GIBBONS, Thomas (c.1616-68), of Whitestone, Devon.

The Gibbons family of Holcombe Rogus, on the Devon-Somerset border six miles from Wellington, was not indisputably armigerous. They were overlooked by the heralds in their visitations either of Devon or Somerset, and when Thomas Gibbons went up to Oxford he was registered as the son of a plebeian. His standing had improved a little when he enrolled at his inn of court, when his father was described as a gentleman from ‘Coe’, almost certainly Cove, near Tiverton.15I. Temple database. What little is known of William Gibbons, the father, is derived from his will, drafted in 1617, in which he was confident of leaving £250 to Thomas and £160 to his sister, so long as a small estate was sold to raise the cash. William Gibbons left one or two small items of silverware, but it is apparent from the will that he was a yeoman farmer. He died when Thomas was no more than four years old, and so the rest of his son’s upbringing was in the hands of his widowed mother or a guardian whose identity remains unknown. William Gibbons’s estate seems to have been too small to interest the court of wards: no wardship papers have been located.

Thomas Gibbons attended Lincoln College, Oxford, and later undertook legal training at the Inner Temple. There he seems not to have been a prominent student, but to judge from the sparse details of his subsequent career, he must have practised law as an attorney, quite possibly dividing his time between Exeter and London. His first noted public appointment came in 1640 when he was named a commissioner for oyer and terminer in Exeter, but he was seemingly not in Exeter, or anywhere in Devon in 1642 when signatures were gathered for Parliament’s Protestation in defence of Protestantism, king, Parliament and the liberties of subjects.16Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, charters and letters patent, CIV; Devon Protestation Returns. An Edward Gibbons, the only taxpayer of that name in Exeter in 1641, may or may not have been a relative.17E179/245/12.

It has been conjectured that Gibbons became a soldier, attained command of Exeter garrison in June 1647, and went on to sit for the city in two protectorate Parliaments.18Trans. Devonshire Assoc. lxi. 212. Whether he ever served in any of the main field armies is doubtful, although he may in November 1642 have been the Thomas Gibbons who was involved in supplying saddles to Serjeant-major Horatio Carey, of the army of Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex. It is not clear that this Thomas Gibbons held military rank in 1642, and is rather more likely to have held a secretarial or commissarial position. After 1642, a number of officers with the surname Gibbon or Gibbons held commissions, but the most important of these was Robert Gibbon*, and the forename Thomas does not figure among the various possibilities. It was Robert Gibbon who held a captaincy in the New Model army, and who was later posted to Scotland where he acquired a colonelcy.19LJ vii. 278b; CSP Dom. 1645-7, p. 563; SP28/130/169-70; Temple, ‘Original officer list’, 69. Nevertheless, somewhere and somehow Thomas Gibbons acquired a military commission, and the probability is that it was in the Exeter city militia formed after the New Model secured the surrender of Exeter in April 1646. It was he who was appointed governor of Exeter on 17 June 1647 with the rank of major, rather than Robert Gibbon, who had no known connection with the south west of England.20LJ ix. 238a. Thomas Gibbons’ was a brief appointment as governor, as by 1648 the commander there was Thomas Saunders.21Worc. Coll. Oxf. Clarke MS LXXII, notes on garrisons, 1648-9. The city may not have been formally or fully garrisoned. Certainly the county committeemen at Exeter complained of the unruliness of the soldiers three months after Gibbons had supposedly been posted, and the confrontation between the arriving New Model soldiers and the city authorities in May 1648 was unmediated by any garrison commander.22Bodl. Tanner 58, f. 507; Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. ix. 13v-14v. Despite these uncertainties, Major Gibbons retained his military title. At the Devon quarter sessions of Midsummer 1650, he was asked as Major Gibbons by the magistrates to mediate in a dispute between two individuals.23Devon RO, Devon quarter sessions order bk. 9 July 1650. The clerks of the 1654 Parliament referred to him as Major Gibbons, and a local commentator on the election of 1659 used the same title.24CJ vii. 381a; Clarke Pprs. v. 277.

