Richard Levett

Sir Richard Levett (d. 1711) was an English merchant, politician and slave trader who served as Lord Mayor of London in 1699. Born in Ashwell, Rutland, he subsequently moved to London and established a pioneering mercantile career, becoming involved with the Bank of England and the East India Company. Levett was acquainted with many prominent individuals during his time in London, among them Samuel Pepys, John Houblon, William Gore, Sir John Holt, Robert Hooke, and Charles Eyre. He acquired several properties in Kew and Cripplegate before dying in 1711. 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 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 impressive Norman lineage, the Levett brothers were strictly middle-class. They represented an emerging England, an England of meritocracy and hard work that trumped the old aristocratic England. (Perhaps it was not an accident that their father, Rev. Richard Levett, had Puritan sympathies.) The enterprising brothers demonstrated that through hard work and pluck, ordinary Englishmen could move into the upper-middle classes. The Levett brothers were abetted in their rise by profound changes in the evolving English economy, with trade opening and feudal privileges diminishing in favour of a growing mercantile middle class. Although Levett was a nominal Tory, he was a free market capitalist by practice.