Newton and the Counterfeiter (8 page)

Shoplifters had a similar battery of tasks divided among gang members. The mask distracted the shopkeeper while the lift grabbed the goods and passed them on to a receiver, or santar, who never entered the store and therefore could not, in theory, be tied to the robbery. Confidence tricks, loaded dice, rigged card games, and the like required similar networks of conspirators. Burglars learned from confederates how to pick locks. Fences, at the hub of criminal commerce, provided a clearinghouse for training, job leads, refuges, and alibis.

In this society of crime, a lone man or woman, unskilled, without friends, known to none of its gentry, would have found it almost intolerably dangerous to attempt a freelance rampage. Chaloner was too smart to try. Instead, he drifted to the hungry fringes of city life until he could find a way to its gilded center.

It took him only a few months, and the path he found earned him scandalized admiration from his biographer, who wrote, "The first part of his Ingenuity showed it self in making Tin Watches, with D—does &c in 'em." These Chaloner "hawk'd about the Streets, and therby pick'd up a few loose Pence, and looser associates."

That is, Chaloner's first attempt to rise above mere subsistence turned him into a purveyor of sex toys. London in the 1690s was as famous, or perhaps notorious, for its spirit of sexual innovation as Berlin would be in the 1920s. Prostitution was ubiquitous, as much a part of the life of the wealthy as it was that of the poor, who supplied most of the trade's workers. The best brothels vied to outdo each other in their range of offerings—so much so that Dr. John Arbuthnot, a man about town in the early eighteenth century, apparently spoke for many when he told a madam at one of the better houses, "a little of your plain fucking for me if you please!"

Anything a cultivated lecher might covet could be had: erotica in words and pictures, ribald songs, and lewd performances. Perhaps the most obscene work of theater ever composed comes from this period, the scabrous play
Sodom, or the Quintessence of Debauchery,
attributed to the notorious libertine John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester. Written in or around 1672, the play may be a disguised attack on Charles II (with whom Wilmot shared at least one mistress). Its description of a monarch attempting to promote sodomy throughout his kingdom has been interpreted as a coded denunciation of the Declaration of Indulgence of 1672, which pronounced official toleration of Catholicism. If that was the author's intention, the polemic comes very well disguised within its wildly ribald plot.

For those whom literary debauches did not satisfy, a market for sexual aids flourished. As early as 1660, just two years after Cromwell's death, which resulted in the decline of Puritanism, there were reports of imported Italian dildos being sold on St. James's Street. Homegrown entrepreneurs also sought to profit, although it remains something of a mystery just what Chaloner was trying to peddle. That his devices demonstrated "the first part of his ingenuity" suggests that they were more than mere knockoff phalluses. They probably were not true watches either. The technology of watchmaking had advanced a good deal by the mid-1670s. The spiral balance spring, invented by Robert Hooke, stored enough energy and released it precisely enough to allow small, hand-held clocks and watches to keep time accurate to minutes instead of hours—a key step in the evolution of timekeeping. Apprentices usually spent seven years learning the intricacies of clockwork. Balance springs would be used to drive clockwork puppet shows by the early eighteenth century, and it is possible to imagine early attempts to make pornographic displays. Yet it is doubtful that a former nailer's assistant could have mastered the art swiftly enough to begin making his own mechanical automata so soon.

More likely, Chaloner created his own variant of what were then being sold as toy watches. A watch was a mark of status, craved even (or especially) by those who could not afford the real thing. To meet that demand, London craftsmen began making imitations. Surviving examples—most recovered from the tidal margins of the Thames—all have the same basic design: two pieces of pewter, each cast into roughly the shape of half a pocket watch. One half would have a crude dial pressed into it, the other would be decorated with an echo of a gentleman's watch case. The two halves were soldered together and sold as a kind of affordable fashion accessory. Chaloner's metalworking knowledge would have been sufficient for this kind of work—and for the innovation of incorporating dildos into the pieces. He does not seem to have made much money at the scheme. But as his biographer hinted, this brief foray into the fringes of the sex trade was significant not so much for the loose change he managed to pick up as for the looser associates who thereby found him. Some of those new friends aided Chaloner in his next and more successful enterprise, which was built on another basic fact of seventeenth-century urban life: the relentless pressure of infectious disease.

