Peter Metge
Irish judge

Peter Metge (c. 1740–1809) was an Irish politician and judge of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He was a colourful character, who was noted for his fondness for duelling, and for his unorthodox private life.
Biography
He was born in Athlumney, County Meath, the second son of Peter Metge and his wife Anne Lyon, who died in 1792. Anne was reputedly a relative of the Bowes-Lyon family.
His grandfather, Peter de la Metgée (1665-1735), was a French Huguenot who fled to Ireland to avoid religious persecution after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. John Metge (died after 1823), who served as MP for Ratoath, and after the Act of Union 1800 as MP for Dundalk (though it is doubtful if he ever took his seat at Westminster), was the judge's younger brother.
He was a graduate of Trinity College Dublin, where he took his degree of Bachelor of Arts in 1763.
Private life
He married Sophia Crofton, daughter of Sir Marcus Lowther-Crofton, 1st Baronet of The Mote, County Roscommon, and his wife Catherine Crofton. They had two children, a son Peter who died at 17, and a daughter who died young.
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This entry incorporates text from “Peter Metge” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.