The other four witnesses were sworn and spoke in quick succession. Elizabeth Holloway seems not to have testified to her Scottish odyssey, but she and Katherine Carter told what they knew—or what they were willing to say—about Chaloner's superlative skill as a coiner. Another witness agreed with Mrs. Carter that he had seen Chaloner make dud shillings on the day specified in the indictment. Both were almost certainly lying, at least in the details. In all the depositions Newton had taken over the preceding four months, several witnesses described Chaloner's June experiments with molded pewter shillings, but none mentioned any coining in August.
But even so, what could Chaloner say? It hardly advanced his cause to argue that he had made false coins two months before the day Newton's witnesses claimed, and that they were shoddy products, not the high-quality fakes they described.
The last to speak for the prosecution was John Abbot, the metal dealer turned coiner whom Thomas Carter had betrayed to Newton in January. Abbot swore that Chaloner approached him in 1693 or 1694, seeking to use his countinghouse. Abbot resisted, not wanting to turn Chaloner loose on his premises, "because wh silver and Gold he had was there." But eventually, as Abbot had told Newton, he cleared out a back room and locked Chaloner into that one space. On his return half an hour later, he opened the door of the countinghouse "& going in found the said Chaloner there in his shirt fileing of Gineas round ye edges and saw him edge them when he had done filing and that he edged them with a piece of Iron which had a grove running along the middle of it."
Moving on, Abbot reported that in 1695 Chaloner had shown him several blank stamps about the size of guinea dies—and which he said "he could get to be struck with the Tower Dyes and that they were fitted to be struck on both sides like a Ginea but broader and he said that Patrick Coffee could get them done any day at noon by a journeyman Smith in the Tower." Hearsay, surely, but it would have taken an exceptionally cautious jury not to be swayed by what Chaloner purportedly did next: he "told the Deponent that he had got his business done."
Here at last the muddle of the Tower dies was resolved—and Abbot was not done yet. He claimed that Chaloner had boasted to him of coining in a house in Mark Lane that yielded six hundred pounds' worth of half-crowns in nine weeks. He also testified that Chaloner had come to buy the silver he needed for the operation from Abbot's own shop, and had tried to pay his bill with counterfeit cash. When confronted with his dud coins, Abbot said, Chaloner first tried to brazen his way out of the debt by threatening to sue Abbot for failure to deliver promised goods. Abbot refused to budge, and Chaloner backed down, paying his reckoning with money that had in fact seen the inside of Newton's Mint. He then sealed the deal by giving Abbot a good dinner—"a Treat at the 3 Tuns in Woodstreet."
Chaloner could see the jurymen on either side of him. He could gauge the tenor of his judges. He must have understood what the prosecution was doing. Legal niceties be damned: his enemy had placed him at the center of enough crimes to hang him, even if they weren't the offenses of which he was accused.
The last witness answered a final question. The prosecution ceased. The judges faced the prisoner. What defense had he to offer? By Newton's careful design, Chaloner had almost no options left. He had not known which former friends would testify. He had no counsel, no legal advice. He had to speak then and there, with no chance to reflect, to organize an argument, to seek out witnesses of his own.
Even so, Chaloner was not completely without resource. He spoke out angrily that the court should recognize that the witnesses were perjurers, lying about his deeds to save their own guilty hides—a claim that was at least partly true. Chaloner was "very sawcy in Court, affronting Mr. Recorder [Lovell] divers Times," one observer wrote. But it was clear that neither judges nor jury were going to credit claims of perjury above his former associates' descriptions of specific crimes.
Chaloner retained one last hope. He had not been able to prepare for the testimony against him, but he had listened to every detail of it. He noted where he was supposed to have forged pistoles, crowns, half-crowns, and shillings. Abbot's shop—a London address. The Tower—within the precincts of the City of London. The Flask tavern—London again, and so on through each devastating retelling of offense after offense. And yet Chaloner faced charges brought by a Middlesex grand jury, being heard by a Middlesex trial jury. How could such a court, Chaloner asked, address crimes committed outside its jurisdiction?
