Sir Richard Levett (1629 – 20 January 1711) was an English merchant and politician who was elected Lord Mayor of London in 1699. Born in Ashwell, Rutland, he moved to London and established a pioneering mercantile career, becoming involved with the Bank of England and the East India Company.
Acquainted with many prominent individuals during his time in the City of London, among them Samuel Pepys, Sir John Houblon, Sir William Gore, Sir John Holt, Sir Charles Eyre, and Dr Robert Hooke, Levett acquired several properties in Kew and Cripplegate.The House of Commons, 1690–1715, Vol. I, David Hayton, Eveline Cruickshanks, Stuart Handley, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002
Early life and career beginnings Although born into a once-powerful Sussex Anglo-Norman family (its surname derives from the village of Livet in Normandy), the future Lord Mayor grew up in straitened circumstances after the family lost much of its medieval wealth. Levett's father was an intruding ministerRev. Richard Levett was presented to the rectory of Ashwell, Rutland, on 13 May 1646, by Sir Nathaniel Brent, Warden of Merton College, Oxford, Levett having received a Presentation by the Great Seal of England. This was clearly a Cromwellian Puritan appointment Levett was the 'intruding minister.' and he was ejected in 1660 after the Restoration when the legitimate incumbent returned to the living. Although born with connections, Richard Levett and his brother Francis were thrown onto their own resources, and were as much pioneers in business as they were in society.
Despite their prestigious Norman lineage, the Levett brothers were middle-class. They represented an emerging meritocratic England succeeding the previous feudalist social order. (Their father, Rev. Richard Levett, held Puritan sympathies.) Their enterprise demonstrated that diligence could elevate commoner Englishmen into the upper-middle class. The Levett brothers' rise was enabled, by trade expanding and feudal privileges diminishing in favour of a growing mercantile middle class. Although nominally a Tory, Levett's practices denoted a free market capitalist.London and the Kingdom, Vol. II, Reginald R. Sharpe, BiblioBazaar LLC, 2008
Levett and his brother Francis began as small haberdashers, trading everything from tobacco to textiles. The sons of a country parson in Rutland, the two Levett brothers imported goods into England, which they then sold to chapmen at fairs across the country, including those at Lenton, Gainsborough, Boston, Beverley and elsewhere. As the British Empire began to expand, bolstered by increasing military might, aggressive merchants like the Levetts leapfrogged other foreign and domestic competitors. From their small operation grew a behemoth, with the Levett brothers using their own ships to import everything from tobacco to linens.
Eventually, their empire became among the largest factors of its day in England, with an immense working capital estimated between £30,000 and £40,000 in 1705, buying tobacco and other goods around the world for import into the English market. The firm they set up came to embrace trade with the Levant (principally Turkey and Syria), India, Africa, the West Indies, North America, Ireland as well as Russia. Contemporaneous records show Levett often immersed in the details of arranging shipping terms and trading voyages to places as disparate as Guinea and the English Southern Colonies. Like many London merchants of the period, Levett was involved in the Atlantic slave trade, overseeing the transportation of African slaves from various West African ports for sale in the English colonies of Virginia and Maryland.
In 1705, Levett sent a letter to the Board of Trade and Plantations to complain about interference with his ships. "The Governors of Virginia and Maryland", Levett complained to the Board, "had refused to permit two ships of theirs to saile from those colonies with their ladings.... And it being alleged in the petition that the masters of those two ships (who came away in ballast) were obliged to give security to touch at the Maderas in their way home." The Board directed its agent to "write to the said masters at Bristol for further information in that matter."Journal, February 1705, Journals of the Board of Trade and Plantations, Institute of Historical Research, 1920, British History Online, british-history.ac.uk
The building of a business empire
By the early eighteenth century, the firm of Sir Richard Levett and Company had become one of England's largest, dominating especially the enormous tobacco trade with the Virginia Colony, as well as the tobacco coming from Turkey.America and West Indies, Calendar of State Papers: Colonial, America and West Indies, December 1702, Cecil Headlam (ed.), Institute of Historical Research, 1913, British History Online, british-history.ac.uk Detailed records of tobacco transactions at the time between Levett and Virginia planters reveal that the London merchant drove a hard bargain.Thomas Haydon, England to Virginia, 1657, Robert Haydon, published by Robert Haydon, 2002
Levett eventually was named a Merchant Adventurer of the London East India Company, Report on the Old Records of the India Office, George Christopher Molesworth Birdwood, W. H. Allen and Co., London, Calcutta, 1891 one of the first directors of the new Bank of England, History of the Bank of England, Its Times and Traditions, Vol. II, John Francis, Willoughby & Co., London, 1847 and even, on 17 February 1698, a member of the New England Company.A Sketch of the Origin and the Recent History of the New England Company, Henry William Busk, Company for Propagation of the Gospel in New England and the Parts Adjacent in America, Spottiswoode & Co., London, 1884 With his deep interests in shipping, Levett was also one of the earliest investors in what became Lloyd's of London, the insurance market place. He was knighted at Kensington in 1691.