In parallel to his limited military postings, in the mid-1640s Thomas Gibbons was also pursuing his legal career, an important milestone of which was his call to the bar in November 1646. Edmund Prideaux I*, recorder of Exeter briefly in 1643 and then again from May 1646, was prominent at the Inner Temple, and must have known Gibbons and have approved of him. No more is heard of Gibbons in Exeter until 10 July 1654, two days before he was returned to Parliament as Thomas Gibbons esquire. On the 10th, he was made a freeman of Exeter corporation on the order of the mayor and common council, evidently as a special measure to make valid his election. On 24 October, the council sent him £20 as an earnest of their good opinion of him while he sat in Parliament ‘about the city’s affairs’.25Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. x. f. 53. He was the only one of his surname in this Parliament, and appears in the record as ‘Mr’ and ‘Major’ Gibbons interchangeably. The ‘city’s affairs’ on which he had been mandated are evident in some of his committee appointments. He was named to the important committee on Ireland, where Exeter corporation had land investments (29 Sept.) and on 7 December was on a committee which allowed towns to raise taxes to fund a civic ministry, an initiative which Exeter pursued independently to fruition after the closure of this Parliament.26CJ vii. 371b, 397b. Another important committee to which Gibbons was named was that of privileges (5 Oct.), and his legal training recommended him to the committee on the reform of chancery, where he sat with another Devonian, Robert Shapcote.27CJ vii. 373b, 374a. Sporting his military title he was named to the committee on forged debentures on 22 November, suggesting that he was happy to be seen as one with interests in the welfare of those who had served in the army.28CJ vii. 388a.

When Gibbons returned to Exeter, he was reimbursed his salary and expenses by the corporation in the customary way, but in the second protectorate Parliament of 1656 he was replaced by Thomas Westlake, the town clerk, who proved a much more vigorous representative.29Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act. Bk x. ff. 56v, 59v. Gibbons began subsequently to be named to tax commissions for the county, however, and was evidently well-affected to the protectorate. While he did not hold any specific office in Exeter before 1660, he was entrusted with scrutinizing the city’s records on behalf of the common council.30HMC Exeter, 341. He made a final appearance as an MP in Richard Cromwell’s Parliament in 1659. He played only a very small part in this assembly, however, and was named only to one committee (5 Feb): on the plans to establish a ‘learned ministry’ in the north of England, code for a more conservative alternative to the radical schemes of the Rump Parliament for ‘propagating the gospel’. The Gibbons whose speeches were recorded extensively by Thomas Burton* was Col. Robert Gibbons. On 7 March Thomas Gibbons was given leave of absence, marking the end of his parliamentary career.31CJ vii. 600b, 611b. Back in Exeter he was given his salary of £27, but only in September after he had petitioned for it.32Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. ix. 118v, 123v.

Whatever Gibbons’s soldierly pretensions might have been, it was his legal skills that were recognized by Exeter corporation when they appointed him as a retained counsel in February 1660. His career seems to have enjoyed a late flowering after the Restoration of the monarchy, as he was not only appointed receiver-general of the assessment tax in Devon and to various commissions out of chancery, but was also created a master extraordinary of that court, which would have given him authority to hear cases in Devon. He seems not to have lived in Exeter, but in houses in the country accessible to the city. He was probably the Thomas Gibbons esquire who had a house in Christow in 1662, and by 1666 he was settled at Whitestone to the west of Exeter.33Devon RO, 516 M/T 65; Al. Ox. In the post-Restoration years, he was reported to be responsible for committing Baptists and Quakers to prison.34Extracts from State Pprs. Rel. to Friends ed. N. Penney (1913), 161. He died on 1 March 1668 and was buried at Whitestone. His son, also named Thomas, matriculated from Wadham, Oxford, in 1666 and followed his father into the Inner Temple. Gibbons junior went on to become deputy recorder of Exeter and a serjeant-at-law. In 1701 his own son, with the same given name, was a third-generation student at the Inner Temple, but none of the family seems ever to have aspired to a seat in Parliament.35Al. Ox.; Devon RO, 3429 A99/PW1; Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. xiii. f. 1.