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

by Thomas Levenson

  Nevertheless, Chaloner did not entirely convince the members of the committee, not even with his bravura demonstrations of what a coiner of real skill could do. But he did impress them. They found that "undeniable demonstrations have been given and shewn unto this committee by Mr. William Chaloner, that there is a better, securer and more effectual way, and with very little charge to his majesty, to prevent either casting or counterfeiting of the milled mony ... than is now used in the present coinage." And so, on February 15, 1697, the committee commanded Newton to "prepare or Cause to be prepared such matters and things"—inside the Mint—"to the End [that] the said Mr Chaloner may make an Experiment ... in relation to Guineas." That is, if the committee were to be obeyed, Isaac Newton had to welcome into the Mint a man who had just argued as publicly as possible that the Warden of the Mint was a fool, a thief, or both.

  Newton chose not to comply. He had legal grounds to refuse the order. The oath he had sworn on taking up his post bound him never to allow an outsider to see the Mint's edging mills. Instead, he asked Chaloner to tell him how his methods worked, and when Chaloner refused, took it on himself to "direct the workmen (without him) to groove some half crowns, shillings and six pences." Newton himself carried those coins to the committee, demonstrating that Chaloner's ideas were unworkable. And there the matter rested, at least officially. If the House was offended at the Warden's recalcitrance, it did not stop its investigative committee from pasting a large section of Newton's testimony into the final report, verbatim.

  But the fact of Chaloner's charges remained a public stain. Chaloner continued to press his claim through the spring of 1697, still hoping that the pressure of parliamentary patronage would win him entry to the Mint. It did not. He had miscalculated—though it was not yet obvious how badly. Newton had been perfectly ready to forget William Chaloner after the messy business of the missing Tower dies the year before. But the parliamentary report, with its praise for Chaloner, was an open sore. Through page after page of draft rebuttals, written in a cramped and crowded hand, passages crossed out and written over in tiny, hasty, furious script, great gobs of ink blotted here and there, runs Newton's private rage. He complained of "calumny" and of the offense given by Chaloner's "libeling ... in print." Publicly, though, he held his tongue. He waited and he watched, he and his agents, eyes and ears open all across London.

  18. "A New and Dangerous Way of Coining"

  TWO BRUSHES WITH Isaac Newton had done nothing to diminish Chaloner's sense of invulnerability. He continued to hold out hope that despite Newton's resistance, he would yet be granted a powerful post within the Tower's moneying rooms. He boasted to his brother-in-law that having "fun[ne]d the Lords of the Treasury and the King out of 100 pounds," he would not leave Parliament "till he had fun[ne]d them likewise."

  Such confidence must have made what happened next a truly galling disappointment. Newton proved able to sustain his defiance of Parliament's order. Chaloner was not to be admitted to the Mint under any pretext. He could not use the Mint's machines to demonstrate his ideas. He would not be asked to join the Mint's staff in any role, much less that of supervisor. According to Chaloner's biographer, the investigating committee finally saw through the persuasive coiner: while he had "accus'd that Worthy Gentleman Isaac Newton Esq; Warden of this Majesties Mint, with several other officers thereof, as Connivers (at least) at many Abuses and Cheats," in the end, the committee "appointed to examine the same ... upon a full hearing of the matter, dismissed ... Chaloner with the Character he deserv'd."

  It did not happen exactly that way; the need to preserve the appearance of a morality tale made the polite lie necessary. In fact, the endorsement of Chaloner's anti-counterfeiting measures in the committee's public report obscured the underlying political reality, which was that the committee was the work of Charles Mordaunt, Earl of Monmouth, and his friends, this time seeking the Master's post at the Mint for an ally. Newton, and even the feckless Thomas Neale, had seen the investigation for what it was: part of a larger, longer game of parliamentary maneuver. Both, however, were members in good standing of England's ruling faction, and they knew that there was never the slightest chance that the government would undermine its friends and reward any of its parliamentary opposition with an admission that the Mint was badly run. The committee did not condemn Chaloner as a liar and a thief—quite the reverse. But neither they nor anyone else was willing to expend any political capital to force him on a Warden who was clearly determined to keep him out.

