Newton and the Counterfeiter (23 page)

With Peers back on board, Newton proceeded as usual, working his way up the gang to weave the strongest possible net of evidence around his primary target. He was in luck: Thomas Holloway was already in custody, confined to the King's Bench Prison since April for an unpaid debt. Peers visited him, telling him that Gravener had taught him, too, how to use Chaloner's new casting method. Holloway, unsuspecting, sent Peers on to the gang working at the Egham house, and Peers produced eighteen counterfeit shillings, thus proving his willingness to take the risks involved. Chaloner was furious when he heard of the newcomer, blasting the incautious Gravener as "a Rogue for teaching him." But the damage was done. Newton again arrested Holloway, now for coining, and with the danger of the death penalty hanging over him, Chaloner's closest confidant had every reason to talk.

He didn't, at least not at first. But then Newton caught a break. Chaloner grew tired of waiting for the Egham plan to generate a return, so he and another man, Aubrey Price, came up with a new scheme. On August 31, the two men came of their own free will before the Lords Justices to present evidence of what they claimed was a Jacobite conspiracy to attack Dover Castle. They offered to infiltrate the plot as couriers and thus to intercept whatever passed among the notional conspirators.

It was a harebrained notion by any stretch—neither the phantasmagoric quality of the supposed plot nor the credentials of Chaloner and Price as Jacobite thief-takers inspired any confidence. Chaloner must have been either truly desperate for cash or else just overweeningly confident—or he may simply have thought that the worst that could happen was that the justices would say no.

And that's probably what would have happened but for an astoundingly bad bit of luck. On the same day Chaloner tried to sell his story, Newton was giving advice on whether to execute a coiner convicted in an unrelated case. The two men seem almost to have tripped over each other in the halls. Newton recognized Chaloner and identified him to the Lords Justices. The order came back immediately: he was to arrest William Chaloner and prepare the case that would put a final stop to his career. And so, on September 4, 1697, agents of the Warden of the Royal Mint committed Chaloner and Price to Newgate Prison.

Newton had followed his instructions, but he was not a happy man. He knew that the evidence he had gathered against Chaloner so far was perilously thin. In fact, he told the Lords Justices that he did not have enough believable testimony to hold Chaloner for anything more than a misdemeanor. No matter, he was told: let the jury wallow in the gory details of Chaloner's minor offenses, however unrelated to the actual charge. With their minds thus prepared, the justices assured him, London jurors would be ready to return felony convictions on less than airtight evidence. So Newton did as he was commanded, and began to prepare his case for trial.

In the meantime, Chaloner readied his counterattack. At first he merely muddied the waters: he accused Price of being the mastermind of the various plots that might form the basis for a charge. Price returned the favor—and two minor members of the conspiracy also testified, enough to threaten the same kind of muddle that had so damaged the investigation of the theft of the Mint dies. But Chaloner did not place all his trust in mere confusion. He next launched a direct attack on the core of Newton's case.

By far the most dangerous potential witness against him would be the man closest to him, Thomas Holloway. At the time Chaloner was jailed, Holloway had been released, probably in exchange for promised testimony at the upcoming trial. But Newgate was a sieve, and a clever man could reach through its walls and touch those outside. Chaloner turned to Michael Gillingham, the keeper of an alehouse near Charing Cross, who had previously run the kinds of delicate errands that came up in Chaloner's line of work.

On or about the seventh of October, Gillingham met Holloway in his tavern and made him an offer. Chaloner would pay his old friend handsomely—twenty pounds, enough to cover his expenses for several months—if he would only have the good sense to leave for Scotland, beyond the reach of English law. Holloway did not accept immediately. Gillingham kept up the pressure, alternating the carrot and the unstated, but clearly understood, stick: in the past, Chaloner had betrayed men who could endanger him, sending at least two to the gallows. To help Holloway assess his options, Gillingham played benefactor, renting lodgings for his family and promising to take care of his children for the five or six weeks before they could be sent to join their parents in Scotland. When Holloway demanded assurances, Gillingham brought in as guarantor Henry Saunders, a tallow dealer both men knew and apparently trusted.

