by Jones, Nigel
The economic crisis caused by the silver shortage was acute. The great historian Lord Macaulay suggests that it was more grevious in its effects on ordinary citizens than even the recent political ructions of the Glorious Revolution which had ousted the Catholic King James II and brought his Protestant daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange to the throne in 1689. For, wrote Macaulay, ‘when the great instrument of exchange became thoroughly deranged, all trade, all industry were smitten as with a palsy. The evil was felt daily and hourly in almost every place and by almost every class.’ The crisis came to a head in 1695, when King William III found that the shortage of ready money – despite the foundation of the Bank of England in 1694 which lent the poverty-stricken government £1.2 million in its first year – was hampering his war against Louis XIV’s expansionist, Catholic France.
It did not take Newton’s logical mind long to grasp the cause of the crisis – and its cure. Since drastic penalties had not stopped the coin clippers, and the traders who exported silver were only obeying the iron dictates of the market, the practical solution was to make coin clipping unviable and the trade in silver unprofitable. Newton suggested a two-stage remedy. Step one: to recall the entire currency still in circulation. Since silver coins were rapidly disappearing thanks to the activities of the bullion traders this would not be such a gargantuan undertaking as it sounds. The recalled money would then be melted down at the mint and reissued as new machine-made money with milled edges to prevent clipping.
Step two was to deal with the export of silver, and for this Newton proposed changing the intrinsic value of the coins. As the dealers were only exporting the silver because it brought more gold abroad than in England, reducing the amount of silver in each shilling would make foreign gold more expensive when counted in English silver money. Correctly calculated, such a devaluation would make the cross-continental trade in English silver unprofitable at a stroke. Newton’s solution was the product of a modern, rational mind. At the dawn of the eighteenth century, the Age of the Enlightenment, he was weighing and assaying money not according to some mystic value lent by the monarch’s head on the coins, but by logic and common sense. Money was worth just what the metal making it up was worth in the marketplace – no more, no less.
In the event, only half of Newton’s radical scheme was put into effect. Parliament approved the recall and re-minting of the coinage, but baulked at the proposed devaluation. As a reward for his suggestions, however, a grateful government offered Newton the prestigious – and lucrative – post of Warden, or boss, of the Mint. With almost indecent haste, an equally grateful Newton accepted, packed his bags and books, left his lodgings at Trinity College, Cambridge, in April 1696, and moved into the Warden’s House in Mint Street near the Brass Mount bastion at the north-east corner of the Tower.
In reforming the currency, and curbing the coin clippers, Newton found himself up against a mind almost as daring and unorthodox as his own. But that mind belonged to a master criminal. It was a duel of wits as dramatic in its way as the fictional clash between Sherlock Holmes and his arch-enemy Professor Moriarty, the ‘Napoleon of crime’, and like that titanic struggle, could only end with the death of one of the protagonists. William Chaloner, Newton’s adversary, was, like the great scientist, a son of provincial England. Indeed, had he been born a few notches further up the social scale, his talents might have brought him fame and wealth, instead of infamy and an ignominious death on Tyburn tree.
The son of a Warwickshire weaver, born around 1660, the delinquent boy Chaloner was apprenticed by his parents to a Birmingham nail maker. It was here that young William got his first taste of coin counterfeiting by making fake Birmingham groats. But Chaloner had his eye on bigger prizes than mere groats, and around 1680 he walked to London to make his fortune. At the height of the rumbustious reign of the licentious Charles II, Chaloner used the metalworking skills he had picked up in Birmingham to make and sell such items as cheap tin watches for gentlemen and dildoes for the ladies, before graduating to becoming a quack physician and clairvoyant.
