Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist

by Thomas Levenson

  ***

  On arrival, though, even so knowing a young ruffian as William Chaloner would have had no preparation for the shock of London. The city was vast, unimaginably larger than any other place inhabited by English men and women. Its population of almost 600,000, more than ten percent of the national total, was greater than that of the next sixty largest so-called cities and towns combined. Norwich, in second place, was home to between 20,000 and 30,000; at most 10,000 lived in Chaloner's Birmingham.

  Seventeenth-century London was a mob of strangers. Its death rate exceeded the birth rate by several thousand a year into the eighteenth century. Yet still it grew, cannibalizing the countryside—drawing from two to three hundred young men and women a day from their villages and towns, come to chase their fortune in the one true metropolis in all of England.

  Even the wiliest and most ambitious of these country folk were stunned by their first impression of the capital, which was commonly described as a kind of hell, a "region of dirt, stink and noise." Chaloner would have known he was getting close when he passed the heaps of human and animal waste carted just outside the city every day and dumped along the roadways. Travelers gasped, covered their faces, sped by as fast as they could, gagging.

  The city proper brought its own terrors. Prudent Londoners did not drink plain water, especially not from the Thames, for reasons Jonathan Swift made clear in his verses on a rain shower in 1710: "Sweepings from Butchers Stalls, Dung, Guts, and Blood, / Drown'd Puppies, stinking Sprats, all drench'd in Mud / Dead Cats and Turnip Tops / come tumbling down Flood."

  Still, while one could live on beer and gin, everyone had to breathe the air. With more than half a million people crammed together, stepping over piles of droppings left by horses, burning wood and coal for warmth, and furnaces, kilns, and ovens making what the city demanded—beer and bread, soap, glass, lime and dyes, pottery, ironwork, and on and on—the atmosphere in the capital was toxic. The resulting "impure and thick mist," if not quite so chokingly fatal as the evil fogs of Victorian London, was still foul enough to drive King William to the suburb of Kensington in 1698.

  London did have its rewards, of course: the hope of wealth, or at least of better than subsistence living. The city formed the unquestioned economic center of the nation at a time of radical transformation. It was a fabulously lucrative change: in the late seventeenth century, England fostered a world-spanning web of commerce, with London as its hub. City-based cartels and joint-stock companies pursued their profits in the Baltic and the eastern Mediterranean. Trade with North America was growing. The East India Company had begun capturing all India for the British Crown. Africa, the West Indies, the American colonies, and the home country formed a network that spun slaves, gold, sugar, rum, and cloth around the Atlantic Ocean. The China trade consumed British silver—the preferred precious metal of the Chinese—in exchange for silk and fine ceramics. Almost all of this, three-quarters of England's international trade, passed through London's docks, warehouses, banks, and exchanges.

  London dominated the domestic economy as well. Even in years of good harvests, wages in the capital beat those for rural labor by as much as fifty percent. By virtue of its population and its wealth, London formed by far the largest single market in England for food, fuel, cloth, and manufactured goods. Londoners ate sheep from Gloucestershire, drank beer brewed with east-country barley, pulled its herring from the North Sea and cooked them over Newcastle's coal. Interconnected webs of carts, rental horses, and stagecoaches sprang up to carry everything, and London's streets became a tangled mass of animals and people, crowds upon herds, a swaying, shouting, shitting din—exhilarating, terrifying, incomprehensible to anyone encountering it for the first time.

  This European urban experience, lived on such a scale only in London and perhaps Paris, formed a network not simply of goods and people but information, from the proper coffeehouse to patronize (Dick's or Will's for Whigs, the Devil tavern or Sam's for Tories), the state of the Baltic market for naval stores, and the most sophisticated houses of prostitution (Mother Wisebourne's establishment off the Strand was a connoisseur's favorite) to the lodes of data that mattered ever more as the city molded the world around it, like the soundings provided by merchant sailors from ports around the world that enabled Isaac Newton to analyze the moon's influence on the tides in the Principia. Thus, despite the stench, the sickly living, the fact that there was no place in England where it was worse to be poor, they kept coming, the country-born who overflowed the city's tenements. London's centripetal force, its gravity, was irresistible, and increasing. It was where the action was.

