James Burton Robertson was a historian. The son of Thomas Robertson, a landed proprietor in Grenada, West Indies, where he spent his boyhood. In 1809 his mother brought him to England, and placed him at St. Edmund's College, Old Hall (1810), where he remained for nine years. In 1819 he began his legal studies, and in 1825 was called to the bar, but did not practise. For a time he studied philosophy and theology in France under the influence of his friends Lamennais and Gerbet.
