by Philip Kerr
I was quickly able to perceive the true character of the allegations that were being made, and how perhaps my master had underestimated the gravity of his position—if one might say such a thing about Isaac Newton—for, soon after our going into Their Lordships, they touched upon the seriousness of the situation and their strong dislike of all religious dissenters and occasional conformists. After which the porter brought Count Gaetano into the room—he that had attempted fraudulently to deceive my master into believing that he had turned lead into gold.
Remaining on his feet, to make his statement before Their Lordships, Gaetano appeared nervous and most unpersuasive, but even so I had not expected the Italian to lie so egregiously, and there were moments during his testimony when I was so shocked at his testimony that I was almost unable to keep a note of what he said.
He charged that Newton had dishonestly solicited a bribe in order that that he should verify that the gold sample the Count had shown him was genuine. He also charged that Newton had threatened to go before the Royal Society and, upon his oath, to denounce the Count as a fraud if he did not pay my master the sum of fifty guineas; and that when the Count cautioned Newton against false swearing, my master had laughed and told him how he cared not what he swore upon the Bible, since he did not believe anything that was written in it anyway.
Reminding Newton that, by case of law of 1676, English common law was the custodian of Scripture and, to some extent, doctrine, Their Lordships said that these were serious allegations made against Newton, although he was not on trial; and that their only aim was to make certain that the wardenship of the Mint was entrusted to a fit and proper person. It was milord Harley who led the enquiry against Newton, and milord Halifax who did the most to defend him.
Newton rose to his feet to answer the Italian’s charges. He spoke entirely without emotion, as if he had been debating a matter of science with members of the Royal Society; but I could see how shaken he was by these allegations, which did cleverly mix the circumstances of the Count’s transmutation with the ambiguous character of Newton’s faith.
“I should like Your Lordships’ permission to lay before Your Lordships a letter that has been sent to me from the Dutch ambassador in London,” said Newton.
Their Lordships nodded, at which point Newton did hand me the letter to convey to their table. I got up, picked up the letter, brought it to the table, bowed gravely, laid it before them, and then returned to my chair next to Newton.
“It will confirm that the Count stole fifteen thousand marks from the ambassador’s cousin at the court of Vienna.”
“That’s a damned lie,” declared the Count.
“Count Gaetano,” said milord Halifax, handing the letter along the table for Their Lordships’ perusal. “You have spoken. You must allow Doctor Newton the chance to refute your allegations, without interruption.”
“Thank you, milord. The ambassador,” declared Newton, “informs me in this letter how he is prepared to give evidence in person that the Count has travelled Europe obtaining money under the pretence of demonstrating the transmutatory art. In London he is the Count Gaetano; but in Italy and Spain he has been the Count de Ruggiero; while in Austria and Germany he called himself Field Marshal to the Duke of Bavaria.”
Newton waited for the effect of this revelation to make its effect, before adding: “The truth, however, is that he is plain Domenico Manuel, the son of a Neapolitan goldsmith and the pupil of Lascaris, who was another great charlatan and mountebank.”
“Rubbish,” snorted the Count. “Nonsense. The Dutch ambassador is as wicked a liar as you are, Doctor Newton; either that or a drunkard and a sot, like the rest of his countrymen.”
This last remark did not sit well with Their Lordships, and it was Lord Halifax who articulated their obvious irritation.
“Count Gaetano, or whatever your name is, it may interest you to note that, as well as being a distant cousin of the Dutch ambassador, our own dear King William is also a Dutchman.”
All of which left the Italian in considerable disarray.
“Oh well, I did not mean to suggest that His Majesty was a drunkard. Nor indeed that all Dutchmen are drunkards. Only that the ambassador must be mistaken—”
“Be silent, sir,” commanded Lord Halifax.
After this, Newton had little difficulty in discrediting Count Gaetano’s story even further; and finally Their Lordships ordered the Count removed, and conveyed under guard to Newgate, pending further investigation.
