Vice-Admiral Sir Richard Leveson (c. 1570 – 2 August 1605). was a Royal Navy officer, politician and landowner. His origins were in the landed gentry of Shropshire and Staffordshire. A client and son-in-law of Charles Howard, 1st Earl of Nottingham, he became a vice-admiral under him. He served twice as MP for Shropshire in the House of Commons of England. He was ruined by the burden of debt built up by his father.
Family background Richard Leveson's parents were Sir Walter Leveson (1551-1602) of Lilleshall, Shropshire, son of Sir Richard Leveson (d.1560) and Mary Fitton (1529–1591). The family name is pronounced , and could be rendered in many ways in the 16th century, including Lewson, Luson and Lucen. In the late Middle Ages, the Levesons were important wool merchants and minor landowners based in the Wolverhampton area. They became major landowners in Shropshire and Staffordshire mainly through the acquisition of former church lands by Walter's grandfather, James Leveson, after the Dissolution of the Lesser Monasteries. The most important estates were at Lilleshall, where James Leveson had bought first the AbbeyVictoria County History: Shropshire, Volume 2, Chapter 14: The Abbey of Lilleshall. and then the entire manor, and at Trentham, where James bought the lands of the dissolved priory.Victoria County History: Staffordshire, Volume 3, Chapter 16: The Priory of Trentham. Walter was initially an enclosing and improving landlord, raising the family's profile still further, and serving as MP for Shropshire three times.
Anne Corbet, the daughter of Sir Andrew Corbet of Moreton Corbet, who was vice-president of the powerful Council of Wales and the Marches. The Corbets were very important landowners in Shropshire, supplying knights of the shire through much of the reign of Queen Elizabeth: in concert with the Levesons, they could dictate the representation of Shropshire in the English parliament.
The Leveson and Corbet families were the most powerful of the landed gentry families in Shropshire, a county without a resident aristocracy.Coulton, Barbara (2010): Regime and Religion: Shrewsbury 1400-1700, Logaston Press , p.40 Both underwent a crisis in the late Elizabethan and Jacobean periods as a result of overspending and succession problems, coupled with unwise exposure to the vagaries of the State. In Richard Leveson's case, the problems stemmed almost entirely from his father's impulsive and irrational behaviour, stemming apparently from a serious mental illness.
Naval career
Leveson took to the sea in his teenage years and his career was secured by marriage in 1587 to Margaret, the daughter of Charles Howard, 1st Earl of Nottingham, who had been appointed Lord High Admiral in 1585.
In 1588 Leveson served as a volunteer on board the Ark Royal against the Spanish Armada, and in 1596 had a command in the expedition against Cádiz, on which occasion he was knighted.Thomas Birch, Memorials of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, vol. 2 (London, 1754), p. 49. In 1597 he is said to have commanded the Hope in 'the Islands' voyage' under Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, though other lists describe him as commanding the Nonpareil. It is possible that he moved from one ship to the other during the expedition.Lediard, T. The Naval History of England. Published by John Wilcox and Olive Payne, 1735. Page 354 In 1599 he commanded the Lion in the fleet fitted out, under Lord Thomas Howard, in expectation of a Spanish attempt at invasion. In 1600, with the style of 'admiral of the narrow seas,' he commanded a squadron sent towards the Azores to look out for the Spanish treasure-ships. Great care was taken to keep their destination secret; but the Spaniards, warned by experience, changed the route of their ships, and so escaped. In October 1601 he was appointed captain-general and admiral of certain of her Majesty's ships to serve against the Spaniards lately landed in Ireland. (Cal. State Papers, Ireland), and in the early days of December fought a battle off CastlehavenSilke, John J: Kinsale: the Spanish intervention in Ireland at the end of the Elizabethan war (Four Courts Press Ltd, 2000) and forced his way into the harbour of Kinsale, where, after a severe action, he destroyed the whole of the enemy's shipping under Pedro de Zubiaur.Sir Amyas Preston to the Earl of Nottingham, 9 December 1601
Early in 1602 Leveson was appointed to command a powerful fleet of nine English and twelve Dutch ships, which were to infest the Spanish coast. The Dutch ships were, however, late in joining, and Leveson, leaving his vice-admiral Sir William Monson, to wait for them, put to sea with only five ships on 19 March 1602. Within two or three days the queen sent Monson orders to sail at once to join his admiral, for she had word that 'the silver ships were arrived at Terceira.' They had, in fact, arrived and left again; and before Monson could join him Leveson fell in with them. With his very small force he could do nothing. 'If the Hollanders,' wrote Monson, 'had kept touch, according to promise, and the queen's ships had been fitted out with care, we had made her majesty mistress of more treasure than any of her progenitors ever enjoyed.'The Naval Tracts of Sir William Monson, in Publications of the Navy Records Society, v. 43, 1912 (London, 1913) It was not till the end of May that the two English squadrons met with each other, and on 1 June, being then off Lisbon, they had news of a large carrack and eleven galleys in Cezimbra bay. Some of the English ships had been sent home as not seaworthy; others had separated; there were only five with Leveson when, on the morning of the 3rd, he found the Spanish ships both under the command of Federico Spinola and Álvaro de Bazán strongly posted under the guns of the castle. At ten o'clock he stood into the bay, and after a fight which lasted till five in the evening, two of the galleys were burnt, and the rest, with the carrack, Saõ Valentinho capitulated and were taken to England. The prize money from the carrack worth £3,000 was awarded by Queen Elizabeth.