It was a neat argument, and in fact the law was on Chaloner's side. Both the Middlesex and the London grand juries met in the same hall at the start of each criminal court session, and both returned indictments to be heard in the Old Bailey. On one day for which a detailed schedule survives, the court opened with two London cases heard before a London jury, followed by the trials of eight Middlesex offenders, all before the correct Middlesex jury. Those ten trials finished by the midday meal break. Such chopping and changing happened all the time—and it reflected the problem of matching legal tradition to the sprawl of the metropolis, which created a continuous habitat for crime that extended far beyond the formal boundaries of the old City of London.
So Chaloner's was not a purely random shot. A similar strategy would work for his nemesis John Ignatius Lawson when he came before a Middlesex jury later that year. Although he had already confessed to crimes sufficient to hang a dozen men, those specified in the indictment—charges that Newton would have had to prepare—had been committed in London, and thus, the judges in that case ruled, could not be addressed in the Middlesex court. In what can only be seen as Newton's payment for services rendered, Lawson walked out of court a free man.
A sympathetic judge could have similarly ordered Chaloner's release. A prosecutor who merely wished to put a scare into a potentially useful prisoner could have eased the court to that conclusion. But not this time. There was no one in court with any charity toward William Chaloner. Lovell and the rest of the judges ignored his objection.
The rush of the court, the pressure of the dozen other cases to come that same day, meant he had to speak and be done—and he did, having offered what observers judged "but an Indifferent Defence." "The Evidence was plain and positive," so after Chaloner had spoken, the judges gave the case to the jury. Juries in this period would retreat to a separate chamber only in complicated cases where they had to decide on the guilt or innocence of several defendants. For a simple matter, they would huddle together for a minute or two in the middle of the courtroom.
They did not keep Chaloner waiting long. Ignoring the lesser charges, the jury "soon after brought him Guilty of High-Treason."
The next day, March 4, 1699, the prisoner stood once more at the bar of the Old Bailey, now to hear his sentence:
Death, by hanging.
The trial of William Chaloner was over.
25. "O I Hope God Will Move Yor Heart"
CHALONER DID NOT GO silently to his appointed fate. "After his Condemnation, he was continually crying out that they had Murder'd him," his biographer recorded, that "the Witnesses were perjur'd and he had not Justice done him." He fought, he raged, he whimpered. Following the conventional demands of the true-crime genre, his one biographer mocked Chaloner's terror, writing that he "struggl'd and flounc'd about for Life, like a Whale struck with a Harping Iron."
One hope remained to him. The presiding judge had to forward the death sentences imposed at each court session to the King and his ministers for review. The court could recommend clemency—but not Lovell's, not in this case. On March 19, Secretary of State Vernon brought nine capital cases from the sessions to William Ill. Two of the condemned received royal mercy, and lived. But Chaloner "was too well known to be credited"—certainly to the men handling the appeal. In essence, whatever the defects of his trial, Chaloner's crimes were too familiar to those in the know. Thus "his Character contributed to his Ruine ... so that the Warrant for Execution being sign'd he was amongst the number appointed to die."
Chaloner received the news in Newgate. He was
still being watched, more for entertainment now than for any judicial purpose. Thomas Carter reported to Newton that "Chaloner ... p[er]sistted to the last how in[no]sent he was for wh. he dyed." His biographer added (or, as likely, manufactured) the sensational details: on hearing the King had signed his death warrant, Chaloner "bellow'd and roar'd worse than an Irish woman at a Funeral; nothing but Murder! Murder! Oh I am murder'd! was to be heard from him." He was inconsolable: "nothing cou'd be thought on to make him take that patiently, which he must embrace whether he would or no."
Chaloner was certainly terrified. In a last letter to Newton, he started off badly, writing as if there were still something to be argued: "allthough p[er]haps you may think not but tis true I shall be murdered the worst of all murders that is in the face of Justice unless I am rescued by yor mercifull hands." He reprised all the defects of his "unprecendented Tryall": that none of the witnesses told the court they had actually seen him coin; that London crimes could not be tried by Middlesex juries; that most of the testimony did not bear on the date specified in the indictment; that the witnesses perjured themselves out of malice and self-interest.
