Newton and the Counterfeiter (29 page)

So Chaloner's was not a purely random shot. A similar strategy would work for his nemesis John Ignatius Lawson when he came before a Middlesex jury later that year. Although he had already confessed to crimes sufficient to hang a dozen men, those specified in the indictment—charges that Newton would have had to prepare—had been committed in London, and thus, the judges in that case ruled, could not be addressed in the Middlesex court. In what can only be seen as Newton's payment for services rendered, Lawson walked out of court a free man.

A sympathetic judge could have similarly ordered Chaloner's release. A prosecutor who merely wished to put a scare into a potentially useful prisoner could have eased the court to that conclusion. But not this time. There was no one in court with any charity toward William Chaloner. Lovell and the rest of the judges ignored his objection.

The rush of the court, the pressure of the dozen other cases to come that same day, meant he had to speak and be done—and he did, having offered what observers judged "but an Indifferent Defence." "The Evidence was plain and positive," so after Chaloner had spoken, the judges gave the case to the jury. Juries in this period would retreat to a separate chamber only in complicated cases where they had to decide on the guilt or innocence of several defendants. For a simple matter, they would huddle together for a minute or two in the middle of the courtroom.

They did not keep Chaloner waiting long. Ignoring the lesser charges, the jury "soon after brought him Guilty of High-Treason."

The next day, March 4, 1699, the prisoner stood once more at the bar of the Old Bailey, now to hear his sentence:

Death, by hanging.

The trial of William Chaloner was over.

C
HALONER DID NOT GO
silently to his appointed fate. "After his Condemnation, he was continually crying out that they had Murder'd him," his biographer recorded, that "the Witnesses were perjur'd and he had not Justice done him." He fought, he raged, he whimpered. Following the conventional demands of the true-crime genre, his one biographer mocked Chaloner's terror, writing that he "struggl'd and flounc'd about for Life, like a Whale struck with a Harping Iron."

One hope remained to him. The presiding judge had to forward the death sentences imposed at each court session to the King and his ministers for review. The court could recommend clemency—but not Lovell's, not in this case. On March 19, Secretary of State Vernon brought nine capital cases from the sessions to William Ill. Two of the condemned received royal mercy, and lived. But Chaloner "was too well known to be credited"—certainly to the men handling the appeal. In essence, whatever the defects of his trial, Chaloner's crimes were too familiar to those in the know. Thus "his Character contributed to his Ruine ... so that the Warrant for Execution being sign'd he was amongst the number appointed to die."

Chaloner received the news in Newgate. He was still being watched, more for entertainment now than for any judicial purpose. Thomas Carter reported to Newton that "Chaloner ... p[er]sistted to the last how in[no]sent he was for wh. he dyed." His biographer added (or, as likely, manufactured) the sensational details: on hearing the King had signed his death warrant, Chaloner "bellow'd and roar'd worse than an Irish woman at a Funeral; nothing but Murder! Murder! Oh I am murder'd! was to be heard from him." He was inconsolable: "nothing cou'd be thought on to make him take that patiently, which he must embrace whether he would or no."

Chaloner was certainly terrified. In a last letter to Newton, he started off badly, writing as if there were still something to be argued: "allthough p[er]haps you may think not but tis true I shall be murdered the worst of all murders that is in the face of Justice unless I am rescued by yo
^r
mercifull hands." He reprised all the defects of his "unprecendented Tryall": that none of the witnesses told the court they had actually seen him coin; that London crimes could not be tried by Middlesex juries; that most of the testimony did not bear on the date specified in the indictment; that the witnesses perjured themselves out of malice and self-interest.

Toward the end of the letter he seems to have realized that his tone was hardly likely to persuade the man who had orchestrated every detail of the proceedings that had brought him to the edge of disaster, and in his final passage Chaloner abandoned any semblance of argument. "My offending you has brought this uponn me," he wrote. But could not his enemy relent? "Dear'S[i]r do this mercifull deed O for God's Sake if not mine keep me from being murdered."

And then: "O dear S[i]r nobody can save me but you O God my God I shall be murderd unless you save me O I hope God will move yo
^r
heart with mercy and pitty to do this thing for me."

And once more:

I am
Yo[u]r near murdered humble Servt
W. Chaloner.

Isaac Newton, victorious at last, did not trouble himself to reply.

The morning of March 22 found William Chaloner in full cry. A day or two earlier, in a last gesture of bravado, he had sent the long-missing Malt copper plate to the Tower—a gift for the Warden of the Mint. But now, when his jailers came for him, he brandished a list of complaints and demanded that it be printed. He was refused.

To the chapel next, where he joined the other prisoners bound for the gallows. He may have sat before the coffin that was sometimes placed on a table before the condemned men's pew. When the chaplain urged him to show the proper spirit of repentance, Chaloner refused, shouting with "more Passion than Piety." The chaplain tried to calm him, but Chaloner raged on. "Notwithstanding the great Care and Pains of the Reverend Ordinary, twas difficult to bring him to a sense of that Charity and Forgiveness proper to all Christians, but more especially to [d]ying Men." Finally, Chaloner steadied himself enough to receive the sacrament, and the doomed worshipers filed out into the open air.

The convoy set out at about noon, bound for the traditional execution ground at Tyburn, now Marble Arch. Some of the condemned men traveled in style. John Arthur, an infamous highwayman, sat at ease in a coach and was cheered by the crowd as he paused at public houses along the way, arriving at the gallows as drunk as he cared to be.

