Newton and the Counterfeiter (19 page)

No one could quite say.

It was possible to see how the affair began—or rather, first became known to the authorities. One day early in the year, Charles Montague, Chancellor of the Exchequer, found in his office a petition to the King and his Privy Council, dated January 13, 1696, and signed by a suspected felon confined at Newgate Jail, William Chaloner. Chaloner blamed his current predicament on the testimony he had given to the councilors the previous summer of wild abuses at the Mint. Mint officers had responded to the accusations by arranging with a private thief-taker to round up some of their usual coining suspects to testify against Chaloner, and had managed to get him committed to the cells pending the proper stitching up of the case that should have put a full stop to his career.

Despite this history, Montague does not appear to have fully grasped the significance of the signature on the petition he held in his hand. He may have recalled that someone by that name had been rewarded for his role in the discovery of Jacobite printers back in 1693. He probably did not remember, if he ever knew, that Chaloner had been held for coining at least once before, winning escape before trial when his accuser was put to death. Even if Montague could call that episode to mind, Chaloner's petition contained such a shocking, eminently plausible description of a conspiracy at the Royal Mint that Montague could not ignore the document. With the Great Recoinage just beginning, any hint of scandal could destroy whatever remained of public faith in the Treasury, so the Chancellor had no choice but to order an immediate investigation into Chaloner's claims.

Chaloner was duly released from Newgate. He returned to Whitehall on May 16, 1696. There, an investigative committee of the Lords Justices of Appeal heard him tell a harrowing story of official corruption and greed. In this sequel to his testimony of the year before, he repeated the claims of his petition: mint moneyers, the men entrusted to make true coins for England, were instead committing crime after crime. Using smuggled blanks made of base metal, they were producing counterfeit guineas on their own. When they did use properly pure silver or gold, they cheated the Mint and the nation by short-weighting the coinage. Worst of all, Chaloner testified, it was the Mint's own chief engraver who had sold off the official dies—the tools that struck the design into the faces of new coins—to coiners beyond the Tower's walls. Chaloner named names and swore that "he himself never made a Guinea in his Life," but he listed both his old confederate Patrick Coffee and, with marvelous bravado, a Mr. Chandler—a name known in the right sort of circles as the coining pseudonym of William Chaloner.

That was one story—horrifying enough to account for Montague's urgent reaction to the original letter. But was it true? Confounding the investigation, the tale was challenged on the spot by one Peter Cooke, described in his arrest record as "a gentleman," although he was already known to the authorities and presently residing in Newgate, where he was struggling to escape the death penalty in an unrelated counterfeiting case. With that incentive, he needed to be as persuasive as possible in his testimony, and the story he told the Lords Justices certainly captured their attention. Cooke admitted that he knew about the missing dies. But, he swore, those dies had not been corruptly sold out of the Mint. Rather, they had been stolen in a theft organized by a gang that included Chaloner himself.

Two incompatible accounts were bad enough. But then the Lords Justices heard from Thomas White, no gentleman, but like Cooke a convicted counterfeiter, testifying in the shadow of the gallows. According to White, the Mint itself and at least some of those who worked there had indeed conspired in what was growing into a massive counterfeiting scheme. White named a specific employee, a moneyer's man named Hunter, as the source of official dies sold to coiners. So far, it was a clear, straightforward story—until White added that Hunter had sold one set of dies to William Chaloner.

The swamp into which the inquiry had wandered grew soggier still when a Mint engraver known as Scotch Robin appeared before the committee. Robin corroborated Cooke's claim that the dies had been stolen, not sold. But the culprit he implicated was not Chaloner but Chaloner's accuser, Thomas White. When Robin himself came under suspicion, he ran, making his way to Scotland, safely beyond the reach of English writs.

Here the investigators seem to have given up. In this tangle of conflicting stories, only one fact could be stated with any certainty: someone, somehow, had gained illegal access to official coining apparatus. Beyond that, the mystery of the missing dies had become not so much a criminal conspiracy as a circular firing squad, with the growing army of the accused tumbling over themselves in their haste to betray one another.

