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

by Thomas Levenson

  He stayed underground for five months. Blackford remained in his holding cell in prison, ready to testify, but eventually his jailers tired of waiting for the elusive Chaloner and satisfied themselves with the counterfeiter in hand. Blackford was hauled to Tyburn and hanged late in 1692. Shortly afterward, Chaloner resurfaced, but he did not immediately restart his coining production line. After his enforced vacation, he seems to have been short of the requisite capital to pay for the sophisticated tools required, along with the significant amounts of silver and gold needed for first-class work.

  Instead, he found a new source of funds in treachery. William III, who had so recently deposed James II, still feared his rival's return. Jacobite sedition—as James's cause was called—sparked major scares and some minor actual threats in London throughout the early 1690s, and the government offered rewards for information about treasonous conspiracies. Chaloner recognized found money when he saw it, and in mid-1693, he set out to find those whom he might usefully betray.

  He approached four journeymen printers with copies of King James's declaration of that April, which sought his return to the throne and promising free pardon to his opponents, lower taxes, and liberty of conscience to all his once and future subjects. They refused to print the incendiary sheet. So Chaloner composed a new Jacobite document of his own and "importun'd them to Print him some," promising that this new pamphlet would be distributed only privately to Stuart sympathizers. Two of the printers resisted, so Chaloner turned his attention to the other two—a Mr. Butler and a Mr. Newbold. It took Chaloner "ye expense of several threats and some money," but "at length they were prevail'd on." Chaloner had them deliver the pamphlets to the Blue Posts tavern in Haymarket, and he invited his co-conspirators to join him there for a celebratory dinner. The printers dined—well, one hopes—and then "instead of Grace after Meat, [Chaloner] entertain'd them with Messengers and Musqueteers and Swearing the Fact at the Old-baily." At trial, Butler and Newbold were convicted of high treason and condemned to death.

  For this service Chaloner was promised one thousand pounds from a grateful Crown and government—or, as he later bragged, "He had fun'd (that is tricke'd) the King of 1000." Always happy to milk a willing cow, Chaloner now pursued a career as a professional informer, to the point of voluntarily going to jail for five weeks to eavesdrop on Jacobite prisoners. But he never repeated his initial coup—several of the prosecutions launched with his information did not produce convictions—and his cash flow ebbed.

  This game ended for good when he crossed paths with a man almost as unscrupulous as himself, a thief-taker named Coppinger. In the loosely policed city, thief-takers filled a vacuum by serving as bounty hunters, tracking down criminals on their own initiative in return for fees from crime victims and rewards from the state. The potential for abuse was obvious—Chaloner's own brief period as a discoverer of stolen goods illustrated how easy it was to play both sides, organizing crimes and betraying gullible accomplices.

  When Chaloner met him, Coppinger had turned to extortion, soliciting bribes and "forcing Money from people, under pretence of Warrants to apprehend 'em." Captured and committed to Newgate, he tried to buy freedom by implicating bigger fish among the coiners he had known through his line of work. According to Coppinger, "the said Chaloner being once in Company with him, accosted him after this manner: Coppinger, I know you have a pretty knack at writing Satyr [satire]; do you write something against the Government, and I'l find a Man shall Print it; then you and I'll Discover it, whereby we shall take off all suspicion of being guilty of any Crime to the prejudice of the Kingdom" Coppinger reported this to the Lord Mayor himself, and Chaloner landed in a holding cell in Newgate.

  Chaloner's famed "knack at Tongue-pudding" served him now. He told tales in his turn of Coppinger's talent as an extortionist. The case against Chaloner never materialized—there was no evidence beyond one man's word against another—and on February 20, 1695, Coppinger was brought before the Old Bailey to face trial. He complained of being "maliciously prosecuted," and asserted that the witnesses against him were known coiners worse than he. He could not, however, explain how a watch worth four pounds that supposedly belonged to one Mary Mottershed had found its way into his possession. He was pronounced guilty of felony theft and sentenced to death. Chaloner walked away untouched.

