Newton and the Counterfeiter (22 page)

Chaloner's next move brought him to the point of the entire exercise. Having proposed a technique to thwart those who cast their counterfeits, he offered a new plan to defeat those who stamped their products. Current coins, he said, were of "such bad Workmanship so that every Graver, Smith, Watchmaker &c. can Grave Stamps to counterfeit Money, and Stamp it with a Hammer, upon a Stone." The incompetents at the Mint could not outthink a mere blacksmith—but Chaloner could. He had brought with him the materials to show the worthy men of Parliament how the nation's currency ought to be produced. All it would take were a few minor alterations to the Mint's machines, which he could make in the moneying rooms at the Tower in a few days and for a modest charge—no more than a hundred pounds or so. Then the modified coining machines would be able to "Stamp ... the Impression so high as to make it Impossible to do with a Hammer or a small Engine"—and even better, his improved methods would require only "two Horses...[to] do all the work, which now Imploys 70 or 80 Men." When all was in place—new tools, modified methods, and a couple of willing horses—then, Chaloner wrote, the new money would be "more Beautiful, and Durable than now our Coyne is made."

And what, besides a bit of cash and a week or so, would be required to achieve such a triumph? Not much, a mere trifle: just that "The Proposer hereof being order'd to perform some of his Proposals in the Mint." As ever, Chaloner kept his eye on the prize: access to the Mint, its tools, its river of hot, precious metal.

The implications of Chaloner's testimony were missed by no one—certainly not Isaac Newton. In a response to Parliament, he wrote that "M
^r
Chaloner before a Committee of the last session of Parliament labored to accuse and vilify the Mint." Newton's responses were consistently defensive—discordantly so, given his usual tone of absolute authority. In one draft memo he wrote, weakly, that he was not to blame for the behavior of the assay master and the melter because their false coining at the Mint happened "three weeks or a month before ye Warden knew any thing of these matters." He went on to complain that some of his own testimony had been omitted from the committee report, as if he had been reduced to mere procedural objections.

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 M
^r
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.

T
WO 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 brasses 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.