Thomas Pitt, 1st Baron Camelford - Family and Sexuality

Family and Sexuality

In July 1771 Pitt married Anne Wilkinson with whom he had two children, Thomas and Anne. She was the younger daughter and coheiress of Pinckney Wilkinson, a rich merchant of Hanover Square, London, and Burnham, Norfolk. 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. Anne, born in September 1772. In March 1773 William Wyndham Grenville, Baron Grenville 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.

In his biography of Horace Walpole, Timothy Mowl says Pitt was a homosexual who "was 'outed' by that early queer-basher Mrs. Thrale". She called him ‘a finical, lady-like man’ 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’.