The plague had not returned after the epidemic that ended in 1667, but thanks to London's crowding, its choking air, and its primitive hygiene, deadly disease was always present. Smallpox remained a scourge for both highborn and low. Londoners died of typhus as well—picked up so easily in the prisons that it became known as jail fever. Winters brought tuberculosis and influenza, and in summer, mosquitoes distributed malaria while the swarming flies spread dysentery, infant diarrhea, and more. Children were unbelievably vulnerable. Thirty-five to forty of every hundred children in London died before the age of two. Prosperity was not much protection. The Quakers, a reasonably well-off group and one of the least affected by the plague of cheap gin available throughout the city, lost about two-thirds of their children before the age of five. Virtually all parents would bury at least one infant.

William Chaloner knew a gold mine when he saw it. True medical expertise was expensive, scarce, and often ineffective, while the terror of disease supported a legion of folk doctors, fakers, patent medicine peddlers, confidence men and women. According to his biographer, in order to "satisfy an itching desire he had to be Extravagant," Chaloner found "a Companion little better than himself who had agreed together to set up for Piss-Pot Prophets, or Quack-Doctors."

The key to a quack's success lay in his ability to convince the desperate, and here the young man from Birmingham demonstrated the gift that would advance all his later endeavors. His biographer moralized, but recognized his skill nonetheless: "Chaloner having the greatest Stock of Impudence, and the best knack at Tongue-pudding, (the most necessary Ingredients in such a Composition) 'twas resolv'd that he sho'd personate the Master Doctor, and his Comrade bear the Character of his Servant."

Chaloner starred in the role, able to cajole, to wheedle, to command audiences to accept his authority as a man of uncommon skill and wisdom. His "servant" must have been equally as efficient in coaxing cash out the marks' hands, for Chaloner was soon able to rent a house on the proceeds. He married and sired several children (though it is not known how many, if any, survived). As the years passed, he expanded his repertoire from quack medical advice to a kind of divination, "pretending to tell sill' Wenches what sort of Husbands they should have, discovering Stol'n Goods &c."

This last proved his undoing. There was an obvious trick to recovering stolen property: steal it yourself in the first place. But it took a skilled and careful operator to pull off the scam repeatedly. A few years later, Jonathan Wild would establish control of the London underworld by organizing both sides of criminal undertakings on a citywide scale. He avoided direct participation in the robberies he stage-managed, profiting instead from his roles as restorer of lost property and "thief-taker"—betraying those who robbed out of turn, who competed with him, or who merely had begun to represent a risk to his liberty.

Wild managed this balancing act well enough to dominate the interface of respectable London and its underside for fifteen years. Chaloner, less cautious, blundered. Around 1690, his name surfaced as a direct suspect in a theft. He ran, ending up in the slums of Hatton Garden, anonymous and broke, with nothing better than "some Old Garret to repose his Carcase."

D
ESPERATION NOW DROVE
William Chaloner to his last apprenticeship. In his Hatton Garden tenement he met a japanner. The term first described those who varnished or finished surfaces, in imitation of the fine Japanese lacquer work that had reached Europe in increasing quantities over the previous century. From that original sense, it had broadened to include any refinishing involving a hard or opaque coating. Chaloner's neighbor specialized in blacking old clothes with a coating that could restore a degree of respectability to them—if you did not examine them too closely. Selling old clothes to the wretched was a poor man's trade, but Chaloner paid the man to teach him his craft. Then, as Isaac Newton himself would later note in the first entry in his dossier, Chaloner turned himself into a trader in "cloaths thredbare ragged + daubed with colours."

Newton would also later snipe that if Chaloner had remained content in this modest station, he could have avoided his later troubles. But Chaloner had never tolerated mere subsistence, and he had undertaken his new training with a specific end in view. Gilding—the art of coating surfaces with a thin, uniform coat—was a skill that could be applied to more than leather or cloth. In fact, the trade as a kind of archetype of deceit had deep roots. Almost a century earlier, in
The Winter's Tale,
Shakespeare's delusional, jealous Leontes gave voice to suspicions that his beloved son is a bastard, even though the boy looks like him—or rather: "women say so, / That will say anything. But were they false / As o'er-dy'd blacks."