Chaloner’s quick wits and plausible patter – in vivid contemporary slang his ‘tongue pudding’ – were deployed to prescribe aphrodisiacs and other love potions for his female clients. In 1684 Chaloner had his first encounter with the Tower when he married a Katharine Atkinson, at the church of St Katharine by the Tower. He continued coining, producing fake French pistoles and English guineas and making an enormous profit in the process. Chaloner’s skill as a literal moneymaker was so great that he was soon acknowledged as the ‘most accomplished counterfeiter in the kingdom’, buying a house in fashionable Knightsbridge and a lifestyle to go with it. He rode around in a carriage with footmen and behaved like a born gentleman about town. Even his future mortal enemy Newton would be impressed, describing Chaloner’s transformation from a humble craftsman ‘in clothes threadbare, ragged and daubed with colours, turned coiner and in a short time put on the habit of a gentleman’.
In 1696, the year Newton became Warden of the Mint, Chaloner moved up a gear. He bought a house in the quiet Surrey village of Egham and moved in machinery to forge the sophisticated machine-struck coins now being turned out in the mint. The isolated house was deliberately chosen so that the noise of the forging would not attract suspicion, but the new warden was already hot on Chaloner’s trail. When he took over at the mint, Newton had conducted a tally of the coinage in circulation. The tally revealed that a staggering one in ten English coins was a fake. If the mass production of forged coins continued at such a rate, the realm’s legal tender would be debauched and the nation would face ruin. As the most talented and productive coiner in the kingdom, Chaloner had to be stopped.
It was now that Newton showed a dedication and ruthlessness that surprised anyone who imagined that the shy scientist who had spent most of his life among Cambridge’s ivory towers would be lost in the worldly atmosphere of the Tower mint and its sleazy environs. The unworldly scholar began to haunt the beery, smoky inns and sawdust-floored taverns surrounding the Tower – the Dogge was a particular favourite – hunting for clues, witnesses and evidence to nail Chaloner and his counterfeiting gang. By these means, Newton met and successfully suborned John Peers, one of the coiners working with Chaloner at the Egham factory. Newton persuaded Peers to turn king’s evidence – and although ‘the most accomplished counterfeiter in the kingdom’ got away with a short spell in Newgate prison, Thomas Holloway, Chaloner’s right-hand man, was convicted and hanged.
Banged up in Newgate prison, Chaloner blamed Newton personally for his plight. ‘The Warden of the Mint is a Rogue,’ he would tell anyone who listened. It was his turn now to up the ante and challenge Newton on his own ground. Chaloner’s method showed a boldness and ingenuity worthy of a higher calling than counterfeiting. In Newgate, Chaloner put his expert knowledge of coins and cash to work, writing a series of pamphlets on monetary policy, and recommending restricting the specialised tools of the coiners’ trade to curb their activities. Cheekily, Chaloner was advising the government on how to extricate itself from the financial morass he himself had helped create. It was chutzpah on a grand scale. As historian Thomas Levenson remarks, ‘William Chaloner writing on tax policy is a bit like John Gotti weighing in on Social Security, or the Kray brothers offering their thoughts on the National Health Service.’ Chaloner’s ultimate objective was even bolder: his pamphlets were just the opening shots in a campaign to get himself – crook and jailbird though he was – appointed overseer of the Royal Mint itself by smearing the mint’s existing staff – from Newton down – as the real criminals and larceners.
Chaloner charged the moneyers at the mint with a host of crimes: ranging from adulterating the coins they struck, to smuggling dies out of the Tower and selling them to counterfeiters. And Chaloner’s campaign got him a long way towards attaining his objective – in fact, into the chamber of the Privy Council, the very heart of government itself. Chaloner was aided by an embittered political patron
, Charles Mordaunt, Earl of Monmouth, out of office and keen to supplant the current chancellor, Charles Montague, Earl of Halifax – who was Newton’s patron. With Mordaunt’s help, Chaloner received a hearing for his accusations against the mint – and his remedies for beating forgers and coiners like himself. The ministers heard him out, but though they did not, as he had hoped, give Chaloner his coveted job in the mint, his ‘tongue pudding’ was convincing enough for them to order an investigation into security there.
