Robert's dogged resolve may well have sprung from a stoicism in face of adversity learnt from those under whose tutelage he was brought up, if it is not too extravagant so to characterise an environment as privileged as his. Not only did his mother lose her husband only months after Robert's birth but both her father and her uncle, executed for their parts in the Jacobite uprisings of 1715 and 1745 respectively, and also her brother, killed in a riding accident, had died prematurely. Robert's grandmother, the redoubtable Catherine Walmesley, was also no stranger to tragedy. Both her parents had died by the time she was four and, during the following nine years, her brother and her two sisters succumbed. She had married the 7th Lord Petre but, a year later, he too died of smallpox and she was left, at the age of barely 15, a widow with an infant son. She subsequently married Charles, Lord Stourton but, when he died in 1753, she became a widow for the second time.