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He is known for his interest in monarchy, royalism and Jacobitism, and particularly for his 1926 essay in counterfactual history, If: A Jacobite Fantasy.

In the 1930s he 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.

He became the literary editor of the generally conservative New English Review. He was a supporter (with some subsequent reservations) of General Franco; with Douglas Francis Jerrold, the NER's editor, he formed in 1937 a group concerned to put the Nationalist case on the fighting in the Spanish Civil War.

During the late 1930s he was a supporter of Neville Chamberlain, though subsequently he was vocal for Winston Churchill. In 1941 he tried to become a Conservative Party candidate, in Dorset South. He was passed over; according to Andrew Roberts in Eminent Churchillians, this was because Petrie was too closely identified with appeasement.

[edit 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• The Duke of Berwick and His Son; Some Unpublished Letters and Papers (1951)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)
• TheSpanish 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)