  Chaloner's first weeks and months in the big city were typical for newcomers: bad and worse. His biographer reported that on his arrival he found himself "something at a loss of Acquaintance, and knew not what course to take for a Livelyhood." He faced the hard truth that London lived and traded through an intricate weave of associations that seemed impenetrable. Obviously, court or government patronage—Newton's approach—was beyond the reach of a masterless apprentice, and the nexus of trade and high finance even more so. The crafts were also off limits. Though the guild system was weakening in the late seventeenth century, tight networks of skilled men locked out even capable strangers, much less half-trained runaways. As late as 1742, London hatters beat to death a man who dared shape headgear without having gone through the apprentice system. About twenty-five men controlled the cheese trade between London and the major producing region of Cheshire, forcing the hundreds of smaller cheesemongers to accept whatever price the cartel set. The scientific revolution and the incipient industrial one supported a range of new enterprises—precision instrument makers, for one. Chaloner had real dexterity with metal and some knowledge of tools, but even were he willing to submit to a new master, he lacked the bona fides that would have persuaded an established shop to take him on. And so it went, for him as for any unknown newcomer. Despite the high wages available to some, the great mass of London's immigrants found themselves underemployed, battling each other for minute advantages in the daily struggle for existence.

  Access to the underworld was tightly controlled too. London's criminals organized themselves into ladders of rank and status as rigid as those of the straight world on which they preyed. Highwaymen like Dick Turpin, celebrated as a kind of latter-day Robin Hood, were the aristocrats. They were generally from higher-class origins than their fellow felons, as they had to have learned how to ride. The tally of those hanged for highway robbery includes parsons' sons, impoverished scholars, spendthrift younger scions of respectable houses—gentlemen, broke, bored, or both.

  But if genteel crime was beyond Chaloner, what about the journeyman variety? London in the 1680s and 1690s had no shortage of tempting targets: the cheek-by-jowl jostling between the rich and the ever-renewing crowds of scrabbling poor offered plenty of scope for a little income redistribution. But while the London criminal world was not as organized as it would become early in the next century, it still arrayed itself according to an order a stranger could not simply enter at will. Street thugs evolved specialized techniques for the crush of London's roads. One gang of footpads, led by the marvelously named Obadiah Lemon, taught themselves to use fishing lines and hooks to snag hats and scarves out of moving vehicles. Others preyed on coaches when they slowed at bridges or other obstacles. Pickpockets often started young, practicing on dummies under the eyes of older relatives or friends already skilled in the art, aspiring to rise to the status of "masters of the trade ... versing upon all men with kind courtesies and fair words, and yet being so warily watchful." They worked in teams, with a carefully worked-out division of labor. One or more stalls (decoys) would lure a cony or a cully (the victim) into a position to be robbed by a foin or a nip. The foins were the elite practitioners, who prided themselves on their dexterity and their ability to distract their victims while they reached into a pocket; the lower-status nips merely slashed and grabbed. Either way, the stolen purse went to the snap, w
ho usually lurked behind or next to the foin or nip, who could then melt into the background.

  Shoplifters had a similar battery of tasks divided among gang members. The mask distracted the shopkeeper while the lift grabbed the goods and passed them on to a receiver, or santar, who never entered the store and therefore could not, in theory, be tied to the robbery. Confidence tricks, loaded dice, rigged card games, and the like required similar networks of conspirators. Burglars learned from confederates how to pick locks. Fences, at the hub of criminal commerce, provided a clearinghouse for training, job leads, refuges, and alibis.

  In this society of crime, a lone man or woman, unskilled, without friends, known to none of its gentry, would have found it almost intolerably dangerous to attempt a freelance rampage. Chaloner was too smart to try. Instead, he drifted to the hungry fringes of city life until he could find a way to its gilded center.

  It took him only a few months, and the path he found earned him scandalized admiration from his biographer, who wrote, "The first part of his Ingenuity showed it self in making Tin Watches, with D—does &c in 'em." These Chaloner "hawk'd about the Streets, and therby pick'd up a few loose Pence, and looser associates."

