Charles Petrie (historian)

Sir Charles Alexander Petrie, 3rd Baronet (28 September 1895 - 13 December 1977) was a popular historian. Of Irish lineage, but born in Liverpool, he was educated at Oxford, and in 1927 succeeded to the family baronetcy.

He is known for his interest in royalism and Jacobitism, and particularly for his 1926 essay in counterfactual history, If: A Jacobite Fantasy. Several of his books deal with Charles I's government, towards which he was broadly sympathetic. He published biographies of three Spanish kings: Philip II, Charles III, and Alfonso XIII, as well as one on Philip II's half-brother Don John of Austria.

In the 1930s Petrie flirted with the far right. He attended the 1932 Volta Conference of fascists and sympathisers. His 1933 book Mussolini, laudatory on the whole, was published in German in Leipzig. He joined in 1934 the January Club of supporters of Oswald Mosley. At the same time he remained publicly hostile towards Nazism troughout,^[1] and his later view of Mosley, as expressed in his 1972 memoir A Historian Looks at his World, was thoroughly unflattering.

Among Petrie's journalistic posts was that of literary editor for the generally conservative New English Review. He supported, with reservations, General Franco, and was a friend of a leading pro-Franco diplomat, the 17th Duke of Alba. Along with NER editor Douglas Francis Jerrold, Petrie formed in 1937 a group concerned to put the Nationalist case on the fighting in the Spanish Civil War. After 1945 he edited the Household Brigade Magazine, and wrote regularly for the Illustrated London News, in addition to being co-editor (with Jerrold) of the New English Review's short-lived successor, English Review Magazine.

During the late 1930s Petrie was a supporter of Neville Chamberlain, though subsequently he was an adherent of Winston Churchill. In 1941 he attempted unsuccessfully to be adopted as Conservative Party candidate for Dorset South. He was rejected, according to Andrew Roberts in Eminent Churchillians, because he was too closely identified with appeasement.

Works

• The History of Government (1929)
• The Jacobite Movement (1932)
• Monarchy (1933)
• The Stuart Pretenders-A History of The Jacobite Movement, 1688-1807 (1933)
• Mussolini (Leipzig, 1933) in German
• The History of Spain (1934) with Louis Bertrand
• Spain (1934)
• The Letters Speeches and Proclamations of King Charles 1 (1935)
• The Four Georges A Revaluation of the Period From 1714-1830 (1935)
• William Pitt (1935)
• Walter Long and his times (1936)
• Lords of the Inland Sea: A Study of the Mediterranean Powers (1937)
• Bolingbroke (1937)
• The Stuarts (1937)
• The Chamberlain tradition (Right Book Club 1938)
• The Life and Letters of The Right Hon. Sir Austen Chamberlain K.G., P.C., M.P: 2 volumes (1939/1940)
• Joseph Chamberlain (1940)
• Louis XIV (1940)
• Twenty years' armistice-and after : British foreign policy since 1918 (Right Book Club 1940)
• When Britain Saved Europe (1941)
• George Canning (1946)
• Diplomatic history, 1713-1933 (1947)
• The Private Diaries (March 1940 to January 1941) of Paul Baudouin (1948) translator
• Earlier diplomatic history, 1492-1713 (1949)
• The Jacobite Movement. The First Phase 1688-1716. London: Eyre, 1948
• The Jacobite Movement. The Last Phase, 1716-1807.(1950)
• Chapters of Life (1950)
• The Duke of Berwick and His Son; Some Unpublished Letters and Papers (1951)
• Monarchy in the Twentieth Century (1952)
• The Marshal Duke of Berwick ; The Picture of an Age (1953)
• Lord Liverpool and his Times (1954)
• The Carlton Club (1955)
• Wellington (1956)
• The powers behind the Prime Ministers (1958)
• The Jacobite Movement (1958) revision
• Daniel O'Conor Sligo: His Family and His Times (1958)
• The Spanish Royal House (1958)
• The Victorians (1960)
• The Modern British Monarchy (1961)
• King Alfonso XIII and His Age (1963)
• Philip II of Spain (1963)
• Scenes of Edwardian Life (1965)
• Don John of Austria (1967)
• Great Beginnings In The Age Of Queen Victoria (1967)
• The Letters of King Charles I (1968)
• The Drift to World War, 1900-1914 (1968)
• King Charles III of Spain: An Enlightened Despot (1971)
• A Historian Looks at His World (1972)
• The Great Tyrconnel: A Chapter in Anglo-Irish Relations (1972)
• King Charles, Prince Rupert, and the Civil War: from original letters (1974)

References

• Kidd, Charles, Williamson, David (editors). Debrett's Peerage and Baronetage (1990 edition). New York: St Martin's Press, 1990.
• Leigh Rayment's Peerage Page

Notes

1. ^ Richard Griffiths, Fellow Travellers of the Right (1980), p. 41.