Robert Petre, 7th Baron Petre

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The introduction to this article provides insufficient context for those unfamiliar with the subject. Please help improve the article with a good introductory style.

This article or section needs to be wikified to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please help improve this article with relevant internal links. (March 2008)

Robert, 7th Lord Petre (1689 – 22/03/1713).

Robert is said to have spurned wearing a wig in the conventional way, spending instead six hours every day dressing his own hair, very small for his age, yet a gay young spark. He caused an uproar of indignation and outrage in the family when, in 1711, being then only 20, in a freak of gallantry cut off a lock of hair from the head of a celebrated beauty, his distant cousin, Arabella Fermor, daughter of Henry Fermor of Tufton.

Alexander Pope, a friend of the family, was prevailed upon to write one of his humorous heroic verses about the incident in the hope that laughter would defuse the situation. The result was “The Rape of the Lock” (first published in ‘Lintot’s Miscellany’ in May 1712) which was an enormous public success, selling 3,000 copies in four days. The first version of the poem, however, so lampooned all those involved that it upset the Petres even more and Arabella, flattered to be cast as heroine by the distinguished Mr. Pope, is said to have become “very troublesome and conceited”. She became the wife of Francis Perkins of Ufton Court, near Reading, in about 1716 and died in 1738.

As far we can tell, Robert lived at Ingatestone but on the strength of his marriage on 1st March 1712, to Catherine Walmesley (1697 – 1785), an extremely rich Lancastrian heiress. She was an ardent Jacobite who had been considered as a possible spouse for Bonnie Prince Charlie and even James Stuart “the Old Pretender”, he intended moving back to Thorndon a plan frustrated by his death at 23 from smallpox on 22nd March 1713, leaving his 16-year-old wife pregnant. After Robert’s death, she married Lord Stourton in 1733. She was a woman of great charity and is said to have caused embarrassment to both families by cutting up her former husband’s parliamentary robes for distribution to the poor.

Peerage of England
Preceded by Thomas Petre, 6th Baron Petre	Baron Petre 1706–1713	Succeeded by Robert James Petre, 8th Baron Petre