Toward the end of the letter he seems to have realized that his tone was hardly likely to persuade the man who had orchestrated every detail of the proceedings that had brought him to the edge of disaster, and in his final passage Chaloner abandoned any semblance of argument. "My offending you has brought this uponn me," he wrote. But could not his enemy relent? "Dear'S[i]r do this mercifull deed O for God's Sake if not mine keep me from being murdered."
And then: "O dear S[i]r nobody can save me but you O God my God I shall be murderd unless you save me O I hope God will move yor heart with mercy and pitty to do this thing for me."
And once more:
I am
Yo[u]r near murdered humble Servt
W. Chaloner.
Isaac Newton, victorious at last, did not trouble himself to reply.
The morning of March 22 found William Chaloner in full cry. A day or two earlier, in a last gesture of bravado, he had sent the long-missing Malt copper plate to the Tower—a gift for the Warden of the Mint. But now, when his jailers came for him, he brandished a list of complaints and demanded that it be printed. He was refused.
To the chapel next, where he joined the other prisoners bound for the gallows. He may have sat before the coffin that was sometimes placed on a table before the condemned men's pew. When the chaplain urged him to show the proper spirit of repentance, Chaloner refused, shouting with "more Passion than Piety." The chaplain tried to calm him, but Chaloner raged on. "Notwithstanding the great Care and Pains of the Reverend Ordinary, twas difficult to bring him to a sense of that Charity and Forgiveness proper to all Christians, but more especially to [d]ying Men." Finally, Chaloner steadied himself enough to receive the sacrament, and the doomed worshipers filed out into the open air.
The convoy set out at about noon, bound for the traditional execution ground at Tyburn, now Marble Arch. Some of the condemned men traveled in style. John Arthur, an infamous highwayman, sat at ease in a coach and was cheered by the crowd as he paused at public houses along the way, arriving at the gallows as drunk as he cared to be.
Chaloner had no such comfort. Once Parliament turned coining into a species of high treason, the execution of coiners followed the same brutal sequence of punishment laid down for those found guilty in Guy Fawkes's Gunpowder Plot. A traitor drank no gin. No one cheered his name. Chaloner was brought to the place of execution on a rough sledge—no wheels. There were no underground sewers in seventeenth-century London, only courses in the roadways to carry sewage to the river. As the sledge bounced along, fountains of filth would have erupted, human and animal waste splattering his clothes, arms, face. All the while he continued to call out his innocence, crying "to the Spectators that he was Murder'd by Perjury." He would have reached the execution ground at Tyburn stinking, wet, cold, and mercilessly sober.
The method of execution for traitors had been in place since Edward I killed the Scots insurgent William Wallace. The condemned must be "hanged by the neck but not until you are dead ... taken down again, and that whilst you are yet alive, your bowels [must] be taken out and burnt before your faces, and that your bodies be divided each into four quarters, and your heads and quarters be at the King's disposal." Counterfeiters got a reprieve: they were permitted to choke on the noose till they died, so that any mutilation of their bodies would take place on their corpses.
At his turn for the gallows, Chaloner once more cried out that "he was murder'd ... under pretence of Law." A minister approached him and again bade him show the penitence and forgiveness demanded of those about to die. This time Chaloner accepted his set role and paused for a moment "to pray with much fervency."
The rope dangled from three crossbeams set in a triangle—Tyburn's Hanging Tree. Prisoners mounted a ladder to put their heads through the noose. Trap-door gallows that could kill quickly would not enter common use in England for another sixty years. When the moment came, the executioner's men would pull the ladder out of the way and the condemned dangled, twitching and jumping (the "hangman's dance") as long as it took—sometimes several minutes—for life to choke out of him.