Frustrated, Chaloner upped his game yet again. This time he set his sights on the newly founded Bank of England – he would become the country’s first ever master forger of the new-fangled banknote. To a champion counterfeiter like Chaloner, the world’s first banknotes – lacking such precautions as today’s inbuilt metal strip and complex cross-grained printing – presented few problems. He printed a stock of forged notes, and was ready to pass them into circulation when the bank, alerted by a dud note they had spotted, pounced on Chaloner’s printer, who promptly shopped him. Completely undaunted, Chaloner once again played the poacher turning gamekeeper: with barefaced gall he claimed that he had only printed the notes to show up their flaws and how easily they could be forged and duplicated. He helpfully betrayed his own counterfeiting confederates into the bargain. Astonishingly, not only did the bank believe him, but they even gave him a £200 reward for his useful information. Once again, Chaloner had made a monkey of authority.
But one man was determined not to be fooled: Isaac Newton. The new Warden of the Mint had begun his work at the Tower as he meant to go on: in a hurricane of activity. Previously the post had been a sinecure, but Newton was determined to be a hands-on boss. Elbowing aside the mint’s incompetent master (or production manager), Thomas Neale, he threw himself into every detail of the production process, from scanning its costs with the gimlet eye of the greatest calculator in the land, to ordering up new furnaces, rolling mills and coining presses to boost the mint’s coin-striking capacity from 15,000 to 40,000 coins a day. Under Newton’s command, 500 workers laboured for shifts of twenty hours a day – except on the Sabbath – on the re-coining of a total of £7 million.
The mint became a continuous production line, with a river of silver flowing in at one end of Mint Street in the south-west corner of the fortress, and newly minted coins jingling out of the other end near Newton’s house in the north-east corner, all overseen with obsessive interest by the warden himself. By the summer of 1698 the great re-coinage was complete. A triumphant Newton took satisfaction in the knowledge that his theoretical mind had grappled with and conquered a supremely practical problem. As a result, the kingdom had a shiny new currency; economic crisis and social disorder were averted; new money clinked in plump purses once more; the king was able to pay his armies; and production at the mint – which had hit 50,000 coins a day – subsided to less frenetic levels.
Freed from the immediate problem of keeping the kingdom afloat financially, Newton was left with the time and energy to pursue a combined role of detective, magistrate and chief security officer for the mint. Investigating the mysterious disappearance of a set of coining dies from the Tower, instruments which in the hands of William Chaloner could pose a deadly threat to the mint’s monopoly of making money, Newton once again embarked on the pursuit of his arch-enemy. To catch his thief, Newton set a gang of lesser criminals on the trail. Starting with two convicted coiners, Peter Cooke and Thomas White, lying under sentence of death in the noisome Newgate jail, Newton began to build a case against Chaloner. Dangling the possibility of a reprieve before their eyes, the theoretical-physicist-turned-unlikely-criminal-investigator persuaded the coiners to betray their former companion in crime. They admitted that the dies had been stolen from the Tower mint and sold to Chaloner to enable him to make near perfect replicas.
Newton stepped up his inquiry – which was now taking up half his working time and a large part of the mint’s budget. The physicist took like a duck to water to the unfamiliar milieu of stinking jails, dung-encrusted back alleys and the dingy inns where coiners gathered. He employed a small army of informers, narks and snoops to gather information about Chaloner and his associates. As a magistrate, he hauled suspects within the intimidating walls of the Tower and interrogated them closely, threatening them with the harsher penalties associated with the grim fortress unless they divulged all they knew.
The scholarly Cambridge scientist had turned into something closely resembling a police state persecutor, pursuing wrongdoers with righteous zeal. Newton’s biographer Frank Manuel comments, ‘There was an inexhaustible fount of rage in the man, but he appears to have found some release from its burden in these tirades in the Tower. At the mint he could hurt and kill without doing damage to his Puritan conscience. The blood of coiners and clippers nourished him.’ Although this goes too far – Newton killed no one, and there is no evidence that he injured them – he later burned the records of his interrogations, and the suspicion remains that he enjoyed the power he wielded over his terrified prisoners.
