CARVE, Thomas. [I] Itinerarium R.D. Thomae Carve Tripperariensis [sic], Sacellani maioris in fortissimâ iuxta & Nobillissima Legione Strenuissimi Domini Colonelli D. Walteri Deveroux sub Sac. Caesar Maiestate stipendia merentis cum Historiâ facti Butleri, Gordon, Lesly & aliorum. [II] Cui sub finem accedunt Vindiciae. In Momos Authoris. Item Paucola quaedam De Butleriana Prosapia. Two parts (of three) bound in one volume.

ONE OF THE GREATEST CLASSIC RARITIES OF IRISH HISTORY

Moguntiae [Mainz], Imprimebat Nicolaus Heyll, 1639; Moguntiae, Imprimebat Nicolaus Heyll, Sumpt. Margarethe Runkin / Vidue Bibliopol, 1641.16mo. pp. [28], 315 [1], (+ 2 blank leaves), [24], 370, [8] (+ 1 blank leaves). With a half-title. Bound by T. Aitken in full dark green morocco, covers framed by double gilt fillets, with inner fleurons. Spine divided into five compartments by five gilt raised bands, author and title in gilt direct in the second, the remainder tooled in gilt to a centre-and-corner design, board edges hatched in gilt, gilt turn-ins, cream endpapers. Armorial bookplate on front pastedown. Ex libris William O’Brien Milltown Park Trust, with bookplates. Old bookplate of Joannis Christophori, Reütter, Theol: Doct: & Dec: in Plättling, pasted on verso of titlepage. Marginal repair to three leaves of dedication in the first part. All edges gilt. A very good copy.
Sweeney 850. Walsh 91, 93.
Thomas Carve [Carew] (c.1590-1664), was born at Mobarnan, Fethard, Co. Tipperary. He was proud to claim lineage with his famous Anglo-Norman namesake who in the fifteenth century held high office in Munster. His sympathies were in many respects anti-Irish, and, though skilled in his native tongue, professed his preference for English. His early youth was spent among the Butlers, to whom, he says, he owed everything. Following his ordination for the diocese of Leighlin, he left Ireland around 1624 and served for four years as chaplain to Walter Butler, Colonel of the Irish and Scots regiment in the service of the Emperor Ferdinand II in the Thirty Years War. He returned to Ireland to visit his friends. In 1630 he rejoined Butler this time for two years, leaving around the time of the death of Gustavus Adolphus at the Battle of Lützen. On Butler’s death in the autumn of 1634 he became chaplain to his successor Col. Walter Devereux who was the honoured murderer of Wallenstein. Carew accompanied Devereux and his regiment throughout Germany and following Devereux’s death in 1640, he was appointed Chaplain General of all the English, Scots and Irish forces.
The first part, printed at Mainz in 1639, begins with his return from Ireland via London to Germany in 1630, includes his account of the assassination of Count Wallenstein, Duke of Friedland at the hands of Col. Devereux on 25 Feb, 1634. It continues with accounts of his travels with the army from the siege and capture of Augsburg, through Lorraine, Hesse, Saxony, Pomerania and Westphalia and concludes with an account of a visit with Devereux to a synagogue in Friedberg; the ‘Itinerary’ gives a curious description of the visit, and the insolent ejectment of Carew. In his dedication to the Earl of Ormonde, he states: “Not in the quiet chamber of study has it been composed, but beneath the tents of war, where my busy pen found no peace from the ominous clangour of the hoarse trumpet, and the loud roll of the battle-drum; where my ear was stunned by the dreadful thunder of the cannon, and the fatal leaden hail hissed round the paper on which I was writing”.
Its publication caused a storm among the Irish in Germany who did not wish that Carew, on the strength of a single allusion in St. Bernard’s Life of St. Malachy, should calumniate his country. There were letters, therefore, written to and of him (many of which he reprints), in which he was admonished to recant what he had said of Ireland; he had described the inhabitants of Connaught and Ulster as “barbarous and unmannerly dogs”. Lampoons against him were privately distributed amongst the Irish soldiery.
The second part, printed at Mainz in 1641 and dedicated to the Countess of Ormonde, continues with events in Europe in 1639-40 to the death of Devereux and includes a vindication of his own claims about the Irish (“a most truculent and ribald composition, only surpassed for coarseness of abuse by the ‘responsio’, which he brought out more than thirty years later” - Kerney) and concludes with an account of the Butler family. It was printed ‘Sumptibus auctoris’ (at the author’s expense) and without licence. Due to its historic rarity Michael Kerney, the brilliant young Irish scholar and assistant to Bernard Quaritch, the antiquarian bookseller, in 1859 edited a reprint of all three parts in an edition of 100 copies, plus 2 on vellum. As Kerney remarks: “Its scarcity is not the only value of Carew’s ‘Itinerary’; it contains important details regarding Wallenstein, the Civil War in England, and the general history of Christendom at the period; and all writers upon the Thirty Years’ War, who could produce a sight of it, have used it, though seldom with acknowledgement. It is styled a ‘curious and valuable work’ by Coxe in his ‘House of Austria’, and Harte’s ‘Life of Gustavus Adolphus’; indeed, the former says that everything in Harte’s work, as regards Wallenstein, is based almost exclusively on Carew. It contains a description of Ireland, and an account of London and its buildings, which are curious and interesting; and here and there is garnished with marvellous narratives, which are the more amusing that they are told in a spirit of entire belief.”
Provenance: Early inscription in Latin on titlepage. From the library of ‘Franciscan library of Dingolfing’, a town in Bavaria about 100 km north of Munich - (the Franciscan house there, which still exists, was founded in 1642.)