In the close-knit world of London traders at the dawn of the eighteenth century, Levett often found himself acting in conjunction with, or competing against, most of the other large traders known to him. At a meeting of the Governors and adventurers of the London East India Company held on 30 April 1701, for instance, Levett found himself in the company of his fellow London traders and ranking India servants "Gov. Thomas Cooke, Deputy Sir Samuel Dashwood, Sir Thomas Rawlinson, Sir Jonathan Andrews, Sir John Fleet, Sir William Gore, Sir Henry Johnson, Sir William Langhorne, Sir William Prichard and Mr. Peter Vansittart."Revue de l'Extreme-Orient, Henri Cordier, Paris, 1887
In the year of 1695, Levett's increasingly powerful firm accounted for 3,894,864 pounds of tobacco imported into England. Of that, the firm subsequently re-exported some 1.3 million pounds to Holland, Germany and the Baltic. Acting as middlemen in an increasingly vertically integrated corporation, which was coming to resemble a modern trading company, Levett and his partners began raking in enormous profits, partly due to their access to large amounts of capital, as well as their access to a proprietary shipping fleet.
As their trading grew, Richard Levett became a prominent fixture on the London scene. Master of the Haberdashers' Company (1690 and 1691),The Livery Companies of the City of London, William Hazlitt, republished by Ayer Publishing, 1972 he was elected as a City Alderman before serving as Sheriff for 1691/92, and then Lord Mayor of London (1699/1700).The succession of aldermen from 1689, Centre for Metropolitan History, A New History of London, John Noorthouck, 1773, pages 894–897, British History Online, british-history.ac.uk As Master of the Haberdashers' Company, Levett played a key role in building fellow Master of the Haberdashers' Company Sir Robert Aske's Hospital, with Levett's friend Robert Hooke serving as architect.
From his home in Cripplegate, formerly the home of Sir Thomas Bloodworth, a previous Lord Mayor, Levett conducted his trading empire and the mayoral business.A Dictionary of London, Henry A. Harben, 1918, Centre for Metropolitan History, British History Online, british-history.ac.uk Levett's home, formerly that of the controversial Bloodworth, who served as Lord Mayor at the time of the Great Fire of London, was a large town house on the old Noble Street near Lily Pot Lane. (The home was later occupied by printer Charles Rivington.)
Home and family life
Also available for Levett's use were two country homes at Kew,Richard Levett's will on file at Somerset House shows that he owned two homes at Kew, one today's Kew Palace, and the other apparently the 'Queen's House'. including the Dutch House (now Kew Palace), as well as the large estate surrounding them.Mark Noble, James Granger, A Biographical History of England, from the Revolution to the End of George I's Reign, W. Richardson, London, 1806 (After Levett's death, his daughter Mary Thoroton leased the Dutch House to Queen Caroline, wife of King George II, for use as a children's nursery, likely accounting for the decision of Frederick, Prince of Wales, to settle at Kew with his wife, Augusta, Princess of Wales. Both Levett homes as well as the estates surrounding them were sold to the royal family in 1781 by Sir Richard's grandson Levett Blackburne, Esq., a prominent Lincoln's Inn barrister).A Regal Dollhouse Fit for a Princess, The New York Times, 2 July 2004
Sir Richard Levett was married to Mary Crispe, likely the daughter of merchant adventurer Sir Nicholas Crispe of Fulham, Middlesex. History of the Crispe Family, Part One, Dr. B.J. Cigrand, Chicago, Illinois, 1901 The couple were prominent in London during the years following the Restoration. Levett was mentioned by Samuel Pepys in his diaries; he was frequently mentioned in contemporary accounts of weddings and soirées of the age, and became a philanthropist, donating to charities like St. Thomas' Hospital in Southwark, and church charities in the West Country and Ireland. An Historical Account of St. Thomas' Hospital, Southwark, Benjamin Golding, Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Browne, London, 1819
Sir Richard Levett's wife, in particular, was a generous donor to religious causes. Edmund Calamy, the English nonconformist churchman, refers to "Lady Levett" in his memoirs as his great "friend", and who was noted in other accounts as a generous donor to religious and educational causes.An Historical Account of My Own Life, Vol. I, Edmund Calamy, John Towill Rutt, Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, London, 1830 Minister Calamy even dedicated a sermon to Lady Levett. A History of the Presbyterian and General Baptist Churches of the West of England, Jerom Murch, R. Hunter, London, 1835
Samuel Pepys, the diarist and Secretary of the Admiralty (and friend of Robert Blackburne, his predecessor and brother of the Archbishop of York), apparently socialised with Alderman Levett. "After staying here a great while at Westminster", Pepys noted in his diary of 14 March 1668, "we (went) back to London, and there to Philips's, and his man directed us to Mr. Levett's, who could not come, and he sent us to two more, and they could not; so that, at last, Levett as a great kindness did resolve he would leave his business and come himself, which set me in great ease in my mind." Diary and Correspondence of Samuel Pepys, Samuel Pepys, Vol. III, J.B. Lippincott, Philadelphia, 1855
Levett also figures prominently in the recently published diaries of politician Roger Whitley, Member of Parliament from Wales and then from Chester. Whitley was a prominent figure in Chester and Whig politician. Whitley's massive diaries reveal frequent meetings between the two men.Roger Whitley's Diary, various entries, British History Online, british-history.ac.uk
Death and legacy