Sir Charles Petrie, 3rd Baronet


Sir Charles Alexander Petrie, 3rd Baronet CBE was a British historian.

Early life

Born in Liverpool, he was the younger son of Sir Charles Petrie, 1st Baronet and his wife, Hannah. He was educated at the University of Oxford, and in 1927 succeeded to the family baronetcy.

Career

Petrie was known for his interest in royalism and Jacobitism, particularly for his 1926 essay in counterfactual history, If: A Jacobite Fantasy. It has Bonnie Prince Charlie go on from Derby to Oxford, but just as all seems lost, the Duke of Newcastle appears in haste to tell him that George II, the head of the House of Hanover dynasty, has fled back to Hanover and Newcastle belatedly declarie his loyalty. As a result, large elements of the people and army came over to the Stuart side, and there was never the disastrous retreat and thus, there was never a Battle of Culloden in 1746, all leading to a Jacobite restoration and to the successive reigns of James III, Charles III, Henry IX and the continued tenure of the House of Stuart until the 20th century. It also depicts the American Revolution as not taking place because of the judicious intervention of Charles Edward, George Washington going on to become a great British general, and other flights of fantasy. He was a member of the Jacobite Royal Stuart Society.
Several of Petrie's books deal with Charles I's government towards which he was broadly sympathetic. He published biographies of Lord Bolingbroke, of the early-20th-century British cabinet minister Walter Long, and of three Spanish kings: Philip II, Charles III, and Alfonso XIII. Another biography of his dealt with a fourth notable Spaniard, Philip II's half-brother Don John of Austria.
During the 1930s Petrie flirted with the far right. Impressed at first by Benito Mussolini on whom he produced a short and respectful book in 1931, he attended the 1932 Volta Conference of fascists and sympathisers. Disposed initially to favour Sir Oswald Mosley, he joined in 1934 the broadly pro-Mosley January Club. At the same time, he remained publicly hostile towards Nazism, 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, Spanish dictator General Francisco 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, as well as writing regularly for the Illustrated London News and Catholic Herald, in addition to being co-editor of the New English Review's short-lived successor, English Review Magazine.
During the late 1930s, Petrie championed Neville Chamberlain but subsequently was an adherent, again with reservations, 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.
He was appointed CBE in 1957.

Works