length by Newton while they were in Newgate awaiting trial. Ivey said of Gibbons
that his ‘business is to take up Clippers and Coyners’ and he knew a great many
of them, but that he mainly used this knowledge to collect protection money
from them, in particular to save them from arrest by giving them prior notice of
raids to be conducted by constables, the king’s messengers, or agents of the
Mint.^70 If Gibbons had such prior information, it is possible that it came from
his position as porter at Whitehall Gate and as a messenger for the secretaries of
state.^71 Other deponents confirmed the charge that Gibbons was able to give
notice of raids on coiners’ houses and lodgings, and that a number of coiners
and clippers were his ‘pensioners’.^72
That a man like Gibbons was able to operate in these ways points to a crucial
issue: the relationship between the thief-takers and the authorities. It is clear
that his activities were well known, and equally clear that he was regarded as
fundamentally untrustworthy. But he was also useful. Secretary Vernon reveals
some of the ambivalence of the government’s attitude towards Gibbons and
others like him when, in 1697 , the administration was pursuing a man called
William Challoner, who was thought to be forging exchequer bills—a matter,
Vernon said, ‘of the highest concern to the nation’. It is a complex story that
need not detain us. What is of interest is Secretary Vernon’s thoughts about how
Gibbons could be used and how much he could be trusted. He wrote to the duke
of Shrewsbury:
It has come into my thoughts that John Gibbons might be of some use in this matter, if
he were fit to be trusted. He has an old intimacy with Chaloner. If he has not been
among them at the coining trade he has been one of their scouts, and if he is concerned
with them in point of profit, I am afraid he will betray any one else rather than them. But
he is a tool with so devilish an edge, that I dare not venture upon him without allowance,
and yet I think something of this nature ought to be done.
In a later letter, in which he muses further about how deeply Gibbons had been
involved in the affairs of the gang the government was pursuing, Vernon says ‘he
is such a bold crafty rascal, that to hope to get any thing out of him, one must be
able to put him into a thorough fright’.^73
There is a good deal of evidence that thief-takers were known to the author-
ities and that they were used by them—as detectives, occasionally as a strike
242 Detection and Prosecution
(^70) PRO, Mint 15 / 17 , nos. 31 , 91.
(^71) Gibbons doubtless owed these positions to political contacts deriving from his earlier career as a
footman to the Duke of Monmouth, and to his having been implicated in plots against Charles II. Nar-
cissus Luttrell noted the part Gibbons played in the tracing and apprehension of Count Conigsmark for
the murder of Thomas Thynne in 1682 , and his being charged with involvement in a plot in 1683 (Lut-
trell, A Brief Historical Relation of State Affairs from September 1678 to April 1714 , 6 vols. (Oxford, 1857 ), i. 165 ,
288 ). Gibbons gave evidence at Conigsmark’s trial, at which the Count was acquitted (Howell, State Tri-
als, ix. 58 – 9 ). Ivey’s hostility to Gibbons no doubt also had its origins in the Exclusion struggles since Ivey
had then been a government agent (Wales, ‘Thief-takers and their Clients’, p. 77 ).
(^72) PRO, Mint 15 / 17 , nos. 88 , 97 , 99 , 198.
(^73) James (ed.), Letters Illustrative of the Reign of William III, i. 330 , 344.