Vice Admiral Sir George Carteret, 1st Baronet (c. 1610 – 18 January 1680 N.S.), son of Elias de Carteret, was a royalist statesman in Jersey and England, who served in the Clarendon Ministry as Treasurer of the Navy. He was also one of the original Lords Proprietor of the former British colony of Carolina and New Jersey. Carteret, a town in New Jersey as well as Carteret County in North Carolina, both in the USA, are named after him. He acquired the manor of Haynes, Bedfordshire (alias Hawnes) in about 1667.

Early life

Carteret was the son of Elias de Carteret and Elizabeth Dumaresq of Jersey, who both died in 1640 (George dropped the "de" from his surname when he entered the English navy, concerned that it sounded too French). He was "bred for the sea" and served as an officer in various naval ships in the 1630s and commanded the Mary Rose before becoming Comptroller of the Navy in 1641.

As a result of his early life at sea, he received little or no formal education, and his embarrassing ignorance was a source of much ridicule in later life. Andrew Marvell mocked his poor command of English, and Samuel Pepys remarked that his ignorance of even the most basic Latin phrases would cause a schoolboy to be whipped; "such ignorance is not to be borne in a Privy Councillor', wrote Pepys severely.