Into the middle of this mess, under compulsion, came Isaac Newton. He did not yet have any real knowledge about how to run a criminal investigation. He would prove an able student.

The jail at Newgate no longer exists. The earliest prison on that site admitted its first tenants in 1188. The last was demolished in 1904 to make room for an expansion of the Old Bailey. The jail in use in 1696 was almost brand new, constructed on top of the ruins left by the Great Fire of 1666. The façade of the rebuilt prison was given a hint of the elegance with which its architect, Sir Christopher Wren, hoped to endow the whole city. But such graces did nothing to alter the essential character of a place that was, as Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders put it, not just "the emblem of hell itself" but "a kind of entrance to it" too. Defoe wrote from personal experience: he had been imprisoned there briefly, for debt. Other celebrated inmates confirmed Defoe's judgment. Casanova, imprisoned at Newgate under accusation of child rape, called it "this abode of misery and despair," an infernal place "such as Dante might have conceived."

This was useful terror, of course, and it began when a new prisoner first entered the underground holding cell beneath the main gate that the inmates called Limbo. Not coincidentally, condemned prisoners also waited there for their final ride to the place of execution, providing exemplary horror for the new arrivals.

There in the gloom, beside an open sewer cut into the floor, prisoners were taught the basics of life in Newgate. From that moment forward, bare survival—let alone any comfort—depended on how much cash the prisoner could feed his jailers. To be or become poor in Newgate invited disaster. New prisoners arrived bound in manacles and shackles on the hands and feet, neck collars for some. It cost two shillings sixpence "easement" to get rid of the ironmongery, and those who resisted could be persuaded. The jailers had been forced to give up the old technique of "pressing" inmates—crushing them beneath weights that were increased slowly, day by day—to get them to surrender their wealth. But there were still ways for an inventive or determined turnkey to encourage the miserly, such as tightening the metal collars enough to break a man's neck.

From the holding cell, prisoners were moved into the main prison. Richer inmates went to the Masters side. Those who could not pay the necessary bribes endured the Commons, where they were packed with up to thirty others into cells designed for a dozen or less. Beds were unknown in the common cells, so prisoners slept where they could, if they could. The diet was mostly bread, but an investigation in 1724 found that even those rations were routinely stolen by privileged prisoners—those who paid to handle the distribution of food and candles—some of which they sold to local shops. Starving, cold, condemned to rot in the dark, Newgate's most desperate residents went on suffering even when found not guilty of any crime. Prisoners had to pay a discharge fee before walking out the front gate, along with a charge for the food they might well never have received. No money, no exit.

Those in the Masters wards fared better. In what was called—and not in jest—the most expensive lodgings in London, prisoners with enough money could rent beds at three shillings sixpence a week, about a day's wage for a skilled worker. They could buy candles and coal, food and wine. The cells were less crowded, and the inmates organized them into something resembling a social order, with rank determined by time served.

Regardless of such relative comfort, the underlying fact of Newgate remained: it was a deadly place. Raw sewage; overcrowding; bad water for those who could not bribe their way to beer or wine; sleeplessness; cold and damp: put it all together and you had an almost purpose-designed incubator for disease. Typhus was so widespread there that mere remand to prison for any length of time could be a death sentence. Year after year, many more inmates died of the disease than lived to meet the hangman.

All this was what Peter Cooke and Thomas White, with their conflicting stories, faced from May to July 1696. Their executions were delayed and then delayed again, often for as brief a respite as a week or so, all to allow them to weigh exactly how horrible their lives were—and to consider how much worse (and brief) those lives could become. By the beginning of August, they finally achieved the proper frame of mind. Then, at last, the Warden of the Mint invited them to search their memories for any new information about the scandal at the Mint.

