Richard Bull (MP)

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,[1] 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.

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.

Through his friend Humphry Morice, in 1756 he was returned unopposed as one of the two MPs for the constituency of Newport, Cornwall, a notorious rotten borough, and held his seat until 1780.

[5] Bull extra-illustrated nearly seventy works, including a copy of James Granger's Biographical History of England which he expanded physically and chronologically to thirty-five large folio volumes.

Both Horace Walpole and Anthony Morris Storer bequeathed books to him, which he had bound in red Morocco of simple design and placed in the library he had fitted in Northcourt.

[12] He was a valued client of Edwards, the Halifax bookbinders, who gave his daughter a complimentary prayer book 'as a faint Expression of Gratitude for the Recommendations and other Favours'.