“We are not out of the woods yet, I fear,” murmured Newton as the porters escorted Gaetano from the Whitehall chamber.
“Bring in the next witness,” commanded milord Harley. “Bring Mister Daniel Defoe.”
“How did he get out of Newgate?” I whispered; and yet while my bowels were wracked at what Defoe might say against my master, I let my face dissemble a different story, smiling confidently at him as he entered the chamber, so that he might apprehend the improbability of his doing any injury to the reputation of one so great.
It cannot be doubted how the Italian’s arrest had a most palpable effect on Mister Defoe; and when he came into the chamber he seemed mighty put out by the other man’s fate. But he soon recovered his composure, and proved to be a much more obdurate sort of witness.
The allegations he made against Newton were twofold: one, that he had entered a dissenting church of French Socinians in Spitalfields; and the other, that he was a close friend of Mister Fatio, the Swiss Huguenot to whom I had been introduced in the coffee shop, just before I became sick with the ague.
“This same Mister Fatio,” explained Defoe, “is strongly suspected of belonging to a cult of extreme dissenters who believe that they can resurrect a dead man in whatever cemetery they see fit.”
“How do you answer, Doctor Newton?” asked Lord Harley.
Newton stood and bowed gravely. “What he says is entirely true, milord,” said Newton, which drew a loud murmur from their Lordships. “But I’ll warrant that these matters can easily be explained to your satisfaction.
“I entered the French church in an effort to find information that might enable me to shed light upon certain murders that have occurred in the Tower, and which I believe are known to you. One of the dead men, Major Mornay, had been a member of this French church, and I went there in the hope that I might speak to the Major’s friends and to see if there were any circumstances that might have led him to take his own life.
“As to Mister Fatio, he is a young man who holds certain views that are repugnant to me. But he is a member of the Royal Society and my friend also, and I am satisfied in time that his intelligence will allow him to appreciate his youthful folly, and to see the good sense of the arguments I have frequently advanced in opposition to his obviously blasphemous views.”
At which point Newton did glance at me, as if his words were meant for me, too.
“For I believe it better that we live in a country where foolish men can be led out of their ignorance by the wiser counsel of their elders, than by torture and execution as still persist in less happier countries than ours, such as France.”
“Is it true,” asked Lord Harley, “that you, Doctor Newton, did order Mister Defoe thrown into prison?”
“Milord, what else was I to do with a man whom I caught in the very act of conducting a clandestine search of the Mint office, where there were many Government papers of a secret or sensitive nature affecting the Great Recoinage?”
“Is this true, sir?” Lord Harley asked of Defoe. “Were you apprehended in the Mint Office?”
“I was arrested in the Mint office, it’s true,” said Defoe. “But I was not searching the office for Mint papers.”
“Then what was your business in the Mint office?” asked Lord Halifax. “Did you not go there when Doctor Newton and his clerk were elsewhere?”
“I did not know that they were elsewhere. I sought to bring before the Warden information regarding certain coiners.”
“The Min
t office is kept locked when my clerk and I are not there,” said Newton. “It was not I who admitted Mister Defoe to the office. Nor my clerk. Moreover, his so-called information was no more than a lie to try to explain his unauthorised presence in our office. And can Mister Defoe now swear out a warrant against one of these coiners whose names he sought to bring to my attention?”
“I did not have names,” said Defoe. “Only suspicions.”
“Suspicions,” repeated Newton. “I have those, too, Mister Defoe. Do not think that you can try to hoodwink Their Lordships as you tried to hoodwink me, sir.”
“It is you who are the liar, sir, not I,” insisted Defoe, who now played his best card. “Are you prepared to take the Test Act in front of Their Lordships, to prove that you are a good Anglican?”
This Test Act of 1673 required that a man, usually someone in public office, receive Holy Communion according to the rites of the Church of England; which was something I knew the anti-Trinitarian Newton would never do; and for a moment I persuaded myself that all was lost. Instead, Newton sighed most profoundly and bowed his head.
