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published.1 His great-grandfather was George Petre,
Provost of Montrose, who died in 1627, whose son and
grandson went to Sweden, the latter to Arboga, where he
was town-councillor in 1658. Young Robert was born
about 1682, in the same little town. Having entered the
army as a volunteer in the Hälsinge Regiment, he witnessed
Charles XII.’s Russian campaign from 1702 till 1709, and
has given us a very interesting and apparently trustworthy
account of his exploits. He graphically describes the
marches, skirmishes, and battles near Mitau under General
Lewenhaupt, who had succeeded General Stuart; how
his regiment once arrived in the small town of Kielmen,
where he met many German and Scottish inhabitants, and
found a Scottish Presbyterian Church; how the fortress
of Selzburg was taken and razed to the ground, and what
befell after the surrender of Mitau to the superior force
of the Russians: all this and much more he notes down.
On the latter occasion he had entered the town to fetch
his horse when he was offered by a Russian official the
rank of a Lieutenant with the dragoons, a “handful” of
ducats, and six months’ pay in advance if he would enter
the Russian service. We let him tell the rest in his own
words : “I answered that I had sworn the oath of
allegiance to my King (of Sweden), and that I should keep it as
long as I lived. People ought not to be so foolish as to
think I would barter away my soul’s salvation for a
miserable sum of money.”2 Petre then goes on to relate
his experiences as his Colonel’s clerk in Riga, his
promotion to the charge of Ensign, and the ceremonies in
1 The Provost of Montrose traces his descent to Lord Petre of Writtle
in Essex.
2 The diary is carefully published by Quennersted, in his Karlolinska
Krigares Dag-Böcker, Lund, 1903. See vol. i. 86 f. The author has
convincingly proved the identity of Robert with the Arboga family. The
Krigs-Arkivet also gives Arboga as his birthplace.
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