  William Chaloner read his own lesson in his seeming invulnerability. In 1693, shortly after his Jacobite printers were condemned, he started up his counterfeit mint once more. His confidence in his ability to outwit the Mint—certainly as long as it was staffed by the usual mix of patronage absentees and corruptible underlings—had been confirmed. His coining trade flourished, forcing him to add employees to keep up with the work. He trained "Relations, nay almost all his acquaintance to do something relating to it." For the moment, Chaloner reigned in his corner of London, a kind of criminal alchemist, able to multiply without limit coins that looked so persuasively like true silver and gold.

  Part III

  Passions

  7. "All Species of Metals ... from This Single Root"

  THE HONORABLE ROBERT BOYLE, seventh son and fourteenth child of the Earl of Cork, had been ill throughout 1691. In July the situation became grave enough to jolt him into writing a will. By Christmastime it was clear that the great chemist (and notable experimental physicist) was dying.

  Boyle's intellectual output had been prodigious. Just as important for the future of British science, he had the gift of recognizing and supporting brilliance when he saw it. Boyle had been Robert Hooke's first patron, John Locke's mentor, the young Newton's occasional correspondent. For three decades and more, he had been the living center of London's learned life. But his decline was no great surprise to those who knew him well. He had been sickly as a child and frail ever after. He had dodged the worst afflictions of the great plague epidemic of the mid-1660s and the more routine ebb and flow of the other infectious diseases that carried off so many contemporaries. But he had endured almost everything else: fevers in and out of season, excruciating recurrent kidney stones, a stroke that left him temporarily paralyzed, although he had continued to dictate experimental procedures to assistants as he recovered.

  He was a man of deep and committed Christian faith. He believed in the resurrection and the glory of God and the joys of the world to come. But if death should have held no terrors for him, Boyle was human enough to admit to fear of the pain of dying. He was fortunate in this, as in so much else. Late in the day on December 31, his life ended calmly, with no evident distress, in his bed at the grand house on Pall Mall.

  Isaac Newton set out for London the day after Boyle's death, and almost certainly went to Boyle's funeral at St. Martin-in-the-Fields on January 7. Two days later, he dined with fellow mourners, including Samuel Pepys and his fellow diarist John Evelyn—another of the founders of the Royal Society—and their conversation turned to "thinking of a man in England fitt to bee set up after [Boyle]" as the leader of the nation's intellectual life.

  The obvious candidate, of course, was sitting at that dinner table. But the right position in London still eluded Newton. Also, unknown to Pepys and Evelyn, the immediate consequence of Boyle's death was to force Newton to confront anew work both he and Boyle had attempted—and kept almost entirely hidden—for two decades.

  Death bursts secrets, and this one began to crack just weeks after Boyle's funeral. In February 1692, Newton wrote to John Locke, mostly to announce that he would abandon hopes for a patronage job for a while. But in the last line of what reads like a hurried postscript, he notes that Locke—one of Boyle's oldest friends—had taken possession of something he cryptically called "Mr. Boyles red earth."

  Locke's reply has been lost, but apparently he picked up on the hint and sent Newton a sample. Then a ripped and partial letter from Newton in July seems to warn Locke off sensitive ground. He writes that he had received too much of the earth, "For I desired only a specimen, having no inclination to prosecute ye process." But, he
added, if Locke wanted to attempt the experiment, then he would try to help, "having a liberty of communication allowed me by Mr. B[oyle], in one case wch reaches you." Newton said that he stood obliged to Boyle to preserve this secret—and presumed that Locke, equally Boyle's confidant, accepted the same obligation. The implication is obvious: the process employing the red earth was incredibly sensitive and could not be discussed unless Locke committed to a vow of silence.

  Locke replied swiftly. He assured his friend that he had been initiated into the mystery: Boyle had "left to ... me the inspection of his papers"—including the ones never intended to reach the public. To reassure Newton, he enclosed copies of "two of them that came to my hand, because I know you desired it." One document survives. It describes in fairly clear language the series of steps through which one might purify the element mercury: wash it repeatedly with a particular soap that would, Boyle wrote, force it to "throw out any feculency that may lie concealed in [mercury]."

