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The half-mad lord: Thomas Pitt, 2nd Baron Camelford (1775-1804)

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Thomas Pitt, Lord Camelford, was a Regency rake whose life was a series of paradoxes. Born to wealth and influence, he often scorned the trappings of wealth and slouched around London dressed as roughly as the pugilists with whom he surrounded himself. Secretly afraid of violence, he earned a reputation as a person nobody dared to cross, and once single-handedly charged into a mob of people who objected to his protest of the Peace of Amiens. Proud of his aristocratic status, he once beat a turnpike-keeper for giving him counterfeit pennies in change, explaining that while to him, a few pence was nothing, to a poor carter or drover, it might mean no bread and cheese, and so he taught the turnpike-keeper a lesson.

In a time when pretense and humbug were almost as prevalent as they were in Victorian times, Camelford clung strongly to his own quirky integrity, and was generally respected for it. His early death in a duel robbed England of one of its more interesting people, and his failure in an attempt to assassinate Napoleon affected history.