“I will always do what Their Lordships require of me,” he said, “even if that means humouring a man who has been imprisoned for bankruptcy and who is himself a dissenter from the established religion.”
“Is this true, Mister Defoe?” asked milord Halifax. “That you are a bankrupt?”
“It is, milord.”
“And are you yourself prepared to take the Test Act?” persisted Lord Halifax.
“Doctor Newton plays a loose game of religion and Bo-peep with God Almighty,” declared Defoe, and then hung his head. “But, in all conscience, milord, I cannot.”
Perceiving this self-righteous and peevish streak in Mister Defoe, Their Lordships dismissed him with a warning to be more careful of whom he accused in future. After which Lord Halifax moved that Lord Harley offer Their Lordships’ apologies for having had Newton endure such baseless charges by such worthless rogues as those we had seen. Lord Harley did so, but said that Their Lordships had only conducted this inquiry in the best interests of the Mint. And with that the hearing ended.
When we were outside the chamber, I congratulated Newton most warmly, and declared myself most mighty relieved at the outcome. “It is as Aristotle says in his Poetics,” I said. “That the plot is the soul of tragedy. For this plot could very easily have succeeded and left you dismissed from your office. Perhaps worse.”
“That it did not is partly thanks to your diligence, in discovering much about Mister Defoe,” said Newton. “And Mister Fatio’s, too. For it was Fatio who wrote to his friends on the Continent about Count Gaetano. But in truth my enemies were ill-prepared. Had they been stronger, they would have felt better able to reveal themselves.”
I shook my head. “To think of what might have happened, sir. You must return home at once.”
“Why must I?”
“Your niece, Miss Barton, will be most anxious to hear what has happened, will she not?”
But already his thoughts lay elsewhere.
“This has all been an unwelcome distraction from the main business in hand,” he said. “Which is the decipherment of that damned code. I have cudgelled my brains and still I can make nothing out of it.”
Over the next few weeks Newton continued to make only slow progress with the cipher, which moved me to suggest, when we were in the office one day, that he might seek the help of Doctor Wallis of Oxford. But Newton treated my suggestion with scorn and derision.
“Ask help of Wallis?” he said with incredulity, as he set to stroking the cat. “I should sooner solicit the opinion of Melchior. ’Tis one thing to borrow a man’s books, but quite another to make use of his brains. Go to him, cap in hand, and confess that I am baffled by this cipher? Why, then the man would bend Heaven and Earth to do something which I could not; and, having done so, would tell all the world. I would never hear the end of it. It would be better that I stuck a bare bodkin in my own side than let him put a thorn there to plague me with.”
Newton nodded angrily. “But it is right that you hold this up to me, for it serves to prick my thinking parts toward the devising of the solution of this conundrum. For I’ll not be dunned like some vulgar arithmetician who can practice what he has been taught or has seen done but, if he is in error, knows not how to find it out and correct it; and if you put him out of his road, he is at a complete stand.
“Yes sir, you encourage me, by God you do: to reason nimbly and judiciously about numerical frequency, for I swear I shall never be at rest till I get over every rub.”
Thus I observed that the cleverer the person, the more certain is his conviction that he is able to solve a puzzle which nobody else can solve; and that this goes to show the truth of Plato’s theory that knowledge involves true belief but goes beyond it.
After that, Newton was almost never without a black lead and a sheet of paper that was covered with letters and algebraic formulas, with which he strove to work out the cipher’s solution. And sometimes I altogether forgot that he did this work. But I well remember the time when Newton finally broke the code. All of a sudden there was great talk of a peace with the French near signing. Formal negotiations between ourselves and the French had been under way since May, at the Dutch town of Rijswijk. This was just as well, for it was common knowledge that the fleet was in a dreadful parlous state at anchor in Torbay, for want of provisions that was occasioned by the severe lack of good money. It was even said by my brother Charles that we had borrowed Dutch money to pay English sailors, and if so, then it’s certain nothing but a peace could have retrieved our situation.
