Under the custom of primogeniture, Carter arranged that the bulk of his lands, including "Corotoman," should go to his eldest son, John Carter II. He, nonetheless, saw to it that his other sons, Robert, Landon, Charles, and George should have ample estates. Robert Carter II, however, died a few months before his father, leaving a young son, Robert III, and a daughter, Elizabeth. A short time after "King" Carter's death his surviving sons procured a special legislative enactment investing the share of the estate intended for the dead son in the young grandson. When Robert Carter III reached his majority, therefore, he would become master of more than seventy thousand acres. The young boy's uncles, John, Landon, and Charles Carter, acted as his guardians. As a result of his mother's early second marriage to Colonel John Lewis, he lived at the latter's manor plantation, "Warner Hall" in Gloucester County. When the lad was nine, he was sent to the College of William and Mary. Nothing further is definitely known of how his youth was spent. On reaching twenty-one Robert at once began preparations for a trip to England where he remained two years. The purpose of this visit is not known. It is probable, however, that he was following the example of his grandfather, his father, and the other sons of "King" Carter who had all completed their education in the mother country. Indeed the records of the Inner Temple reveal that he was admitted to the privileges and assumed the agreeable duties of a member of that august legal society a few months after he arrived there.[22] Whatever his motives, though, it is unlikely that a spirited young man, possessed of ample means and free of parental restraint, would bury himself entirely within musty college walls. Reports at home had it that he spent his time in idleness and gay diversions. A portrait painted at this time by a fashionable artist, probably in the studio of Sir Joshua Reynolds, shows him arrayed in a fine doublet of silk and a high lace collar, with a mask in one hand as if to indicate he was about to hasten away to some masquerade. [22] Cf. Jones, E. Alfred, _American Members of the Inns of Court_, p. 41. Whatever his youthful follies may have been, Robert Carter possessed a gentle and thoughtful nature. As he matured, he became increasingly a serious man of business and of scholarly and cultivated tastes. Returning to Virginia in 1751, he soon married and settled down to the life of a country squire at "Nomini Hall," the manor house his father had built in Westmoreland County.