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Sir Richard Levett (also spelled Richard Levet) (died 1711), Sheriff, Alderman and Lord Mayor of London, was one of the first directors of the Bank of England, an adventurer with the London East India Company and the proprietor of the trading firm Sir Richard Levett & Company. He had homes at Kew and in London's Cripplegate, close by the Haberdashers Hall. A pioneering British merchant and politician, he counted among his friends and acquaintances Samuel Pepys, Robert Blackborne, John Houblon, physician to the Royal Family and son-in-law Sir Edward Hulse, Lord Mayor Sir William Gore, his brother-in-law Chief Justice Sir John Holt, Robert Hooke, Sir Owen Buckingham, Sir Charles Eyre and others.〔(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, Levett's father was a country vicar, and the future Lord Mayor grew up in straitened circumstances after the family lost much of its medieval wealth.〔Rev. Richard Levett was presented to the Rectory in Ashwell, Rutland, on 13 May 1636, 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.'()〕 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.〔(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 and even Russia. Contemporaneous records show Levett often immersed in the details of arranging shipping terms and trading voyages to places as disparate as French Guinea, Virginia, Maryland and elsewhere.〔Like many merchants of his time, Levett was apparently engaged in the slave trade, loading human cargo in French Guinea and other African ports for transport to Virginia and Maryland.()〕 In 1705, for instance, 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 )〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Richard Levett」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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