Hence Exaltation Gather and his box of money. The King's gesture would fall flat if half the prisoners remained in pokey for debts accumulated during their (unjust and un-Christian) imprisonment and so the King had (through Daniel) encouraged special collections to be taken up in sympathetic churches and had (though this was supposed to be grievously secret) supplemented that money with some from his own reserves to make sure it all came off well. In practice it meant that the nonconformists of London and the King of England had used Exaltation Gather's strong-box as a dust-bin for disposal of all their oldest, blackest, lightest in weight, most clipped, worn, filed-down, and adulterated coins. The true value of each one of these objects had to be debated between the gaoler of Ipswich on one hand, and on the other, Exaltation Gather and any recently freed Puritans who (a) were sharp when it came to money and (b) enjoyed verbal disputes – i.e., all of them.