Ralph Levett

Ralph Levett (1600 – c. 1660) was an English Anglican minister who served as domestic chaplain to an aristocratic family from Lincolnshire with Puritan sympathies, who subsequently installed him as rector of a local parish.

A graduate of Christ's College, Cambridge,[1] where he became a protégé of the prominent Puritan minister John Cotton, Levett later married the sister of the wife of his friend Rev.

[2] His father, Thomas Levett, was of middling rank in the local gentry, not owning the manor at High Melton, but identified as 'gent.'

In 1636, by contrast, Levett's friend Wheelwright, whom he apparently knew at Cambridge, was driven from his post at Bilsby by the ecclesiastical authorities, and departed for the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

[9] (Wheelwright was following John Cotton, who himself had fled to Massachusetts three years earlier to avoid imprisonment for nonconformity.

[10]) Still, the rigours of ministering to an aristocratic, if Puritan-inclined household, meant that Levett sometimes wrote to his former mentor Cotton for advice on handling tricky situations.

Valentine's Day caught Levett unawares when he was approached by the household's "2. young Ladyes" and asked to draw a name from a hat.

"His Puritan principles," writes Sargent Bush in his The Correspondence of John Cotton, "were clearly being challenged as he considered what was an appropriate response for him as a minister of God on the one hand and an employee of the family on the other.

"[6] In 1632, five years after Levett's letter to Cotton, Lincolnshire records show the marriage of "Mr. Ralfe Levit and Anne Hutchinson" in Bilsby, the parish of Rev.

[13] Perhaps the Wray family's endorsement provided Levett some measure of protection, or his brother's position as Chancellor and Commissary to the Archbishop of York helped shield him from persecution.