  That is, Chaloner's first attempt to rise above mere subsistence turned him into a purveyor of sex toys. London in the 1690s was as famous, or perhaps notorious, for its spirit of sexual innovation as Berlin would be in the 1920s. Prostitution was ubiquitous, as much a part of the life of the wealthy as it was that of the poor, who supplied most of the trade's workers. The best brothels vied to outdo each other in their range of offerings—so much so that Dr. John Arbuthnot, a man about town in the early eighteenth century, apparently spoke for many when he told a madam at one of the better houses, "a little of your plain fucking for me if you please!"

  Anything a cultivated lecher might covet could be had: erotica in words and pictures, ribald songs, and lewd performances. Perhaps the most obscene work of theater ever composed comes from this period, the scabrous play Sodom, or the Quintessence of Debauchery, attributed to the notorious libertine John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester. Written in or around 1672, the play may be a disguised attack on Charles II (with whom Wilmot shared at least one mistress). Its description of a monarch attempting to promote sodomy throughout his kingdom has been interpreted as a coded denunciation of the Declaration of Indulgence of 1672, which pronounced official toleration of Catholicism. If that was the author's intention, the polemic comes very well disguised within its wildly ribald plot.

  For those whom literary debauches did not satisfy, a market for sexual aids flourished. As early as 1660, just two years after Cromwell's death, which resulted in the decline of Puritanism, there were reports of imported Italian dildos being sold on St. James's Street. Homegrown entrepreneurs also sought to profit, although it remains something of a mystery just what Chaloner was trying to peddle. That his devices demonstrated "the first part of his ingenuity" suggests that they were more than mere knockoff phalluses. They probably were not true watches either. The technology of watchmaking had advanced a good deal by the mid-1670s. The spiral balance spring, invented by Robert Hooke, stored enough energy and released it precisely enough to allow small, hand-held clocks and watches to keep time accurate to minutes instead of hours—a key step in the evolution of timekeeping. Apprentices usually spent seven years learning the intricacies of clockwork. Balance springs would be used to drive clockwork puppet shows by the early eighteenth century, and it is possible to imagine early attempts to make pornographic displays. Yet it is doubtful that a former nailer's assistant could have mastered the art swiftly enough to begin making his own mechanical automata so soon.

  More likely, Chaloner created his own variant of what were then being sold as toy watches. A watch was a mark of status, craved even (or especially) by those who could not afford the real thing. To meet that demand, London craftsmen began making imitations. Surviving examples—most recovered from the tidal margins of the Thames—all have the same basic design: two pieces of pewter, each cast into roughly the shape of half a pocket watch. One half would have a crude dial pressed into it, the other would be decorated with an echo of a gentleman's watch case. The two halves were soldered together and sold as a kind of affordable fashion accessory. Chaloner's metalworking knowledge would have been sufficient for this kind of work—and for the innovation of incorporating dildos into the pieces. He does not seem to have made much money at the scheme. But as his biographer hinted, this brief foray into the fringes of the sex trade was significant not so much for the loose change he managed to pick up as for the looser associates who thereby found him. Some of those new friends aided Chaloner in his next and more successful enterprise, which was built on another basic fact of seventeenth-century urban life: the relentless pressure of infectious disease.

  The plague had not returned after the epidemic that ended in 1667, but thanks to London's crowding, its choking air, and its primitive hygiene, deadly disease was always present. Smallpox remained a scourge for both highborn and low. Londoners died of typhus as well—picked up so easily in the prisons that it became known as jail fever. Winters brought tuberculosis and influenza, and in summer, mosquitoes distributed malaria while the swarming flies spread dysentery, infant diarrhea, and more. Children were unbelievably vulnerable. Thirty-five to forty of every hundred children in London died before the age of two. Prosperity was not much protection. The Quakers, a reasonably well-off group and one of the least affected by the plague of cheap gin available throughout the city, lost about two-thirds of their children before the age of five. Virtually all parents would bury at least one infant.