  The issue came to a head in late spring of 1697, when the parliamentary session ended with no offer of preferment for Chaloner. The news shocked him. Worse, it left him very close to flat broke. His last visit to Newgate would have been as expensive as usual, and he seems to have abstained from any coining enterprises while trying to run his long con on Parliament. But by the end of the winter, "his money grew short," and he acknowledged that "if ye Parliament did not give him encouragement he must go to work again." On March 10 or 11 he commissioned "a stamp for a shilling" from an engraver with whom he had worked before. If he could not trick the government into making him wealthy, he would make his fortune in the familiar way, with what Isaac Newton himself called "a new and dangerous way of coining."

  Chaloner now reassembled his old firm. He recruited his longtime co-conspirator Thomas Holloway, and the two of them resumed their partnership, whereby Chaloner supplied the brains and the ambition and Holloway took charge of the logistics. Desperate for a quick infusion of cash, Chaloner told Holloway to "take a house in the Country, convenient for coyning," while "he should find materials."

  Holloway worked quickly, finding a house in the village of Egham, in Surrey, about twenty miles southwest of London. Operations on a scale to satisfy Chaloner needed plenty of space, as they produced a lot of noise and heat along with a constant flux of raw materials, finished goods, and people. Such hubbub could never go unnoticed in London. Every coining scheme in the capital relied on the willed blindness—bought, coerced, or born of indifference—of dozens of witnesses. This omertà never held indefinitely. Newton filled his case files—and Newgate—with reports of coining operations in tenement rooms or close-packed houses observed by neighbors or captured small fry who had seen coining apparatus as they came and went with their handfuls of dud crowns or guineas. A rich man's house, either in town or in the country, would not do either. High walls and enough room could defeat the curiosity of strangers, but it was impossible to keep any substantial coining operation secret from the servants any wealthy household would employ.

  The choice of a village house evaded both traps. It was private enough to avoid too much local scrutiny. It was modest enough so that no servants need apply; the new tenants would take care of themselves. Best of all, Chaloner and Holloway appear to have believed, it was far enough from London to escape the Warden's immediate notice.

  While Holloway worked out the details of the new location, the ringleader handled his chores. Chaloner's "new way" of coining was essentially a variation on the traditional method of casting counterfeits. But his understanding of the demands of high-quality casting seems to have impressed even Isaac Newton, who documented each step of his nemesis's process as he learned it from a parade of informers. The key to casting successful counterfeits lay with the quality of the stamps or molds that impressed the image of the two faces of a coin. To make sure that his molds would pass muster, Chaloner cut the face and reverse patterns into wood blocks and then handed them off to Holloway, who took the patterns to a metalworker named Hicks. Newton caught the essential detail in the next step. Ordinary molds opened to receive molten metal, and reclosing them to produce both the top and bottom faces of the coin could leave suspicious marks. So Chaloner directed Hicks to produce a brass mold that had a channel, or a kind of spout, through which metal could be introduced into the casting chamber—thus, in theory, reducing the likelihood of introducing flaws or telltales into the finished counterfeit.

  From Hicks, the b
rasses now traveled on to a third man, John Peers, who was to file their faces. This step would refine the quality of the image they would leave, making them practically indistinguishable from the faces of coins struck by the Mint's machines. Last, Chaloner insisted on counterfeiting only shillings, which meant that the new molds would be "but little ones ... so that they might be hidden anywhere."

  Early in his career, Chaloner had held close his knowledge of the counterfeiting process, maximizing his take from each dud coin. Now he was more concerned to distance himself from any actual contact with a false coin. So he agreed to teach the Holloway brothers the secrets of his "new way quick and profitable." John Holloway proved an indifferent student, but Thomas showed his quality once again. Chaloner would arrange for someone to pass their bad shillings into circulation, and with this division of labor, "the three should share the profit."

