Robert Bent

Merchant and MP for Aylesbury 1802-1804, one of a group of British merchants lending £60,000 in total to Alexander Donaldson in 1803 secured on substantial 'slave-property', mostly mortgages. He was a major slave-trader with 38 voyages recorded in the 1790s and early 1800s, most from Liverpool but with three from London. His History of Parliament entry downplays the 'suggestion' that he was slave-trader by referring to the lack of commentary on this in the 1804 election contest, even though the same entry later records his ownership of a ship named Port au Prince lost at sea, a ship shown in the TASTDB under Robert Bent's name with three slaving voyages between 1802 and 1804. The entry records his bankruptcy in 1806. The joint entry for his sons Ellis Bent (1783-1815), deputy judge advocate, and Jeffrey Hart Bent (1781-1852), judge (later a Chief Justice in Grenada, St Lucia, Trinidad and British Guiana), in the Australian Dictionary of Biography describes their father Robert Bent as 'an associate of Charles James Fox.'

http://www.histparl.ac.uk/volume/1790-1820/member/bent-robert-1745-1832; http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/bent-ellis-1772