Apparently unaware of the snares that Newton was patiently setting for him, Chaloner continued his campaign to infiltrate the mint, appearing at the bar of the House of Commons in 1697 to denounce the fraud and forgery he claimed was rife at the Tower, and again brazenly proposing himself as the Hercules who could clear out the Augean Stables in Mint Street if only he were to be given access to it. So impressed with his ‘tongue pudding’ were the members of the Commons committee investigating the alleged abuses at the mint, that they ordered Newton to arrange an experiment in the Tower at which Chaloner could demonstrate his methods for foiling the coiners. Newton refused. Instead, he appeared before the committee himself, his pockets heavy with coins grooved according to Chaloner’s suggestions, to show up the flaws in the master forger’s schemes. Chaloner had been rebuffed – but it had been a close-run thing and Newton would not forget it.
The warden’s investigation into the dies filched from the mint had run into the sand. But when Chaloner openly accused Newton of incompetence at best, and himself of embezzling from the mint at worst, he made an error that would prove fatal, reviving Newton’s dormant enmity against him. Smarting under the public slight that Chaloner’s charges of malpractice had inflicted on him personally – he called them ‘calumny’ and ‘libel’ – and the idea that MPs would prefer the word of a common criminal to that of the nation’s finest mind, Newton plotted his revenge.
A year after he had last been there, in February 1698 a desperate Chaloner – flat broke after the failure of his Egham coining venture – was back before Parliament, this time as a petitioner, pleading that the mint was conspiring against him. He failed, and by that spring was reduced to penury. In an effort to restore his fortunes Chaloner attempted a fresh scam: forging the tickets for a newly established money-raising venture by the treasury, a national lottery. Chaloner was discovered, arrested and confined in the familiar Newgate jail. An implacable Newton took over the prosecution of his case. With a cold, single-minded fury, the warden set about weaving a noose around the neck of the man who had maligned him and his mint. In one non-stop, ten-day session at his house in the Tower Newton took no fewer than 140 witness statements on the case. He left nothing to chance, even inserting stool pigeons – compromised coiners – into Newgate to wheedle incriminating statements from Chaloner. A steady flow of their reports went straight from Newgate to the Tower to join Newton’s ever fattening case file.
Feeling the meshes of Newton’s net tightening inexorably about him, Chaloner went to pieces. His letters to Newton deteriorated from arrogance, to anxiety, to desperation, to blind panic. One of Newton’s spies reported to him that the coiner had gone mad, ‘pulling his shirt to pieces and running stark naked at midnight abot. the Ward for half an hour together’. As the shadow of the gallows loomed larger, Chaloner was ‘continually raving that the Devil was come for him and such frightful Whimseys’. Newton would have none of it. Suspecting that Chaloner’s ‘Lunacy’ was
as genuine as the coins he had turned out, he pressed ahead with constructing a cast-iron case against him.
When the case came to trial at the Old Bailey in March 1699, the court was merciless. After hearing the half-dozen former confederates of Chaloner assembled by Newton testify that he was a master coiner – and had used the missing Tower dies for his work – he was convicted of high treason and sentenced to die on the gallows at Tyburn. Newton studiously ignored a last plea sent from Newgate whose desperation echoes down the years:
My offending you has brought this upon me … Dear Sr. do this mercifull deed O for God’s sake if not mine keep me from being murdered. O dear Sr. nobody can save me but you O God my God I shall be murdered unless you save me O I hope God will move your heart with mercy and pitty to do this thing for me.
Newton remained unmoved, and was promoted from warden to the lucrative post of Master of the Mint at the end of the year – presumably as a reward for bringing Chaloner to the gallows.
He remained at the Tower for another quarter of a century, raking in an average of £1,650 a year, considerably more than the scholarly stipend of £100 a year he had earned as a professor at Cambridge. However, the great genius lost an estimated £20,000 of his new-earned wealth in the bursting of the South Sea Bubble in 1720. Even a mind as astute as his, it seems, could not resist the common human frailties of greed and folly. After the crash, Newton, old, disheartened and in failing health, arranged for his niece’s husband, William Conduitt, to succeed him as Master of the Mint, and retired from the close confines of the Tower where he had spent so many weary years. Two years later, nearly thirty years after Chaloner had choked his life out on the gallows, Newton followed him into the shades.