  It was a good plan. It should have worked. But within a few weeks, the whole scheme started to fall apart.

  On May 18, John Peers—the man Chaloner had chosen to put the finish on his new coining molds—appeared before a magistrate to answer a charge unrelated to the current scheme. When pressed by his interrogator, however, he spilled his guts, volunteering as much as he could of Chaloner's plans. He testified that one of Chaloner's gang had asked him to make an edging tool of the sort used by counterfeiters. He said that he had seen "Cutters and Tooles Instrumts proper for coyning" at a house occupied by Chaloner's brother-in-law, Joseph Gravener (also Grosvenor). Peers admitted his own guilt for providing some of the "divers Tooles necessary" for Gravener's coining ambitions, and he claimed to have seen Gravener "actually counterfeit a Milld Shilling." He said that Chaloner was pressing his brother-in-law to deliver the equipment needed in Egham by promising that he "would have him in a Proclamation about a Fortnight since at Clark's the Flask Tavern"—a deadly threat, as it meant that Gravener would stand publicly accused of a capital crime. Last, and probably most galling, Peers testified that he had heard Chaloner make his famous boast that he would "fun" Parliament as he had previously defrauded the King and the Treasury.

  Unfortunately, Peers's information took its own sweet time to reach the man who most needed to hear it. Newton learned of the confession only by accident, three months after the initial deposition. In early August, he visited the Secretary of State's offices to question another counterfeiter in a case unrelated to Chaloner's. There, finally, someone mentioned what Peers had said. The news shocked Newton into action. He arrested Peers on August 13 and brought him to the Tower for questioning. He recognized the obvious, however: nothing in Peers's account directly implicated Chaloner, and nothing very significant had happened yet. Newton needed more, and he knew what he had to do to get it. He released Peers and gave him five shillings for walking-around money, in exchange for which Peers was to report on the doings of Chaloner's gang.

  Peers soon ran into trouble. Newton's criminal opposition seem to have noticed his habit of questioning suspects in the Mint, and information about who entered and left by the Tower's western gate became a valued commodity. Within a day, the wrong people knew that Peers had spoken to the Warden. Someone—it is not clear who—denounced him as a counterfeiter to a thief-taker, who promptly delivered Peers to Newgate. Newton had his own sources on the street, however, and word of the arrest reached him almost immediately. He bailed his man out the next day, paying the bill out of his own pocket.

  With Peers back on board, Newton proceeded as usual, working his way up the gang to weave the strongest possible net of evidence around his primary target. He was in luck: Thomas Holloway was already in custody, confined to the King's Bench Prison since April for an unpaid debt. Peers visited him, telling him that Gravener had taught him, too, how to use Chaloner's new casting method. Holloway, unsuspecting, sent Peers on to the gang working at the Egham house, and Peers produced eighteen counterfeit shillings, thus proving his willingness to take the risks involved. Chaloner was furious when he heard of the newcomer, blasting the incautious Gravener as "a Rogue for teaching him." But the damage was done. Newton again arrested Holloway, now for coining, and with the danger of the death penalty hanging over him, Chaloner's closest confidant had every reason to talk.

  He didn't, at least not at first. But then Newton caught a break. Chaloner grew tired of waiting for the Egham plan to generate a return, so he and another man, Aubrey Price, came up with a new scheme. On August 31, the two men came of their own free will before the Lords Justices to present evidence of what they claimed was a Jacobite conspiracy to attack Dover Castle. They offered to infiltrate the plot as couriers and thus to intercept whatever passed among the notional conspirators.

  It was a harebrained notion by any stretch—neither the phantasmagoric quality of the supposed plot nor the credentials of Chaloner and Price as Jacobite thief-takers inspired any confidence. Chaloner must have been either truly desperate for cash or else just overweeningly confident—or he may simply have thought that the worst that could happen was that the justices would say no.