  William Chaloner knew a gold mine when he saw it. True medical expertise was expensive, scarce, and often ineffective, while the terror of disease supported a legion of folk doctors, fakers, patent medicine peddlers, confidence men and women. According to his biographer, in order to "satisfy an itching desire he had to be Extravagant," Chaloner found "a Companion little better than himself who had agreed together to set up for Piss-Pot Prophets, or Quack-Doctors."

  The key to a quack's success lay in his ability to convince the desperate, and here the young man from Birmingham demonstrated the gift that would advance all his later endeavors. His biographer moralized, but recognized his skill nonetheless: "Chaloner having the greatest Stock of Impudence, and the best knack at Tongue-pudding, (the most necessary Ingredients in such a Composition) 'twas resolv'd that he sho'd personate the Master Doctor, and his Comrade bear the Character of his Servant."

  Chaloner starred in the role, able to cajole, to wheedle, to command audiences to accept his authority as a man of uncommon skill and wisdom. His "servant" must have been equally as efficient in coaxing cash out the marks' hands, for Chaloner was soon able to rent a house on the proceeds. He married and sired several children (though it is not known how many, if any, survived). As the years passed, he expanded his repertoire from quack medical advice to a kind of divination, "pretending to tell sill' Wenches what sort of Husbands they should have, discovering Stol'n Goods &c."

  This last proved his undoing. There was an obvious trick to recovering stolen property: steal it yourself in the first place. But it took a skilled and careful operator to pull off the scam repeatedly. A few years later, Jonathan Wild would establish control of the London underworld by organizing both sides of criminal undertakings on a citywide scale. He avoided direct participation in the robberies he stage-managed, profiting instead from his roles as restorer of lost property and "thief-taker"—betraying those who robbed out of turn, who competed with him, or who merely had begun to represent a risk to his liberty.

  Wild managed this balancing act well enough to dominate the interface of respectable London and its underside for fifteen years. Chaloner, less cautious, blundered. Around 1690, his name surfaced as a direct suspect in a theft. He ran, ending up in the slums of Hatton Garden, anonymous and broke, with nothing better than "some Old Garret to repose his Carcase."

  6.
"Every Thing Seem'd to Favour His Undertakings"

  DESPERATION NOW DROVE William Chaloner to his last apprenticeship. In his Hatton Garden tenement he met a japanner. The term first described those who varnished or finished surfaces, in imitation of the fine Japanese lacquer work that had reached Europe in increasing quantities over the previous century. From that original sense, it had broadened to include any refinishing involving a hard or opaque coating. Chaloner's neighbor specialized in blacking old clothes with a coating that could restore a degree of respectability to them—if you did not examine them too closely. Selling old clothes to the wretched was a poor man's trade, but Chaloner paid the man to teach him his craft. Then, as Isaac Newton himself would later note in the first entry in his dossier, Chaloner turned himself into a trader in "cloaths thredbare ragged + daubed with colours."

  Newton would also later snipe that if Chaloner had remained content in this modest station, he could have avoided his later troubles. But Chaloner had never tolerated mere subsistence, and he had undertaken his new training with a specific end in view. Gilding—the art of coating surfaces with a thin, uniform coat—was a skill that could be applied to more than leather or cloth. In fact, the trade as a kind of archetype of deceit had deep roots. Almost a century earlier, in The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare's delusional, jealous Leontes gave voice to suspicions that his beloved son is a bastard, even though the boy looks like him—or rather: "women say so, / That will say anything. But were they false / As o'er-dy'd blacks."

  Painting clothes was hard work for little profit. But metal? That was where money could be made. Although there is no record that Chaloner planned out his counterfeiting career, the sequence of his actions strongly suggests that he had figured out the opportunity, probably before his overeagerness as a stolen-goods man got him into trouble. Certainly, he took to his new enterprise quickly, applying his newly acquired technique to silver pieces with which "he thought it Probable to Counterfeit Guinea's, Pistoles [French currency], &c, which being Gilded well [with gold] and Edg'd, might pass for Current throughout the Kingdom."