The date was August the twenty-seventh, 1697, and I can still recall how I was a little surprised when Newton ignored my news of the peace and instead informed me, most triumphantly, that the deciphering of the letters was done and immediately made pertinent sense.
I accepted his word on the matter straightaway—for there was no denying the look of immense satisfaction on his face—and congratulated him most warmly upon the solution; and yet he still insisted on demonstrating the ingenious construction of the cipher in order that I might be satisfied of the truth of what he said. Newton drew his chair up to our table in the Mint office and, pushing Melchior away from his papers, showed me the many pages of his copious workings.
“In truth,” he explained, with much excitement, “a brief glimpse of how I might solve it presented itself to my mind just a few days ago, but only very vaguely. But now I see that it is all to do with constants and functions, which is but a cruder system of my own fluxions.
“The code is based in part on a system that uses a single short and repeating word, known to both correspondents, as the key to the cipher. Let us say that the keyword is your own surname. The encipherer repeats this keyword beneath his message, thus.” Newton wrote two lines of text on a sheet of paper:
“Observe,” he continued, “how all the letters of the alphabet have a numerical value from one to twenty-six.”
“The letter T in our message is the twentieth letter in the alphabet,” he said. “We add this to the key letter that appears below. This is an E and the fifth letter in the alphabet. The sum of these two letters is twenty-five, which is the letter Y. This becomes the first letter of our cipher. Of course the sum of two letters may easily be more than twenty-six, for instance with the letters T and 5. Their sum is thirty-nine. Therefore, in order that we do not run out of cipher letters, we start the alphabet again so that after the letter Z, which is worth twenty-six, the letter A becomes worth twenty-seven, and so on. In this way, thirty-nine gives us the cipher letter M. When it is finished, the whole message in cipher would read as follows.”
“The person wishing to decipher the message,” continued Newton, “executes the procedure in reverse. He writes out the cipher with the key word repeating underneath, and subtracts their numerical values. E, worth five, is subtracted from Y, worth twenty-five, which gives us twenty. Twenty-six is then added,
to take account of any minus numbers. This gives us forty-six and the letter T. Equally, if we look at the cipher word XUPAY, we see that if we subtracted our keyword letter S from the cipher letter A, we would end up with one minus nineteen, which gives us minus eighteen. Minus eighteen plus twenty-six is worth eight, which gives us the letter H, from the message word LIGHT.”
I nodded as, slowly, I began to understand the character of the cipher he described.
“As I said to you before,” explained Newton, “the code we have been dealing with here in the Tower is based on this general principle of a repeating keyword. But this makes it most susceptible to solution, for the key is always in full view of him who would make the decipherment. For example, you may perceive that in the cipher the letter X occurs twice in the cipher, and both times it conceals the same message letter L. Similarly the letter U occurs three times, and twice it conceals the message letter I. And it can be observed that one quarter of the time, common fragments such as the ‘TH’ in ‘THE’ will correspond exactly to ‘EL’ in ‘ELLIS.’ This is the weakness inherent in the system.
“Therefore the person who devised this key added an ingenious and numerical force that produced a motion within the key to hide those common fragments much more effectively. And yet so simple too, for the keyword itself changes based on the message, in a simple series progression. In this system, the keyword becomes a function of the letter L.
“The first five letters of the message would be encrypted in the normal way.”
“But for the next five letters, the key changes based on the five encrypted letters—Y,T,Q,U, and H—according to whether or not the letters of the encryption appear before or after L. Any encrypted letters between M and Z cause the keyword to be incremented by one letter. But any letters before or including L cause the requisite letter of the keyword to remain the same. Or, to put it another way, Ato L are our constants, while M to Z are our variables. For example, with:”