Chaloner showed courage at the end. He mounted the ladder. Then, "Pulling his Cap himself over his Eyes, [he] submitted to the stroke of justice." Richer men often paid the hangman to pull on their legs to speed death. Not the destitute Chaloner. He had to choke till he drooped, to the greater amusement of the crowd.
William Chaloner lies in no known grave. He does possess an epitaph, the last lines of the biography printed within days of his execution:
"Thus liv'd and thus dy'd a Man who had he square'd his Talent by the Rules of Justice and integrity might have been useful to the Commonwealth: But as he follow'd only the Dictates of Vice, was as a rotten Member cut off."
* * *
Epilogue
"He Could Not Calculate the Madness of the People"
ISAAC NEWTON did not attend William Chaloner's execution—there is no hint that he even considered doing so. He had other counterfeiters to pursue, and his work continued in the narrow rooms of the Tower.
Apparently, though, criminal London occupied him less once Chaloner was gone. After compiling more than two hundred interrogations through the peak months of that investigation, Newton collected just sixty more on various cases over the next year and a half. He may simply have been resting on the laurels he had earned for his work on the recoinage. From a purely manufacturing perspective, England's currency was sounder than it had ever been. According to the Mint's teller, Hopton Haynes, under "this gentleman's care we have seen it brought to that extraordinary nicety ... as was never known in any reign before this."
Results like these earned Newton his reward at the end of 1699. Thomas Neale, the impressively useless Master of the Mint, displayed a previously unobserved knack for timing by dying in December. Within the web of patronage and obligation that ruled English politics, the mastership was a lucrative plum. Apart from a salary of £500 a year, the Master received a fee for every pound of metal coined at the Mint. Neale had made an additional £22,000 that way during the recoinage, even though Newton had done the work. Newton was not a particular political favorite; nonetheless he became the only Warden in the history of the office to move directly into the Master's position, in what was clearly a response to his role in saving England's coinage. He took up the new post on his fifty-seventh birthday, Christmas Day, 1699.
With that his fortune was made. The Mint remained busy enough to throw off extraordinary sums from time to time. In his first year, Newton took in £3,500—enough to persuade him, finally, to give up his no-show Cambridge professorship, with its paltry stipend of £100. He would have much less profitable periods, but according to a calculation by Richard Westfall, Newton on average took in about £1,650 a year during his twenty-seven years as Master. Never truly poor, he was now well on his way to being genuinely rich.
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br /> In the new century, Newton also returned to some of the questions in natural philosophy that had consumed him in his youth. At the end of 1703 he became president of the Royal Society after another death, that of his old antagonist Robert Hooke, and within a couple of months he presented the society with the manuscript of the second of his two great books, Opticks.
Opticks reported the results of the investigations of light and color that had first brought Newton to the attention of the Royal Society back in the early 1670s. The book also presented Newton's first full declaration of all that he believed to be true, across the range of investigations that had consumed his life. He argued for intellectual humility; in a draft of the introduction he acknowledged, "To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. Tis much better to do a little with certainty & leave the rest for others that come after than to explain all things by conjecture without making sure of any thing." But he maintained the unity of natural phenomena, writing about the concept of forces acting on bodies from a distance: "It's well known that Bodies act upon one another by the Attractions of Gravity, Magnetism and Electricity; and these Instances shew the Tenor and Course of Nature," for, as Newton argued, in one of his most famous epigrams, "Nature is very constant and conformable to her self." Thus, he argued, other such hidden forces would be found throughout the natural world.
Perhaps most significantly, he allowed himself to declare publicly a private conclusion he had reached long before. He acknowledged that mechanical ideas tended to eliminate the necessity of God: "Latter Philosophers banish the Consideration of such a Cause out of natural Philosophy," he wrote, "feigning Hypotheses for explaining all thing mechanically and referring other Causes to Metaphysicks." But this was an error in method, he asserted, announcing that for his part he sought to deduce "Causes from Effects till we come to the very first Cause." Not for him merely "to unfold the Mechanism of the World," but to learn "Whence is it that Nature doth nothing in vain; and whence arises all that Order and Beauty which we see in the World."
Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist Page 22