  Simple as it sounded, Boyle's experiment clearly fascinated Locke, and Newton felt compelled to give his friend one last warning. To his certain knowledge, Boyle had first examined this process as much as twenty years earlier, "and yet in all this time I cannot find that he has either tried it himself or got it tried with success by anybody els." Newton, for his part, wanted nothing to do with it. He was glad Locke had received instruction from Boyle's papers, for "I do not desire to know what he has communicated but rather that you would keep ye particulars from me ... because I have no mind to be concerted with this R any further than just to know ye entrance." Locke could go ahead if he wished, regardless of Newton's efforts to "perhaps save your time and expense." Yet for all his studied lack of interest, Newton allowed he had a project of his own: "I intend ... to try whether I know enough to make a [mercury] wch will grow hot with [gold]."

  To find a substance, some "mercury," that will interact with gold? Now Newton was getting to the nub of the matter. Boyle's reluctance to part with all he knew, even to Newton; Newton's initial circumspection with Locke; Locke's own withholding of the larger and more provocative part of the process—all these derived from the fact that the three men were talking—or rather, trying not to talk about—one of the deepest mysteries of the natural world. William Chaloner was not the only man in England searching for a way to create wealth without limit. The esoteric recipe hidden in Boyle's papers—or so Newton and Locke hoped, or wondered, or doubted—contained a method by which someone adept in the manipulation of matter and heat could transform base metal into pure, lustrous, immortal gold. In other words: alchemy.

  From this distance, after almost three hundred years of systematic chemistry, alchemists seem little better than con men, or at best self-deceivers. To modern eyes, alchemy is groundless superstition, the same sort of unreason that led some of Newton's contemporaries to fear the occult powers of witches.

  In fact, alchemists had a bad reputation by Newton's day too. Ben Jonson parodied them as greedy charlatans in The Alchemist, first performed in 1610. His hero, Subtle, wields a half-mastered patter of alchemical jargon in order to gull the gullible and win the affections of a comely nineteen-year-old widow. He openly counterfeits: to persuade one reluctant client to hand over the last of his money while he waits the two weeks or so for the alchemical process to produce cartloads of gold, he offers "a trick / to melt the pewter, [that] you shall buy now, instantly / and with a tincture make you as good Dutch dollars as any are in Holland."

  And yet, Robert Boyle, who was neither a criminal nor much given to folly, pursued alchemy with passion. So did Isaac Newton for more than twenty years, with all the concentration and effort that he devoted to mathematics or physics, producing more than a million words of notes: queries, copies of older texts, and page after page of laboratory results. He and Boyle and Locke—and dozens of others throughout Europe—still felt the urgent need to mix and shake and heat and cool compound after compound, in pursuit of something more valuable to them than mere gold. Why?

  Because, at least for Newton, alchemy offered two prizes of infinite worth. The first was the usual aim of Newton's investigations: knowledge of the created world. Alchemy, as he and Boyle approached it, was an empirical, experimental science. Its theory was occult—literally, hidden—but its practice was hard, hot, and practical, the manipulation of matter with heat, solvents, weights and measures. Each alchemical experiment told Newton some fact about the behavior of the physical world.

  That was an end worth seeking on its own terms, but it was the second aim of the work that drove Newton's periodic near-obsessive concentration on alchemy. Newton understood the implications of the expanding reach of natural philosophy, of course—none better. When he first encountered the mechanical worldview, he had concluded that it made no sense to declare that "ye first matter" derived from any prior source, "except God." He crossed out those last two words, it's true—but he had written them down first.

  And in them, Newton recognized the essential fact that remains at the core of modern science with its material explanations for physical events. In a world composed entirely of matter in motion, the traditional role of God had to shrink. The author of a mechanical universe could put events in train, but after that primary impulse, the cosmos could then wend its way forward through time on its own.