Finally, Holloway agreed to make a run for it. Gillingham gave him no time to think twice. He handed Holloway nine pounds on the spot. He paid another three pounds to Skipper Lawes, master of the ship that would carry Holloway's children to Scotland. A few days later, Saunders again accompanied Gillingham as Chaloner's agent. Holloway handed Gillingham a document empowering him to collect some debts owed him, and then he and his wife mounted two horses hired for the journey north.

There was one last detail to square away: Holloway had told the livery owner that he intended to return the rented horses that night—but Gillingham knew that this was just one more casual fraud. He went to the livery stable in Coleman Street and "told the man of the house that his horses would not be at home till two or three dayes were over"—news that must have cost him the extra hire. Why did he bother? Because he "would not have Holloway persued by the man for his horses."

Then, with every thread meticulously woven up, Gillingham visited Newgate to report to his client—still with the useful Harry Saunders in tow. Chaloner "asked him if Holloway was gone away." Gillingham said he was—which had the desired effect, as Saunders reported: "Chaloner then seemed to be Very joyfull and said a fart for ye world."

Newton's premonition of fiasco was justified. With Holloway nowhere to be found, the two other witnesses recanted, although what the defendant did to produce such sudden amnesia is unknown. The case never reached the jury; the presiding judge dismissed the charges. By the end of October or the beginning of November, after seven weeks in jail—in irons, he claimed—Chaloner walked out of Newgate, a free man once more.

F
REE CHALONER MIGHT
have been, but he was a deeply worried man. By December 1697, he was virtually destitute. Keeping up the appearance of respectability before Parliament had left him short of cash. Pile on a seven-week stay in Newgate, and the cupboard was bare.

With winter approaching, trying to live on what his jailers had left him goaded Chaloner to the point of recklessness. Had not an English judge refused even to present the trumped-up case against him to an English jury? Had he not suffered the shackles, the squalor, the naked corruption of Newgate? Should not someone compensate this guiltless man for all the wrongs done to him?

On February 19, 1698, Chaloner laid his portrait of abused virtue before Parliament in a document he also had printed for public distribution. "Your Petitioner," he wrote, "did in the last sessions of Parliamt discover several abuses committed in the Mint." And what was his reward for such service to the Crown? "Some of the Mint threatned by some means to prosecute him & take away his life before the next sessions of Parliament." His accusers had gone so far as to conspire with the worst kind of scum to suborn the crime that would bring him to his death: "some of the Mint have imployed & given Privilege to several persons to coyn false money ... all of which was done with an intent to draw him [Chaloner] into coyning to take his life away."

This attempt at judicial murder failed, defeated by Chaloner's determined virtue: he was concerned only "to find out the Treasons & Conspiracies against the King & Kingdome" and then "this year writing a book of the present state of the Mint & the defects thereof ... wch he hoped would have been of service to the Publick." That the Mint would not abide, of course, and so, Chaloner charged, "they committed him to Prison & so prevented him from doing it."

The miseries of the cells had brought him "great sufferings & ruined condition," and left him "incapable of providing himself & family." There must be someone to make him whole, or as Chaloner humbly put it, should give him "such redress as shall seem best in your Honours great Wisdom & Justice."

There could be no doubt whom Chaloner really meant by that careful phrase "some of the Mint." Isaac Newton was the only man who had both means and motive to use the power of the state to kill a man for private revenge. Newton himself certainly understood. He copied out Chaloner's petition in his own hand, and four versions of his reply survive in his papers. Bitter anger runs through all of them, along with a healthy dose of disdain: "If he would be let the money & Government alone & return to his trade of Jappaning," Newton wrote in his first attempt at an answer, "he is not so far ruined but that he may still live as well as he did seven years ago when he left of that trade & raised himself by coyning."