White faced the greatest and most imminent danger. The earlier case against him had been controversial, and its course illustrated the difficulty officials faced obtaining convictions for even notorious offenders. The evidence presented during his prosecution had been unconvincing at best. The Middlesex County grand jury had thrown out the charges against him three times before the prosecutor went jurisdiction-shopping and found a London grand jury that could be badgered into issuing an indictment. The persistence suggests that White had well-placed enemies, a hint confirmed after his conviction. A member of Parliament demanded his execution—and promised complications in the House if White was spared.

Newton's leverage was immense: if one conviction was not enough, by the time of their first interview, he had received information of another of White's crimes, information that White had helped two other men to set up a coining press—itself a capital offense. Newton was thus White's only hope, but at first it looked as if the convict had overplayed his very weak position. In his first interrogation he chose not to betray his two accomplices in the matter of the coining press, and Newton prepared to walk away, leaving White to the gallows. Just in time,
White began to talk. Newton held his canary tight, petitioning after each interview for a stay of execution of no more than two weeks. He kept the game going for months, delaying the hanging thirteen times in all, until he was sure that White had betrayed every person he plausibly could (and perhaps a few more besides). Finally, in May 1697, Newton let his singing bird out of the cage, arranging White's pardon after he had survived a full year in Newgate.

Peter Cooke grasped the essentials of the game much more quickly. He offered up at least three men as soon as he was asked. One was a deserter, and was promptly returned to the army. The second informed in his turn, productively enough to secure his own pardon. The third had nothing of sufficient value to offer. He was convicted and transported to the West Indies—the Fever Islands—a punishment that was understood to be a drawn-out sentence of death.

The information won Cooke his reprieve, but it did nothing to help Newton make sense of the case of the missing dies. Through August and September, he interrogated another six men—possibly more. He arrested more than thirty suspects, and as the autumn progressed, he set yet more investigations in motion.

What was William Chaloner doing while Newton and his growing crew of informers, runners, and clerks spread out across the city?

He remained in plain sight. After his release from Newgate, late in the winter of 1696–97, he found new lodgings in London. Newton had apparently interviewed him just once, possibly in August, certainly by the end of September. Everyone else caught up in the case had been questioned and threatened repeatedly by a relentless Newton until they broke. Chaloner alone stuck to his story that it was the Mint itself that harbored a criminal conspiracy—and Newton could not shake him from his claim.

As Newton was discovering, for all the severity of the law, coining proved to be a difficult crime to prosecute. Even securing an indictment was hardly a sure thing, as White's example demonstrated. Beyond the justified skepticism engendered by the reward system, the very bloodiness of the "bloody code"—the enormous list of offenses for which the punishment was death—made juries ever more reluctant to convict unless compelled by overwhelming evidence. In this case, William Chaloner had prudently kept himself at a safe remove from the incriminating dies. Cooke and White had been able to testify only that Chaloner had been somehow involved in the scheme, one of a group.

Thus insulated, Chaloner simply held firm, denying involvement, pressing his charges against the Mint, even offering to assist Newton in straightening out the scandal at the Tower. All Newton had to do, Chaloner told him, was to hire someone whom he could recommend without hesitation, Thomas Holloway—just coincidentally, Chaloner's old coining partner—to serve as supervisor at the Mint.

Newton brushed that aside. Though still in his first months as a crime fighter, he knew better than to accept "help" from suspects. But the fact remained that there was no obvious reason to hold on to Chaloner. He didn't have the dies. Those who accused him of involvement were already under sentence of death for separate matters—which meant that any jury could reasonably discount their testimony as an act of desperation. And Newton did not yet know whom he was really dealing with in William Chaloner.

In our age of constant communication, we must keep in mind how hard it could be to keep track of the bad guys in Newton's time. Chaloner had surely left enough tracks to register as a rogue. Newgate's keepers would have recognized him from his two previous visits. Some in the government would have remembered him from the affair of the Jacobite pamphlets, and someone at the Treasury should have recalled the thousand-pound reward paid him in 1695.