revolution he followed James to St. Germains; but he suffered no immediate loss, as his estate at West Harting was, at James's special request, exempted by William from confiscation. In 1696, however, on the discovery of the assassination plot, it was found that he had provided Sir George Barclay with a sum of money to purchase horses and arms. Caryll was attainted, and his estate was seized by the crown. His life interest in it was granted to Lord Cutts, but was redeemed by his nephew by payment of 6,000l. Caryll continued his services to Mary of Modena, and is said to have been appointed secretary of state to James in 1695 or 1696. After James's death in 1701, he was created by the Pretender Baron Caryll of Dunford, and became one of his secretaries of state, but apparently without salary (Egerton MS. 2517).
In 1700 he published anonymously an English version of the psalms: ‘The Psalmes of David, translated from the Vulgat,’ which was probably designed more particularly for the use of the Pretender's household. As a last glimpse of literary occupation, we have, in a letter of the queen, 19 May 1701 (Add. MS. 28224), a reference to his being busy with James's memoirs.
Caryll died on 4 Sept. 1711, and was buried in the church of the English Dominicans at Paris. A tablet was erected to his memory in the Scotch College (Sussex Arch. Soc. Collections, xix. 191), of which he was a benefactor. An epitaph on him was written by Pope, and sent to his heir and nephew, beginning with the lines:
A manly form; a bold, yet modest mind;
Sincere, though prudent; constant, yet resign'd;
Honour unchanged, a principle profest;
Fixed to one side, but mod'rate to the rest:
An honest courtier, and a patriot too;
Just to his prince, and to his country true.
These six lines Pope afterwards took for an epitaph to Sir William Trumbull, and remodelled the rest to suit the Countess of Bridgewater. Caryll married, early in life, Margaret, daughter and coheiress of Sir Maurice Drummond, who died in 1656. He left no issue.
[Dallaway's Sussex; Gordon's History of Harting (1877); Elwin's edition of Pope, vols. i. and vi.; Dilke's Papers of a Critic (1875), i. 123; Foley's Records of S. J., iii. 534; Caryll MSS. in the British Museum.]
CARYLL, JOHN (1666?–1736), the friend of Pope, was the nephew and heir of Lord Caryll [q. v.], being the son of Richard Caryll of West Grinstead, Lord Caryll's younger brother. He was born about 1666, and, after composition with Lord Cutts, the grantee of Lord Caryll's forfeited estate at West Harting, he succeeded in 1697 to that property, which he had managed since his uncle's retirement abroad, and in 1701, on his father's death, to another estate at West Grinstead. He seems to have resembled his uncle in an amiable disposition and literary taste, and was intimate with the literary men of his day, and especially with Pope. ‘Half a line in the “Rape of the Lock” has made his name immortal’ were true words when Macaulay wrote them, and since then the recovery of Pope's correspondence with Caryll has inseparably associated the two names.
Pope may have first made Caryll's acquaintance at the Englefields of Whiteknights, to whom he was related (Elwin, Pope, vi. 136). At Lady Holt, his house at West Harting, built in his uncle's time, and at West Grinstead Caryll received frequent visits from Pope and some from Gay. It appears too that Pope owed his first acquaintance with Steele to Caryll's introduction. Steele was acting as Lord Cutts's secretary when the negotiations for the redemption of the Harting property were in progress, and probably then first came in contact with Caryll (ib. 144 n.) Caryll's suggestion of the ‘Rape of the Lock’ is acknowledged in the opening of the poem:
This verse to Caryll, Muse, is due.
The hero of the piece was his cousin and neighbour, Lord Petre.
The correspondence between Pope and Caryll, lately published, covers the period from 1710 to 1735. Some of Pope's letters are addressed to Caryll's son, another John, who married Lady Mary Mackenzie, daughter of Lord Seaforth, and died young in 1718. Pope asked Caryll more than once during 1726 and 1727 for the return of his letters, but his correspondent was loth to comply, and the delay appears to have caused a coolness between the friends in correspondence. It was not till 1729 that Pope at length regained possession of the letters, and published garbled versions of them in his ‘Correspondence with his Friends’ [see Pope, Alexander]. Caryll's reluctance to give them up is marked strongly enough by his delay. The value that he set upon them, and doubtless the feeling that he might never see them again, induced him to take copies of them before they passed out of his hands.