Yet an odd, pleading tone also pervades each of the drafts. The problem was that Chaloner was telling the truth, more or less. Witnesses had failed to appear. No link had been shown between the coining den in Egham and Chaloner himself. The case—as Newton had feared—was laughably weak. His complaint that Chaloner had "laboured to accuse and vilify the Mint" looked like confirmation that Chaloner's arrest was ordered out of injured pride. His declaration that there were "divers witnesses that Mr Chaloner last spring & Summer was forward to Coyn" was true but beside the point, given that none of those witnesses proved willing to show up in open court. And when he complained without proof that the defendant was guilty of the kind of witness tampering that "gravells prosecutions & renders it dangerous for any man to prosecute," he simply sounded weak in the face of an opponent who had bested him.

It got worse. Newton added: "I do not know or beleive that any privilege or direction was given by any of the Mint to draw him or his confederates in." That phrasing sounds just a bit too careful a dodge—and it was, for of course it was Newton himself who had given John Peers money and sent him off to infiltrate the Egham gang—even bailing Peers out of Newgate to do so. Here he seemed to be looking for plausible deniability if Peers or any of his other agents should turn up to confirm Chaloner's tale.

Chaloner's petition sparked yet another official investigation, and for the moment roles were reversed: Isaac Newton was standing in the dock, defending himself against the charge of framing an innocent man. A panel of senior government figures was assembled to look into the matter, and though the group was stacked with Newton's friends—Charles Montague and such reliable allies as Lowndes and James Vernon, then serving as Secretary of State—initially the evidence heard by the group, including Chaloner's own testimony, tended to favor Chaloner's claim. The panel persisted, however, and as other witnesses testified, more and more gaps turned up in the plaintiff's story. In the end, the investigators produced a report that dismissed Chaloner's claims—but quickly, in a bald rejection that did not satisfy Newton's hunger for a full exoneration.

But if Newton felt aggrieved at this perceived slight—the more so, perhaps, for having been so nearly caught out—he knew who had truly caused him such vexation. He was certain that Chaloner had committed crimes against the King, and that was bad enough. And now he had formed "a confederacy against the Warden."

This was new: Chaloner had been just one more anonymous offender, against whom equally interchangeable officials would take the steps needed to cut short a criminal career. But no longer. This one criminal had targeted a single, specific officer, the Warden. Alone of all those he sent to Newgate and the gallows in his years as the coiners' scourge, the Warden of the Mint did William Chaloner the honor of treating him as an individual antagonist—someone not merely to be stopped, but crushed.

The ruthlessness to come in the pursuit of Chaloner had deeper roots than mere anger over the humiliation of having to defend himself in public. Newton had already proved willing to pursue ends over means when he acquiesced in the Lords Justices' suggestion to so prejudice the jury as to extract a felony conviction for misdemeanor offenses. But the ferocity he showed through the next phase of his campaign against Chaloner suggests that there may have been more than mere
raisons d'état
driving him. Chaloner could not have known that there was a hidden thrust concealed within his challenge to the Warden, one that touched Newton's most private faith.

Faith indeed, for any counterfeit had religious significance. The magic that transformed a disc of metal into legal tender came from the image of the King's head on the face of a coin. The King ruled by the grace of God. To steal that likeness was an act of lèse majesté, an offense against the sacred person of the monarch. Coining was a capital crime because of the danger it presented to the state; it ascended to the odium of treason because of its insult to the Crown.

But while that was true for any counterfeiter, Chaloner had mocked not just King William III but also Isaac Newton, and on very specific ground. By 1698, Newton was no longer a practicing alchemist. Still, Chaloner's counterfeiting was, in effect, a blasphemous parody of the alchemist's dream to multiply gold without limit—the equivalent of a black mass, in which a toad or turnip takes the place of the consecrated Host. The same would have held true for any forger, of course. Yet none but Chaloner ever set himself up as a direct rival to Newton's mastery over metal.

Did that trespass matter? Did Newton pursue Chaloner more intensely than he would have absent his own alchemical history? It is impossible to know. Clearly, Newton's motives for hounding his quarry were overdetermined: duty and personal offense as well as any secret defense of faith all fed into the mix.