Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 45.djvu/359

Pitt nine Articles, and he spoke against the Royal Marriage Bill. Through his influence, supported by Lady Chatham, the reconciliation of his uncle and Lord Temple was effected in 1774. Walpole, who quarrelled with him on political topics, calls him a ‘flimsy’ speaker, though not wanting in parts; but Wraxall recognised in him the possession of no ordinary powers of oratory, and remarked that, although he rarely spoke, his name and family relations ‘procured him a most favourable audience.’ It was acknowledged on all sides that he never spoke so well as in his speech in 1780 on Dunning's celebrated motion to limit the influence of the crown. He was one of the strongest opponents of Lord North's ministry, and a warm antagonist of the coalition. In November 1781 he protested against voting supplies until grievances were redressed, in a speech to which Fox referred in his own justification on 4 Jan. 1798, when opposing the passage of the Assessed Taxes Bill (Hansard, xxxiii. 1230). In February 1783 he moved the address for the Shelburne ministry, protesting that he had always been opposed to the use of force against the American colonies, and he attacked Fox's East India Bill with energy.

A very favourable account is given by Wraxall of his speech in 1782 against parliamentary reform, in which he did not ‘make a false step,’ although hampered by the knowledge that he was returned to the House of Commons in respect of a single tenement. Next year, when the same question was brought forward, he incurred much ridicule by a change of opinion, and by an offer to sacrifice his borough for the public good. He was satirised by the authors of the ‘Rolliad’ (ed. 1795, pp. 171–2), and he was mercilessly chaffed in the House of Commons by Fox (13 March 1784) and Burke (28 Feb. 1785). In March 1783, when the king was endeavouring to form an administration in opposition to North and Fox, the leadership of the House of Commons and the seals of a secretary of state were ‘offered to and pressed upon Thomas Pitt’ (, Court of George III, 1853, i. 190), although Lord Ashburton, who conferred with the king on the subject, pleaded that he was a ‘wrong-headed man’ (, Life of Shelburne, ii. 375–82). On 5 Jan. 1784 he was raised to the peerage as Baron Camelford of Boconnoc, a signal proof, as was generally remarked, of the influence of his cousin, the young William Pitt (cf. Chatham Correspondence, iv. 526–7).

Ill-health often drove him to the continent. From 1789 to 1792 he was in Italy, and, although he landed at Deal in June 1792, he was obliged to flee to the continent again in September. Peter Beckford says in his ‘Familiar Letters’ (1805 edit. i. 159), that Lord Camelford ‘left Florence for Pisa with the gout upon him, and died immediately on his arrival;’ but it is generally said that he died at Florence on 19 Jan. 1793. He was buried on 2 March at Boconnoc, where he had added to the old mansion, from his own designs, a second wing, in which is a gallery sixty-five feet long, containing many family and other portraits. In 1771 he had erected, on the hill above the house, an obelisk, 123 feet high, to the memory of his uncle, Sir Richard Lyttelton (Parochial Hist. of Cornwall, i. 74–5).

Pitt married, on 28 or 29 July 1771, Anne, younger daughter and coheiress of Pinckney Wilkinson, a rich merchant of Hanover Square, London, and Burnham, Norfolk. She had ‘thirty thousand pounds down and at least as much more in expectation,’ wrote Gray. She died at Camelford House, Oxford Street, London, on 5 May 1803, aged 65, pining from grief at the career of her son, and was buried in the vault in Boconnoc churchyard on 19 May. Their issue was one son, Thomas, second earl of Camelford, who is separately noticed, and one daughter, Anne, born in September 1772. In March 1773 William Wyndham Grenville, baron Grenville [q. v.], wrote that the girl was ‘either dying or actually dead,’ but she lived to marry him in 1792, and survived until June 1864.

Lady Camelford's sister Mary made an unhappy marriage, in 1760, with Captain John Smith, by whom she was mother of Admiral Sir Sidney Smith. Camelford, who treated his sister-in-law and her children with much kindness, printed in 1785 a ‘Narrative and Proofs’ of Smith's bad conduct (Bibl. Cornub. ii. 500).

Pitt was high-minded, generous, and distinguished for suavity of manners, but was of irresolute temperament. Sir Egerton Brydges describes him as ‘a man of some talents and very elegant acquirements in the arts’ (, Peerage, ix. 438). Mrs. Piozzi, with more emphasis, calls him ‘a finical, lady-like man’ (, Notes on Wraxall, ed. 1836, vol. iv. addenda p. vii), and by Sir J. Eardley-Wilmot he was dubbed in 1765 ‘the prince of all the male beauties,’ and ‘very well bred, polite, and sensible’ (, Memoirs, p. 182).

Several fugitive tracts have been loosely assigned to Camelford. Sir John Sinclair credits him with a reply to his own ‘Lucubrations during a Short Recess,’ 1782 (Corresp.