Edward Petre

Edward Petre, S.J. (1631 – May 15 1699) was an English Jesuit and privy councillor. He was the son of Sir Francis Petre, Bart., of Cranham, head of a junior branch of the family of the Barons Petre, and his wife Elizabeth Gage, daughter of Sir John Gage, both strong Roman Catholics. In 1649 he was sent for his education to the Jesuit College at St. Omer, and entered the order in 1671. Petre served as a chaplain and adviser to James II of England and was an unpopular and galvanising presence at James's court. James, as a Catholic reigning over a nation of Protestants, aroused much ire, and much of it was directed at Petre, his close advisor on religious matters.

Before James's accession in 1685, Petre was then vice-provincial of his order. James soon made him clerk of the closet, a position without any political power. Later that year, James wrote to ask Pope Innocent XI to make Petre a bishop "in partibus" (a bishop without a see, now called a titular bishop). The pope refused. In 1686, Lord Castlemaine, James's ambassador to Rome, renewed the application, while James urged it forcibly on Ferdinando d'Adda, the papal nuncio in London. But if the pope was unmoved, the king was characteristically obstinate. James and Castlemaine continued to push for a bishop's position for Petre through 1687, and now requested that Petre be made a cardinal, but the pope steadily refused. James contemplated making him Anglican Archbishop of York, as the see was then vacant, but the pope would not grant a dispensation to hold it, and even directed Petre's superiors to rebuke him for his excessive ambition. Petre was made a privy counsellor the same year.

After his nomination as privy councillor, the popular charges against him became more fervid than ever, and reached their height in insinuations made about the birth of the Prince of Wales, James Francis Edward Stuart in 1688. Like many in James's court, Petre at first trusted Sunderland, but he was also among the first to detect that minister's duplicity, and to break with him. Modern scholars have mixed reviews of Petre's behaviour, and contemporary sources on both sides are biased. The "Catholic Encyclopedia" said of him "with little gift for politics, nor paying much heed to them, he was nevertheless severely blamed when things went wrong. He was also regardless, almost callous, as to what was said about him by friend or foe." Petre followed James into exile in France. He became head of the Jesuit College at St Omer in 1693. He was later transferred to Valten in Flanders, and died there in 1699.