Richard Bull (MP)

Richard Bull (1721–1805) was an English landowner, a long-serving member of the Parliament of Great Britain and a noted art collector who lived in a historic house on the Isle of Wight.

Baptised on 15 November 1721 in the church of St Peter le Poer in the City of London, he was the only surviving son of a wealthy businessman Sir John Bull and his second wife Elizabeth Turner, His aunt Elizabeth Bull, wife of Lieutenant-General William Tatton, was the mother of Katharine Tatton, who married Edward Nevill, 15th Baron Bergavenny, and William Nevill, 16th Baron Bergavenny. His younger sister Kitty Bull (1732–1805) married the Reverend Charles Smith, brother of William Smith, Treasurer of the Ordnance.

Admitted to Westminster School in 1735, he started legal training at Lincoln's Inn in 1742 but this was cut short by the death of his father, when he inherited the family home of The White House at Chipping Ongar and land on the Isle of Wight. Instead he entered Trinity Hall, Cambridge in 1743, where he received a classical education, and then in 1747 he married a widow with two children for whom he took responsibility. She was Mary Ash, born 1719 in Ongar, who had been married to Bennet Alexander Bennet, her two children being Richard Henry Alexander Bennet and Levina Bennet, who in 1762 married John Luther, Together they had two daughters, Elizabeth and Catherine, who did not marry.

From 1755 to 1774 he had a London house at 24 Upper Brook Street and thereafter at 10 Stratton Street. In 1783 he took to staying at the mansion of Northcourt Manor at Shorwell on the Isle of Wight, from where his grandfather originated. When his daughter Catherine died in 1795 he bought Northcourt and he and Elizabeth moved there, over the years improving the house, gardens and grounds. Having no son, he endowed his nephew Charles Hewitt Smith (1773–1835) with a large sum, but it was all spent. He died intestate on 12 December 1805, with Elizabeth his heir. When she died in 1809, Northcourt and its contents went to her half-brother Richard and half-sister Levina.

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