  It was not just Newton who felt the chill of an increasingly Godless nature. Every careful observer understood the implications of the new approach. The year after Newton was born, one of its central proponents, René Descartes, had to defend himself against charges of atheism. In 1643, Martin Schoock, a professor of philosophy at the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands, bitterly condemned Descartes as the "prince of Cretans" (from the old gibe about the man from Crete who assures his hearers that he speaks the truth when he says that all Cretans are liars); for being a "lying biped"; and, worst of all, because "he injects the venom of atheism delicately and secretely into those who, because of their feeble minds, never notice the serpent that hides in the grass."

  To Schoock, the sin lay less with Descartes' physics and more with his reverence for the power of human reason. He was particularly suspicious of what he saw as the Frenchman's strangely weak affirmation of the existence of God. (Descartes complained of the unanswerable nature of the charge to the French ambassador to The Hague, writing that "simply because I demonstrated the existence of God, [Schoock] tried to convince people I secretly teach atheism.") Descartes himself escaped serious consequences. But the stench of atheism stuck to the new science—and by the time Newton first came into contact with Descartes' work, the implications of a physics that virtually eliminated the need for God to act in history were obvious even to a youth just starting to read the basic texts on the fringes of the educated world.

  Newton ultimately demolished Descartes' physics, and long before that he had found a way, satisfying at least himself, to restore God to the center of the action in space and time—most dramatically, perhaps, in his arguments for why the sun and the planets should experience their mutual gravitational attraction.

  His early writings about how divine action shaped the solar system were still a bit vague, as in the letter he wrote in 1675 to Henry Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society, in which he suggested "so perhaps may the Sun imbibe this Spirit copiously to conserve his Shining, & keep the Planets from recedeing further from him." But Newton had sharpened his view by the time he came to the Principia. Gravity, he argued, derived from divine action. There, he invoked the presence of God directly, declaring that when the tails of comets brushed past the earth, they deposited that spirit "which is the smallest but most subtle and most excellent part of our air, and which is required for the life of all things."

  As Newton developed his thinking, his new physics grew ever more hospitable to his vision of an omnipresent, omnipotent, all-knowing, and, above all, an active deity, fully present in the material cosmos of space and time. He explicitly offered the Principia as testimony to the existence and
glory of all-creating divinity: "When I wrote my treatise upon our System, I had an eye on such Principles as might work wth considering men fore the beleife of a Deity," he wrote to Richard Bentley, an ambitious young clergyman preparing the first of the series of lectures Robert Boyle had endowed in defense of Christian religion. "Nothing can rejoice me more," Newton added, than that his work would prove "useful for that purpose."

  Finally, in 1713, Newton expressed his mature conception of divine action in a short essay added to Book Three of the second edition of the Principia. Called the "General Scholium," it contains a passionate account of God triumphant in nature. He wrote, "This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being." How smart? How powerful? "This Being governs all things"—and Newton meant governs—"not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all." What are his attributes? "The true God is a living, intelligent, and powerful Being ... He is eternal and infinite, omnipotent and omniscient." Where does this God reside? "He endures forever and is everywhere present ... He is omnipresent not virtually but also substantially."

  This was a God to animate the dry bones of mathematical philosophy. Existing everywhere, for all time, he is "all similar, all eye, all ear, all brain, all arm, all power to perceive, to understand, and to act." All this within a cosmos that Newton elsewhere called his "boundless, uniform Sensorium," within which God could "form and reform the Parts of the Universe."

  That is: Newton's God existed everywhere, "substantially"—really, materially there, able to impinge on matter instantly, through all of space and time. The observed fact of cosmic order, combined with Newton's demonstration that human mathematical reason could penetrate that order, implied (necessarily, to Newton) the existence of that perfect being from whom both order and intelligence derived. Newton's natural philosophy was thus, as he had told Bentley, explicitly an inquiry into what could be discovered through the properties of nature about the divine source of all material existence.