In 1603, during the last sickness and after the death of the queen, Leveson commanded the fleet in the narrow seas, to prevent any attempt to disturb the peace of the country or to influence the succession being made from France or the Netherlands. This was his last service at sea. On 7 April 1604 he was appointed jointly Lieutenant of the Admiralty of England, and Vice-Admiral of England for life (ib. Dom.), and in the following year was marshal of the embassy to Spain for the conclusion of the peace. Shortly after his return he died in London.
Member of Parliament
The parliament of 1589 Richard Leveson was elected a member of the English parliament for the first time on 7 November 1588, sitting in the 1589 parliament. He was one of two members for the county of Shropshire, the other being his own father, Walter. In the previous election, in October 1586, Walter had been paired with Richard Corbet, his brother-in-law, and the two families had decisive influence over the choice of MP for several decades. At the time of his election he was only 18 years old, unusual but not unique in this period. The parliament lasted only from 4 February 1589 until 29 March. Leveson was not a prominent and the journals for the 1589 Parliament mention that he asked for leave of absence.History of Parliament Online: Members 1558-1603 - LEVESON, Richard (1570-1605) - Author: J.J.C., accessed 26 September 2013
The parliament of 1604
The summoning of the first parliament of James I found Leveson at the height of his prestige. His capture of the Portuguese carrack was still fresh in the memory. At the funeral of Elizabeth I, he had acted as a knight of the canopy. On his arrival in London in May 1603, James I made Leveson a gentleman of the Privy chamber. Later that year, he was given the task of taking Thomas Grey, 15th Baron Grey de Wilton to Winchester for trial as a participant in the Bye Plot.
Throughout Elizabeth's reign, Shropshire had been represented by eight families, mainly based in the north of the county, of which the Levesons were one. Andrew Thrush and John P. Ferris (editors): History of Parliament Online: Constituencies 1604-1629 - Shropshire - Author: Simon Healy, accessed 23 September 2013. Leveson must have seemed an obvious choice at the time and two of the prominent county gentry took the unusual step of countersigning the return to mark their approval: Vincent Corbet, Leveson's uncle, and Francis Newport. Newport's endorsement was significant: a former MP, and three times High Sheriff of Shropshire, he knew Leveson's difficulties well, as the Privy Council had sent him to arrest three of Sir Walter's servants in 1593. The second member was Robert Needham, a cousin of Leveson and Corbet whose family estates were mainly around Cranage in Cheshire but whose seat was Shavington Hall in Shropshire. Andrew Thrush and John P. Ferris (editors): History of Parliament Online: Members 1604-1629 - NEEDHAM, Sir Robert (1567/8-1631), of Shavington Hall - Author: Simon Healy, accessed 23 September 2013.
When the parliament assembled on 19 March 1604, Leveson was one of those deputed to administer the Oath of Supremacy to the rest of the House of Commons, He was soon nominated to two committees directly concerned with family affairs of his patron, the Earl of Nottingham. One was the committee to deal with the naturalization of Nottingham's wife. Leveson's mother-in-law had died shortly before the queen. The earl then married a Scottish woman, about fifty years his junior, Margaret Stuart, a daughter of the so-called "Bonny Earl", James Stewart, 2nd Earl of Moray. The second committee dealt with provision for Leveson's sister-in-law, Frances Howard, known as Lady Kildare, as she was the widow of Henry FitzGerald, 12th Earl of Kildare. Her second husband, Henry Brooke, 11th Baron Cobham had been condemned to death in November 1603 for his part in the Main Plot to install Lady Arbella Stuart on the throne. He was not executed but held in the Tower of London until his health broke down in 1617.History of Parliament Online: Members 1558-1603 - BROOKE, alias COBHAM, Henry II (1564-1619), of Cobham Hall, Kent - Author: P. W. Hasler, accessed 26 September 2013 As proposed by the committee, Parliament granted Cobham's lands to Lady Kildare.
Parliament also drew on Leveson's professional expertise. He was named to a committee dealing with the relief of soldiers and sailors who had served in the Irish war and to another on a bill to prohibit the export of iron artillery. The latter was one of a series of measures proposed by the highly experienced MP Robert Wroth, who had sought to set the agenda for the parliament by bringing forward a list of seven "grievances" or reform proposals around which he hoped to focus debate. Andrew Thrush and John P. Ferris (editors): History of Parliament Online: Members 1604-1629 - WROTH, Sir Robert I (c.1539-1606) - Author: Andrew Thrush, accessed 24 September 2013. The most important was a proposal to sweep away the abuses of the wardship system, but he also wanted reform of the Exchequer and elements of religious and social reform. Leveson was nominated to a committee to look at the whole programme proposed by Wroth, as well as to some of the committees on specific proposals. However, Wroth was a puritan, the last of the Marian exiles to serve in the House of Commons. His approach was not universally popular and there were powerful interests opposed to him in the Court and in the House of Lords, as well as cracks in his relationship with his patron, Robert Cecil. In the end, none of Wroth's program was carried.