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Robert Edward Petre, 9th Baron Petre (March 1742 in Ingatestone Hall – 2 July 1801) was a British peer. Lord Petre was the son of Robert Petre, 8th Baron Petre (1713–1742), a renowned horticulturist, and Lady Henrietta Anna Mary Barbara Radclyffe (1714–1760), daughter of the 3rd Earl of Derwentwater (1689–1716) who was the grandson of Charles II by his mistress Moll Davis. Lord Petre was a member of the English Roman Catholic nobility, a philanthropist and responsible for employing James Paine to design a new Thorndon Hall and a house in Mayfair. ==Life== Lord Petre was born just three months prior to the death of his father, at the age of 29, from smallpox. He was born to an inheritance of exceptional wealth and influence. The claim that he was one of the dozen richest men in the Kingdom is probably fanciful but his estates were certainly extensive. His ancestor, Sir William Petre, had acquired some , chiefly in Essex and the West Country. To this Sir William’s son, John, added a further . Furthermore, his grandmother was Catherine Walmesley, who had inherited the whole of her family’s large estates in Lancashire and Surrey which, at the time of her marriage, were reputed to be worth £7,000 per annum. There is a disappointing lack of personal writings and correspondence in the Petre family archive and so it is difficult to form a rounded impression of the man; legend has it that, in later life, he himself destroyed many of his personal papers. They bore witness to the acrimonious disputes which he was to have with the Roman Catholic hierarchy and which, in retrospect, he came to deeply regret. It is clear he was no great intellect; one now anonymous commentator is particularly unkind; ''His literary equipment fell short even of the moderate standard then expected of a nobleman and his generous patronage of men of letters and art seems to have been dictated by other considerations than intellectual sympathy.'' On the other hand, as Charles Butler, lawyer and Secretary of the Catholic Committee of which Robert was Chairman, wrote in his obituary, ''“All his actions were distinguished by rectitude, openness and dignity”.'' Indeed, from the events of his life emerges a picture of a man of great energy, determination and perseverance with a keen sense of patriotism and duty. Robert’s dogged resolve may well have sprung from a stoicism in face of adversity learnt from those under whose tutelage he was brought up, if it is not too extravagant so to characterize an environment as privileged as his. Not only did his mother lose her husband only months after Robert’s birth but both her father and her uncle, executed for their parts in the Jacobite Uprisings of 1715 and 1745 respectively, and also her brother, killed in a riding accident, had died prematurely. Robert’s grandmother, the redoubtable Catherine Walmesley, was also no stranger to tragedy. Both her parents had died by the time she was four and, during the following nine years, her brother and her two sisters succumbed. She had married the 7th Lord Petre but, a year later, he too died of smallpox and she was left, at the age of barely 15, a widow with an infant son. She subsequently married Charles, Lord Stourton but, when he died in 1753, she became a widow for the second time. As mentioned above within a few months of Robert’s birth, his father died of smallpox at the age of 29 and so Robert succeeded as the 9th Lord Petre. As a minor, he remained, of course, under the guardianship of his mother and it was only as a result of her death in 1760 that he was permitted to take over his estates at the age of eighteen. Some additions were made to the original Ginge Petre Charity endowment: for example, a further £48 was settled in 1778 from various properties in the area. Chapman and Andre’s Atlas of Essex (1777) shows the almshouses as “the Workhouse”, and this seems to have been one of their functions, at least until the 1830s. Robert also devoted himself to a number of other enterprises. He made annual charitable donations of £500, chiefly to Roman Catholic priests and religious orders both here and on the Continent. He was the first Chairman of the Chelmer and Blackwater Navigation, which was responsible for building the canal connecting Chelmsford to the sea near Maldon. He was a loyal and patriotic man, for at the end of the century, when we were at war with France, he raised a company of volunteers from the districts of Ingatestone, Brentwood, and Billericay; the banners of these volunteers were still hanging in Ingatestone Church in 1848. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Robert Petre, 9th Baron Petre」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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