Newton and the Counterfeiter (10 page)

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.

T
HE 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.