Painting clothes was hard work for little profit. But metal? That was where money could be made. Although there is no record that Chaloner planned out his counterfeiting career, the sequence of his actions strongly suggests that he had figured out the opportunity, probably before his overeagerness as a stolen-goods man got him into trouble. Certainly, he took to his new enterprise quickly, applying his newly acquired technique to silver pieces with which "he thought it Probable to Counterfeit Guinea's, Pistoles [French currency], &c, which being Gilded well [with gold] and Edg'd, might pass for Current throughout the Kingdom."

Adding to the sense that this was a planned rather than an opportunistic move was Chaloner's timing. He saw his chance at the very moment that England was, literally, running out of money in what was a nationwide demonstration of Gresham's law—the axiom that bad money drives out good. The crisis was driven by a peculiarity of England's coinage, the fact that for almost three decades the country had two types of money in circulation: the hand-struck coinage produced up to 1662, and the coins manufactured since on machines installed in the Mint that year.

The older currency, struck by a Mint moneyer swinging his hammer, was irregular and prone to wear. Worse, it had smooth rims, which meant that anyone with a good pair of shears and a file could snip the edge of a coin and then file the piece smooth again. A cut here and a slice there and pretty soon a coin clipper could accumulate a healthy pile of silver, at the expense of a debased currency.

Clipping became epidemic in the 1690s, to the point that at the height of the crisis, "it was mere chance whether what was called a shilling was really ten pence, sixpence, or a groat," according to the Victorian historian Lord Macaulay. In one test of the state of the currency, Macaulay reported, "Three eminent goldsmiths were invited to send in a hundred pounds each in current silver to be tried by the balance." That much money, he wrote, "ought to have weighed about twelve hundred ounces. The actual weight proved to be six hundred and twenty four ounces." And so it went throughout the kingdom: money that should have tipped the scale at 400 ounces actually weighed 240 ounces at Bristol, 203 at Cambridge, and, at rival Oxford, a mere 103.

Clipped coinage was hardly new: it had been punished as high treason since Elizabeth's reign. Ever since, clippers were regularly caught, tried, and condemned to death by the rope or by fire, but with little effect, especially in the orgy of clipping that took place between 1690 and 1696. As Macaulay wrote, the news that one condemned clipper was able to offer six thousand pounds for a pardon "did much to counteract the effect which the spectacle of his death was designed to produce."

There was a still faster route to wealth available to those with access to more sophisticated tools. By 1695 counterfeit money accounted for about ten percent by value of all coins in circulation. The secret of that success lay in the counterfeiter's ability to crack the second and more formidable of England's two types of legal currency.

London had seen nothing like the new moneymaking machinery the Mint installed in 1662. The ubiquitous Samuel Pepys, then secretary to the Navy Board, wangled a personal tour on May 19, 1663. In the narrow Mint rooms crammed alongside the outer wall of the Tower of London, he saw an extraordinary spectacle of heat, noise, smoke, and men pushed to the point of collapse as they raced to keep up with the pace of the giant machines.

In the first room he toured, Mint workers tended intense charcoal fires beneath iron cauldrons, each large enough to melt up to a third of a ton of silver bullion at a time. Other workers poured the liquid metal into sand molds to make small rectangular ingots. Once the ingots cooled, the machines took over. Men broke the molds and passed the silver blocks through huge, crushing rolling mills, powered by horses driving giant capstans one story below. The thin plates that emerged went to lever-driven punches that pounded out round discs to be flattened by a screw press.

Pepys noted approvingly that the new money was "neater ... than the old way," displaying an unprecedented level of consistency. By law, each shilling was supposed to contain a precise weight of silver, and this mechanical approach linked the symbolic claim of value on the face of the coin—the marks on the coin that declared "this is a shilling"—to the material promise: "this coin contains 88.8 grains of silver, value, twelve pence."