Thomas Walpole was born into a political family. The second son of the 1st Baron Walpole and his wife Telisha, nee Lombard, he was the nephew of Sir Robert Walpole, the prime minister from 1721 to 1742.
Walpole entered into partnership with the merchant Sir Joshua Vanneck,[1] and married his daughter Elizabeth Vanneck on 14 November 1753. She died on 9 June 1760.[2]
From 1753 to 1754 he served as a Director of the East India Company. In the early 1770s Walpole led a group of investors, including Benjamin Franklin, to seek from the crown a land grant in Ohio.[4]
In 1787 he married his second wife, Jeanne-Marguerite Batailhe de Montval.[2] From 1799 until his death Walpole lived in a large house, today named Walpole House, on Chiswick Mall, Chiswick.[5]
His son Thomas (1755–1840) was British Ambassador to Munich.[6]
^Report of the Lords commissioners for trade and plantations on the petition of the Honourable Thomas Walpole, Benjamin Franklin, John Sargent, and Samuel Wharton, esquires, and their associates for a grant of lands on the River Ohio, in North America, for the purpose of erecting a new government : with observations and remarks, 1772. B.A. Hinsdale. "The Western Land Policy of the British Government from 1763 to 1775." Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly. Volume I (December 1887) 207-229.
