Sir Charles Alexander Petrie, 3rd Baronet (28 September 1895 – 13 December 1977) 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 (albeit to a cool reception), 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 belatedly declares his loyalty. (It has been speculated by some historians that Newcastle, known to have flirted with Jacobitism, was actually contemplating a judicious "conversion" to the Stuart cause when the Prince's army reached Derby.) 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 (The Old Pretender), 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