  And that's probably what would have happened but for an astoundingly bad bit of luck. On the same day Chaloner tried to sell his story, Newton was giving advice on whether to execute a coiner convicted in an unrelated case. The two men seem almost to have tripped over each other in the halls. Newton recognized Chaloner and identified him to the Lords Justices. The order came back immediately: he was to arrest William Chaloner and prepare the case that would put a final stop to his career. And so, on September 4, 1697, agents of the Warden of the Royal Mint committed Chaloner and Price to Newgate Prison.

  Newton had followed his instructions, but he was not a happy man. He knew that the evidence he had gathered against Chaloner so far was perilously thin. In fact, he told the Lords Justices that he did not have enough believable testimony to hold Chaloner for anything more than a misdemeanor. No matter, he was told: let the jury wallow in the gory details of Chaloner's minor offenses, however unrelated to the actual charge. With their minds thus prepared, the justices assured him, London jurors would be ready to return felony convictions on less than airtight evidence. So Newton did as he was commanded, and began to prepare his case for trial.

  In the meantime, Chaloner readied his counterattack. At first he merely muddied the waters: he accused Price of being the mastermind of the various plots that might form the basis for a charge. Price returned the favor—and two minor members of the conspiracy also testified, enough to threaten the same kind of muddle that had so damaged the investigation of the theft of the Mint dies. But Chaloner did not place all his trust in mere confusion. He next launched a direct attack on the core of Newton's case.

  By far the most dangerous potential witness against him would be the man closest to him, Thomas Holloway. At the time Chaloner was jailed, Holloway had been released, probably in exchange for promised testimony at the upcoming trial. But Newgate was a sieve, and a clever man could reach through its walls and touch those outside. Chaloner turned to Michael Gillingham, the keeper of an alehouse near Charing Cross, who had previously run the kinds of delicate errands that came up in Chaloner's line of work.

  On or about the seventh of October, Gillingham met Holloway in his tavern and made him an offer. Chaloner would pay his old friend handsomely—twenty pounds, enough to cover his expenses for several months—if he would only have the good sense to leave for Scotland, beyond the reach of English law. Holloway did not accept immediately. Gillingham kept up the pressure, alternating the carrot and the unstated, but clearly understood, stick: in the past, Chaloner had betrayed men who could endanger him, sending at least two to the gallows. To help Holloway assess his options, Gillingham played benefactor, renting lodgings for his family and promising to take care of his children for the five or six weeks before they could be sent to join their parents in Scotland. When Holloway demanded assurances, Gillingham brought in as guarantor Henry Saunders, a tallow dealer both men knew and apparently trusted.

  Finally, Holloway agreed
to make a run for it. Gillingham gave him no time to think twice. He handed Holloway nine pounds on the spot. He paid another three pounds to Skipper Lawes, master of the ship that would carry Holloway's children to Scotland. A few days later, Saunders again accompanied Gillingham as Chaloner's agent. Holloway handed Gillingham a document empowering him to collect some debts owed him, and then he and his wife mounted two horses hired for the journey north.

  There was one last detail to square away: Holloway had told the livery owner that he intended to return the rented horses that night—but Gillingham knew that this was just one more casual fraud. He went to the livery stable in Coleman Street and "told the man of the house that his horses would not be at home till two or three dayes were over"—news that must have cost him the extra hire. Why did he bother? Because he "would not have Holloway persued by the man for his horses."

  Then, with every thread meticulously woven up, Gillingham visited Newgate to report to his client—still with the useful Harry Saunders in tow. Chaloner "asked him if Holloway was gone away." Gillingham said he was—which had the desired effect, as Saunders reported: "Chaloner then seemed to be Very joyfull and said a fart for ye world."

  Newton's premonition of fiasco was justified. With Holloway nowhere to be found, the two other witnesses recanted, although what the defendant did to produce such sudden amnesia is unknown. The case never reached the jury; the presiding judge dismissed the charges. By the end of October or the beginning of November, after seven weeks in jail—in irons, he claimed—Chaloner walked out of Newgate, a free man once more.