Andrew Ducarel

Andrew Coltée Ducarel (9 June 1713 – 29 May 1785) was an French-English antiquary, librarian, and archivist. He was also a lawyer practising civil law (a "civilian"), and a member of the College of Civilians. Early life and education Ducarel was born on 9 June 1713 in Paris. His parents, Jacques Coltée Ducarel (1680–1718) and Jeanne Crommelin (1690–1723), were Huguenots from Normandy. Jacques was a banker and merchant, who achieved ennoblement in 1713 with the title Marquis de Chateau de Muids. He died in 1718, just as a new wave of Huguenot persecution was beginning, and in 1719 Jeanne fled with her three infant sons first to Amsterdam, and then, in 1721, to England. They settled in Greenwich, where Jeanne married her second husband, Jacques Girardot, another Huguenot. In 1728, Andrew was sent to be educated at Eton. The following year he suffered a serious accident there in which he lost one eye: he spent three months under the medical care of Sir Hans Sloane. In 1731 he matriculated at Oxford from Trinity College, but transferred shortly afterwards to St John's. In 1734, while still undergraduates, he and his brother were naturalized. Ducarel graduated in 1738 with a Bachelor of Civil Law, and then moved to Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He was created Doctor of Civil Law in 1742, and graduated as a "grand compounder" on 21 October 1748. He was admitted a member of the College of Advocates at Doctors' Commons on 3 November 1743, and afterwards served as librarian there 1754–7, and as treasurer 1757–61. Legal and administrative career Ducarel was appointed "commissary or official" (i.e. an ecclesiastical judge) of the royal peculiar of St Katharine's by the Tower by Archbishop Thomas Herring in 1755; of the city and diocese of Canterbury by Archbishop Thomas Secker in December 1758; and of the sub-deaneries of South Malling, Pagham, and Tarring in Sussex, by Archbishop Frederick Cornwallis, on the death of Dr. Dennis Clarke, in 1776.