Newton and the Counterfeiter (28 page)

This last charge was absurd on its face. No coiner would have set up such a profligate and inefficient production line—six different coins, indiscriminately silver and gold. As Chaloner could have told him—as he had in fact written in his two published accounts of coiners' methods and tools—skilled workmen used molds and hammers or presses to make their coins. Each mold or die served a particular denomination. It would have hopelessly confused the process to change sizes, values, and metal recipes hour by hour across the day. Any sensible coiner set up the production line for one denomination and worked it until he or she was done. Newton surely knew this too, but he presented his story with a sufficiently straight face. Whatever corruption of the panel Chaloner had attempted, failed. The Middlesex grand jury for the March 1699 sessions of court returned three true bills against him, one for each of the crimes the Warden had alleged.

Chaloner, asked to plead to the indictments, stood mute. This was his last attempt to postpone the trial. English legal practice required an affirmative statement from the accused: guilty or not guilty. Standing mute dragged proceedings to a halt. There were, however, methods to persuade the obstinate. In the most gruesome, peine forte et dure, the silent accused would be taken to a cell and shackled to the floor. Warders would pile blocks of iron on the prisoner's body until he either pled or died. In Chaloner's case, two of the indictments could have earned that treatment, and the judges could have ruled his silence on the third as an admission of guilt. Chaloner bowed to the inevitable, and "at length he was prevail'd upon, and pleaded Not-Guilty."

Isaac Newton and William Chaloner fought their last battle the next day, March 3. English trials in the late seventeenth century were swift and ruthlessly to the point. There were no lawyers. Prosecutions in most felony cases were handled by the victims of crimes themselves, or by local authorities in cases, such as murder, where victims could not speak on their own behalf. Crimes against the Crown required some agent of the state—the Warden of the Mint or his designated mouthpiece, for example—to stand as the aggrieved party.

Chaloner had to speak for himself. There was no presumption of innocence. He had to offer an affirmative defense—either an outright argument of innocence or some demonstration that the prosecution's witnesses and evidence were sufficiently tainted so as to leave the case unproven. It was still an unpopular position that the defendants might benefit from the counsel of someone learned in the law. As the influential early-eighteenth-century legal scholar William Hawkins wrote, it should require "no manner of Skill to make a plain and honest Defence."

The trial took place in the Old Bailey, which stood just beyond the western side of the London city wall, about two hundred yards from St. Paul's Cathedral and conveniently close to Newgate. The building, erected in 1673 to replace the courts lost in the Great Fire of 1666, contained a ground-floor courtroom that was open to the sky, the better to reduce the risk that prisoners with typhus would infect judges and juries. (The danger was real. The courtroom was enclosed in 1737, and in the worst of the incidents that followed, sixty people died following a court session in 1750, among them the Lord Mayor of London.) Two upper stories loomed over the well of the court, leaving it in shadow for much of the day. The accused—Chaloner, when his day in court came—stood in the gloom on a platform, the infamous dock. There, standing behind the rail, the bar to which lawyers are still called, the prisoner faced his judges and the witness box in which he would by right confront those who would testify against him. Partitioned boxes to his left and right held the jury, and above the jury boxes, balconies on either side held respectable onlookers, peering down to complete the image of the courtroom floor as an arena, the den in which men and women faced the prospect of death.

Less worthy spectators packed into the yard behind the open end of the court. For many, the Old Bailey sessions provided a day out—a circus act—but the crowd also included (or so the authorities complained) criminals yet uncaught, preparing against the day they might find themselves facing judgment. Chaloner's entrance would have set an extra buzz running through that crowd, famous enough as he was to attract the seventeenth-century analogue of the celebrity reporter. One of those scribblers left a description of the Chaloner trial that is still the most vivid (if not entirely unbiased) portrait of Newton's antagonist.

When Chaloner's case was called, he had almost no time to think. The court sitting in the Old Bailey heard an average of fifteen to twenty cases a day; many took just minutes from start to finish. As the trial began, his predicament grew worse. In an age without advocates for the defense, there was a presumption that judges "should be the advocat for the prisoner in every way where justice would permit it."

