(A second Devonshire candidate, Michael Jermyn, obtained an equal number of votes; the vice-chancellor gave his decision in favour of Carpenter.)
One of his pupils at the university was Sir William Morice, secretary of state 1660–68, a politician with religious views similar to his tutor's Calvinism.
His earliest work Philosophia libera triplici exercitationum decade proposita was an attack on Aristotelianism, and appeared at Frankfurt in 1621, under the pseudonym "N. C.
Three sermons entitled Achitophel, or the Picture of a Wicked Politician, preached to the University of Oxford and dedicated to James Ussher, appeared in 1627, 1628, 1629, 1638, 1638, and 1642.
The dedication by N. H. was to Thomas Winniffe, and asserts that but for a kinsman the manuscript might have been lost on the Dutch shores, as Carpenter's works on optics were in the Irish Sea.