GIBSON, Thomas (1667-1744), of Lothbury, London.

Descended from Sir John Gibson, who bought the manor of Welburn in 1597, Gibson was a partner in the firm of Gibson, Jacob, and Jacomb, of Lothbury, scriveners and bankers, Walpole’s bankers and men of business (see Jacomb, Robert). In Walpole’s early days Gibson is said to have saved him from the Fleet by a timely loan of £1,500.J. H. Plumb, Walpole, i. 110. When Walpole became paymaster he appointed Gibson his cashier. Heavily engaged in financing colliery undertakings in the north of England, Gibson was active in the coal trade lobby before he entered Parliament. Returned for Marlborough in 1722, he voted with the Government in all recorded divisions. He did not stand in 1734, when he appears to have been consulted by Walpole on north country elections,E. Hughes, N. Country Life in 18th Cent. 164, 271 n. 2, 292-6. but he was brought in by Walpole for Yarmouth in 1736, again voting steadily with the Administration. On 12 Feb. 1741 Sir George Wynne wrote to Walpole about the elections in Flintshire and Denbighshire, saying that the bishop of Salisbury and Gibson held mortgages on an estate of his and that the bishop was about to assign his mortgage to Sir Watkin Williams Wynn, which would put it in his power to ruin him, ‘yet Mr. Gibson seemed to pay no regard to my representation, though I pressingly importuned him to pay the bishop off that I might not fall into the enemy’s hands’. After Walpole’s fall Gibson applied to him, 16 July and 13 Aug. 1743, to secure his retention as cashier to the army under the new paymaster if Pelham became first lord of the Treasury, suggesting that if he were dismissed he might have to press for the amount that Walpole owed him, namely £7,741 0s. 7½d.Cholmondeley (Houghton) mss. On 25 Aug. Walpole asked Pelham to ‘insist upon continuing Mr. Gibson deputy. He has been there from the beginning of my time and is as solicitous about it as in his younger days and lower circumstances’.Newcastle (Clumber) mss. He kept his office until two months before his death, 21 Sept. 1744.