George Sitwell
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Sir George Reresby Sitwell, 4th Baronet, (London, 17 January 1860 - Locarno, 9 July 1943) succeeded his father as 4th Baronet, at the age of two.
Educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, he contested Scarborough seven times as a Conservative and was an MP from 1885 to 1886 and from 1892 to 1895. A keen antiquarian, he worked on the Sacheverell papers, and wrote a biography of his ancestor, William Sacheverell and published The Letters of the Sitwells and Sacheverells. His collection of books and papers are said to have filled seven sitting-rooms at the family house, Renishaw Hall, in Derbyshire. He researched genealogy and heraldry, and was a keen designer of gardens, studying garden design in Italy.
In 1909 he purchased the Castello di Montegufoni, near Florence, then a wreck inhabited by three hundred peasants. Over the next three decades he restored it to its original design, and took up permanent residence there in 1925, writing to the then Archbishop of Canterbury and the Chancellor of the Exchequer to explain that taxes has forced him to settle in Italy.
Sitwell married, in 1886, Ida Emily Augusta Denison, daughter of Baron (later Earl) of Londesborough. In 1913 he refused to pay off her many creditors, and saw her prosecuted and imprisoned for three months. He remained in Italy at the outbreak of war, but in 1942 moved to Switzerland and died at Locarnio on 9 July 1943. He was succeeded by his elder son Osbert, who described him vividly in his five volume autobiography.