Not this time. Standing alone at the bar, Chaloner stared at the formidably irascible Salathiel Lovell, Recorder of London—the chief jurist for the jurisdiction. Notoriously intemperate, Lovell had a reputation as a hanging judge. In one famous case involving a supporter of the deposed King James, he ignored the legal complexities his fellow judges had seen in another case and "cut asunder the Gordian knots of law he could not untie ... and directed the jury to bring him in guilty, which they did." He had low friends too, conniving with the thief-takers who could be as much the source of as a solution to crime. Daniel Defoe, one of many who loathed Lovell, wrote, in
Reformation of Manners:

Fraternities of Villains he maintains,
Protects their Robberies, and shares the Gains;
Who thieve with Toleration as a Trade,
And then restore according as they paid.

Worse still, according to Defoe, Lovell offered justice for hire:

Definitive in Law, without Appeal,
but always serves the hand who pays him well:
...
He has his Publick Book of Rates to show
Where every Rogue the Price of Life may know.

Defoe was a master polemicist, and his claims are not facts. Absent hard evidence, the most that can be said is that if Lovell was not running a protection racket, he did turn a usefully blind eye in order to buff his reputation as a relentless investigator and scourge of crime.

All of which meant that in better times, a judge with Lovell's reputation would have been a perfect target for the cheerfully corrupting William Chaloner. Now, though, broke and unable to bribe anyone, much less as expensive a man as the Recorder, his only value to Lovell was as someone whose conviction could bolster the judge's credentials as London's chief crime fighter.
Chaloner was famous, with a trail of public bombast behind him to ensure that his conviction would be noticed in all the right places. He was friendless now as well, so Lovell need fear no covert attack on his own interests. Above all, the powerful—Newton, certainly, and Vernon, and behind them the ruling Whig establishment—wanted Chaloner gone. Lovell understood the value of pleasing those who could reward him. (Three years later, he would ask the King for a landed estate in recognition of his vigor in hounding coiners.) Chaloner could not have drawn a worse judge.

The Recorder made his influence felt from the beginning of the trial. Speaking from the bench, one of the judges—unspecified in the record, but almost certainly the vocal Lovell—opened the proceedings by calling the defendant notorious, clearly indicating to the jury which way the wind blew. The impression of an overwhelming presumption of guilt grew as Newton's parade of six prosecution witnesses entered the chamber.

With that entrance, Chaloner was able to gauge the direction of the testimony he would have to counter. Before he had an instant to gather his wits, however, the trial began.

That prosecution was a probably deliberate muddle. Newton seems to have taken to heart the advice he got a year earlier, that he could simply throw enough dirt around to convince the jury that Chaloner must have done something bad. The prosecution's witnesses essentially ignored the central claim of the indictment. Rather than dwell on proving that Chaloner had actually produced more than one hundred coins, both false gold and false silver, of five different sizes and designs, all in a single day, Newton's witnesses took the jury on an extended tour of the previous eight years of Chaloner's career.

So Thomas Taylor and Katherine Coffee repeated their story of Chaloner's early misdeeds. Coffee's story revealed that Chaloner had mastered the use of stamps and a hammer to make French pistoles by 1691. Carefully parsing her evidence, she reported that she had seen "Gineas which were reputed Chaloners but never saw him coyn any."

Taylor's information buttressed Coffee's. As Chaloner knew, staring across at his old supplier, Taylor could tell the court that he had provided two sets of stamps or dies—one for the pistoles Mrs. Coffee had just placed under the prisoner's hammer, and the other for English guineas. Never mind that the events in question took place seven years before the date of the crime for which Chaloner was supposed to be standing trial. Here he was in memory, caught red-handed committing treason.

The other four witnesses were sworn and spoke in quick succession. Elizabeth Holloway seems not to have testified to her Scottish odyssey, but she and Katherine Carter told what they knew—or what they were willing to say—about Chaloner's superlative skill as a coiner. Another witness agreed with Mrs. Carter that he had seen Chaloner make dud shillings on the day specified in the indictment. Both were almost certainly lying, at least in the details. In all the depositions Newton had taken over the preceding four months, several witnesses described Chaloner's June experiments with molded pewter shillings, but none mentioned any coining in August.

