force. Lovell, the recorder of London during the period we have been dealing
with, seems to have had an especially close relationship with such men. Cer-
tainly, he took a very large number of depositions in cases in which they had an
interest. He was greedy, and possibly corrupt; certainly he was ever on the look-
out for the possibility of picking up an estate forfeited by a convicted coiner. It is
clear that Lovell encouraged and protected the thief-takers; that he valued their
contribution to the policing of the City and of the metropolis generally, and at
whatever cost.
Lovell may have placed particular reliance on thief-takers. But he was not un-
usual in using and supporting such men. The Mint had developed its own pros-
ecutorial staff by the 1690 s, led by George Macy and other men who served as
chief clerk, but Newton, and other wardens, also sent thief-takers to apprehend
coiners and to give evidence against them at the county assizes. The secretaries
of state and under-secretaries also had their own staffs of police and prosecutors
in the forty messengers of the chamber who were on the lord chamberlain’s es-
tablishment, but who worked almost exclusively for the secretaries. Their main
business was to carry the diplomatic mail, but they were also sent to arrest and
detain suspects in cases of interest to the Crown, and in the 1690 s that included
a number of coining cases.^74 From the 1660 s, if not earlier, the messengers were
used by the secretaries of state to make arrests, to give evidence, and to take part
in other ways in prosecution drives. But in addition, as we have seen in the case
of secretary Vernon, thief-takers also played a large part in those campaigns.
A striking instance of thief-takers working together, and of their being em-
ployed by the authorities, occurred in 1696 , when the sheriffs of London went
to Newgate gaol to interrogate a number of suspected coiners and took with
them a force of thief-takers. The sheriffs’ account—as it emerged in affidavits
taken when the case went to King’s Bench—was that in the course of an exam-
ination of a woman who had been arrested by Rewse and Jenkins and found to
be carrying a large amount of clipped money, recorder Lovell learned about a
major clipping enterprise being carried on in Newgate gaol.^75 Taking a few men
with them, the sheriffs went to Newgate, searched the rooms in which a gold-
smith called Greene and his partner David Davies were being held, and, with-
out offering violence of any kind, removed the considerable sums of money and
silver bullion they found there.
The version offered in their examination by the defendants, Greene and
Davies, differed in many respects from this account and seems likely to be closer
to the truth. Davies described it this way:
on Munday the sixth of January last betweene the howers of three and foure of the
Clock in the afternoone Sr Edward Wills one of the present Sherriffs of London came
The state and prosecution
(^74) J. M. Beattie, The English Court in the Reign of George I(Cambridge, 1967 ), 49 , 120 – 1.
(^75) King v. Davies and Carter and King v. Greene (PRO: Records of the Court of King’s Bench (KB)
2 / 1 Part I ( 7 Will. III): affidavits ofJenkins and Rewse, 4 February 1696 ).