suc. fa. 5 Jan. 1707 (a minor) as 7th Bar. PETRE
Never sat.
b. c. Mar. 1690, o. s. of Thomas Petre, 6th Bar. Petre, and Mary, da. of Sir Thomas Clifton, bt. of Lytham, Lancs. m. 1 Mar. 1712, (with £50,000) Catherine (d.1785), da. of Bartholomew Walmsley of Dunkenhalgh, Lancs. and Dorothy Smith, da. of John Smith of Crabbet, Suss. 1s. (posth.). d. 22 Mar. 1713.
The fortunes of the Petre family, once impoverished and distressed had substantially recovered by the time Robert Petre succeeded to the title. At his death his income from his Essex estates was variously estimated as between £4,000 and £6,000 a year plus approximately £2,000 from the western estates. Even after payment of his mother’s jointure of £1,000 a year he was a relatively wealthy young man.1
Little is known of his life except that his social circle consisted of members of families who were, like his own, prominent in the Catholic community. His charitable donations amounted to £1,000 a year and included donations to priests in England as well as to Catholic causes abroad.2 He was said to have been the original ‘advent’rous baron’ in Pope’s Rape of the Lock, but though he may once have been a suitor of Arabella Fermor, he actually married Catherine Walmsley, one of the richest heiresses of the day. Catherine Walmsley had inherited her fortune from her brother Francis. In addition to her portion of £50,000, paid in cash, she also brought lands worth £5,000 a year to the marriage.3
Petre died in March 1713 of smallpox, which was said to have been contracted at a celebration of his first wedding anniversary. Despite his wealth he had little opportunity to exercise any electoral influence and, as a Catholic, he was barred from the House of Lords. His own political views are unknown, but his mother and his wife were both Jacobite sympathizers. His widow was said to have offered £1,000 to the Jacobite cause in 1715 and at one stage was suggested as an appropriate wife for the titular James III.4 She eventually married as her second husband, Charles Stourton, 15th Baron Stourton. Her only child, Robert James Petre, was born three months after his father’s death and succeeded immediately as 8th Baron Petre.
R.P.