But even so, what could Chaloner say? It hardly advanced his cause to argue that he had made false coins two months before the day Newton's witnesses claimed, and that they were shoddy products, not the high-quality fakes they described.

The last to speak for the prosecution was John Abbot, the metal dealer turned coiner whom Thomas Carter had betrayed to Newton in January. Abbot swore that Chaloner approached him in 1693 or 1694, seeking to use his countinghouse. Abbot resisted, not wanting to turn Chaloner loose on his premises, "because wh silver and Gold he had was there." But eventually, as Abbot had told Newton, he cleared out a back room and locked Chaloner into that one space. On his return half an hour later, he opened the door of the countinghouse "& going in found the said Chaloner there in his shirt fileing of Gineas round ye edges and saw him edge them when he had done filing and that he edged them with a piece of Iron which had a grove running along the middle of it."

Moving on, Abbot reported that in 1695 Chaloner had shown him several blank stamps about the size of guinea dies—and which he said "he could get to be struck with the Tower Dyes and that they were fitted to be struck on both sides like a Ginea but broader and he said that Patrick Coffee could get them done any day at noon by a journeyman Smith in the Tower." Hearsay, surely, but it would have taken an exceptionally cautious jury not to be swayed by what Chaloner purportedly did next: he "told the Deponent that he had got his business done."

Here at last the muddle of the Tower dies was resolved—and Abbot was not done yet. He claimed that Chaloner had boasted to him of coining in a house in Mark Lane that yielded six hundred pounds' worth of half-crowns in nine weeks. He also testified that Chaloner had come to buy the silver he needed for the operation from Abbot's own shop, and had tried to pay his bill with counterfeit cash. When confronted with his dud coins, Abbot said, Chaloner first tried to brazen his way out of the debt by threatening to sue Abbot for failure to deliver promised goods. Abbot refused to budge, and Chaloner backed down, paying his reckoning with money that had in fact seen the inside of Newton's Mint. He then sealed the deal by giving Abbot a good dinner—"a Treat at the 3 Tuns in Woodstreet."

Chaloner could see the jurymen on either side of him. He could gauge the tenor of his judges. He must have understood what the prosecution was doing. Legal niceties be damned: his enemy had placed him at the center of enough crimes to hang him, even if they weren't the offenses of which he was accused.

The last witness answered a final question. The prosecution ceased. The judges faced the prisoner. What defense had he to offer? By Newton's careful design, Chaloner had almost no options left. He had not known which former friends would testify. He had no counsel, no legal advice. He had to speak then and there, with no chance to reflect, to organize an argument, to seek out witnesses of his own.

Even so, Chaloner was not completely without resource. He spoke out angrily that the court should recognize that the witnesses were perjurers, lying about his deeds to save their own guilty hides—a claim that was at least partly true. Chaloner was "very sawcy in Court, affronting Mr. Recorder [Lovell] divers Times," one observer wrote. But it was clear that neither judges nor jury were going to credit claims of perjury above his former associates' descriptions of specific crimes.

Chaloner retained one last hope. He had not been able to prepare for the testimony against him, but he had listened to every detail of it. He noted where he was supposed to have forged pistoles, crowns, half-crowns, and shillings. Abbot's shop—a London address. The Tower—within the precincts of the City of London. The Flask tavern—London again, and so on through each devastating retelling of offense after offense. And yet Chaloner faced charges brought by a Middlesex grand jury, being heard by a Middlesex trial jury. How could such a court, Chaloner asked, address crimes committed outside its jurisdiction?

It was a neat argument, and in fact the law was on Chaloner's side. Both the Middlesex and the London grand juries met in the same hall at the start of each criminal court session, and both returned indictments to be heard in the Old Bailey. On one day for which a detailed schedule survives, the court opened with two London cases heard before a London jury, followed by the trials of eight Middlesex offenders, all before the correct Middlesex jury. Those ten trials finished by the midday meal break. Such chopping and changing happened all the time—and it reflected the problem of matching legal tradition to the sprawl of the metropolis, which created a continuous habitat for crime that extended far beyond the formal boundaries of the old City of London.