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This is the pseudonym for the historical Robert, Lord Petre, the young gentleman in Pope’s social circle who offended Arabella Fermor and her family by cutting off a lock of her hair. In the poem’s version of events, Arabella is known as Belinda. The antagonist of the poem. Based on the historical Lord Petre, the Baron snips of Belinda’s lock on account of his infatuation with her remarkable beauty and refuses to give it back. Readers learn that, earlier that day, he created a bonfire to the god of Love made out of, among other things, books containing romantic stories, love letters, and tokens from past romantic attachments, in order to pray for success in winning Belinda in some way, and settled on “raping” her lock. And while his cutting of the lock is not equated with rape in the modern sense—in the context of the poem, it means “theft” or “pillaging”—Pope is still using the word to connote injustice, and to unequivocally state that he has taken what he had no right to take. The fact that the Baron is only referred to by his title, revealing his masculinity and his station but nothing else, or else is satirically figured as a “knight,” the height of courtly masculinity, allows Pope to metonymically cast a kind of witty judgement over all noblemen, and to question the contemporary assumption that they were the intellectual and moral leaders of their day.