WILKINSON, Pinckney (?1693-1784), of Burnham, Norf.

Published in The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1754-1790, ed. L. Namier, J. Brooke., 1964
Available from Boydell and Brewer

Constituency

Dates

1774 - 26 Feb. 1784

Family and Education

m. Dec. 1735, Miss Thurloe, 1s. 2da.

Offices Held

Biography

Wilkinson was ‘for many years an eminent merchant in London, from which he retired on the death of his only son’.1 In 1760 John Calcraft described him as ‘a citizen worth £80,000’.2 In the 1760s he held about £50,000 of Government stock, and about £6,000 of Bank stock.3 When his daughter Anne was about to marry Thomas Pitt, Thomas Gray wrote to the Rev. Norton Nichols, 28 June 1771, that Wilkinson ‘gives her £30,000 down, and at least as much more in expectation’;4 and Pitt in his ‘Memoir’ of 17815 referring to his wife speaks of ‘the great inheritance she brings’. Pitt, mostly an absentee in the Parliament of 1774, and with no axe to grind, returned at Old Sarum his father-in-law at an age when he was hardly capable of effective service in the House. Wilkinson voted with the Opposition, and apparently never spoke in the House. The last two years of his life he was incapacitated through a paralytic stroke.6  He died 26 Feb. 1784, aged 90.

Ref Volumes: 1754-1790

Author: Sir Lewis Namier

Notes

  • 1. Gent. Mag. 1784, p. 237.
  • 2. Add. 17495, f. 145.
  • 3. Bank of England recs.
  • 4. Corresp. Thos. Gray, ed. Toynbee Whibley, iii. 1192.
  • 5. Fortescue mss at Boconnoc.
  • 6. T. Lever, House of Pitt, 208.