John Gibbon

John Gibbon (1629–1718) was an English officer of arms, Bluemantle Pursuivant and known as a writer on heraldry and the politics of the Exclusion Crisis. Life The eldest son of Robert Gibbon, a London draper and fourth son of Robert Gibbon of Rolvenden, Kent, and his wife Mary, daughter of Lionel Edgar of Framsden, Suffolk, he was born on 3 November 1629; he was brother to Matthew Gibbon, Edward Gibbon's great-grandfather. On 11 December 1639 he was admitted a pupil of Merchant Taylors' School, then went to Jesus College, Cambridge, matriculating in 1645, but not taking a degree. With royalist views, Gibbon led an itinerant life under the Commonwealth. On his father's death in 1643 he had inherited land in Kent, but it was of little value. He writes of time he spent at Allesborough in Worcestershire, in the house of Thomas Coventry, 2nd Baron Coventry, where he was employed as a domestic tutor. Gibbon visited Europe as a soldier and a traveller, learned French and Spanish, and passed some time in Jersey. He crossed the Atlantic in 1657, and worked managing the Virginia estate of Richard Lee I. He took the body paint of Native Americans to be confirmation of heraldry as a human universal.