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

Wilkinson was ‘for many years an eminent merchant in London, from which he retired on the death of his only son’.Gent. Mag. 1784, p. 237. In 1760 John Calcraft described him as ‘a citizen worth £80,000’.Add. 17495, f. 145. In the 1760s he held about £50,000 of Government stock, and about £6,000 of Bank stock.Bank of England recs. 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’;Corresp. Thos. Gray, ed. Toynbee Whibley, iii. 1192. and Pitt in his ‘Memoir’ of 1781Fortescue mss at Boconnoc. 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.T. Lever, House of Pitt, 208. He died 26 Feb. 1784, aged 90.