Chaloner had no such comfort. Once Parliament turned coining into a species of high treason, the execution of coiners followed the same brutal sequence of punishment laid down for those found guilty in Guy Fawkes's Gunpowder Plot. A traitor drank no gin. No one cheered his name. Chaloner was brought to the place of execution on a rough sledge—no wheels. There were no underground sewers in seventeenth-century London,
only courses in the roadways to carry sewage to the river. As the sledge bounced along, fountains of filth would have erupted, human and animal waste splattering his clothes, arms, face. All the while he continued to call out his innocence, crying "to the Spectators that he was Murder'd by Perjury." He would have reached the execution ground at Tyburn stinking, wet, cold, and mercilessly sober.

The method of execution for traitors had been in place since Edward I killed the Scots insurgent William Wallace. The condemned must be "hanged by the neck but not until you are dead ... taken down again, and that whilst you are yet alive, your bowels [must] be taken out and burnt before your faces, and that your bodies be divided each into four quarters, and your heads and quarters be at the King's disposal." Counterfeiters got a reprieve: they were permitted to choke on the noose till they died, so that any mutilation of their bodies would take place on their corpses.

At his turn for the gallows, Chaloner once more cried out that "he was murder'd ... under pretence of Law." A minister approached him and again bade him show the penitence and forgiveness demanded of those about to die. This time Chaloner accepted his set role and paused for a moment "to pray with much fervency."

The rope dangled from three crossbeams set in a triangle—Tyburn's Hanging Tree. Prisoners mounted a ladder to put their heads through the noose. Trap-door gallows that could kill quickly would not enter common use in England for another sixty years. When the moment came, the executioner's men would pull the ladder out of the way and the condemned dangled, twitching and jumping (the "hangman's dance") as long as it took—sometimes several minutes—for life to choke out of him.

Chaloner showed courage at the end. He mounted the ladder. Then, "Pulling his Cap himself over his Eyes, [he] submitted to the stroke of justice." Richer men often paid the hangman to pull on their legs to speed death. Not the destitute Chaloner. He had to choke till he drooped, to the greater amusement of the crowd.

William Chaloner lies in no known grave. He does possess an epitaph, the last lines of the biography printed within days of his execution:

"Thus liv'd and thus dy'd a Man who had he square'd his Talent by the Rules of Justice and integrity might have been useful to the Commonwealth: But as he follow'd only the Dictates of Vice, was as a rotten Member cut off."

I
SAAC NEWTON
did not attend William Chaloner's execution—there is no hint that he even considered doing so. He had other counterfeiters to pursue, and his work continued in the narrow rooms of the Tower.

Apparently, though, criminal London occupied him less once Chaloner was gone. After compiling more than two hundred interrogations through the peak months of that investigation, Newton collected just sixty more on various cases over the next year and a half. He may simply have been resting on the laurels he had earned for his work on the recoinage. From a purely manufacturing perspective, England's currency was sounder than it had ever been. According to the Mint's teller, Hopton Haynes, under "this gentleman's care we have seen it brought to that extraordinary nicety ... as was never known in any reign before this."

Results like these earned Newton his reward at the end of 1699. Thomas Neale, the impressively useless Master of the Mint, displayed a previously unobserved knack for timing by dying in December. Within the web of patronage and obligation that ruled English politics, the mastership was a lucrative plum. Apart from a salary of £500 a year, the Master received a fee for every pound of metal coined at the Mint. Neale had made an additional £22,000 that way during the recoinage, even though Newton had done the work. Newton was not a particular political favorite; nonetheless he became the only Warden in the history of the office to move directly into the Master's position, in what was clearly a response to his role in saving England's coinage. He took up the new post on his fifty-seventh birthday, Christmas Day, 1699.

With that his fortune was made. The Mint remained busy enough to throw off extraordinary sums from time to time. In his first year, Newton took in £3,500—enough to persuade him, finally, to give up his no-show Cambridge professorship, with its paltry stipend of £100. He would have much less profitable periods, but according to a calculation by Richard Westfall, Newton on average took in about £1,650 a year during his twenty-seven years as Master. Never truly poor, he was now well on his way to being genuinely rich.

In the new century, Newton also returned to some of the questions in natural philosophy that had consumed him in his youth. At the end of 1703 he became president of the Royal Society after another death, that of his old antagonist Robert Hooke, and within a couple of months he presented the society with the manuscript of the second of his two great books,
Opticks.

Opticks
reported the results of the investigations of light and color that had first brought Newton to the attention of the Royal Society back in the early 1670s. The book also presented Newton's first full declaration of all that he believed to be true, across the range of investigations that had consumed his life. He argued for intellectual humility; in a draft of the introduction he acknowledged, "To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. Tis much better to do a little with certainty & leave the rest for others that come after than to explain all things by conjecture without making sure of any thing." But he maintained the unity of natural phenomena, writing about the concept of forces acting on bodies from a distance: "It's well known that Bodies act upon one another by the Attractions of Gravity, Magnetism and Electricity; and these Instances shew the Tenor and Course of Nature," for, as Newton argued, in one of his most famous epigrams, "Nature is very constant and conformable to her self." Thus, he argued, other such hidden forces would be found throughout the natural world.

Perhaps most significantly, he allowed himself to declare publicly a private conclusion he had reached long before. He acknowledged that mechanical ideas tended to eliminate the necessity of God: "Latter Philosophers banish the Consideration of such a Cause out of natural Philosophy," he wrote, "feigning Hypotheses for explaining all thing mechanically and referring other Causes to Metaphysicks." But this was an error in method, he asserted, announcing that for his part he sought to deduce "Causes from Effects till we come to the very first Cause." Not for him merely "to unfold the Mechanism of the World," but to learn "Whence is it that Nature doth nothing in vain; and whence arises all that Order and Beauty which we see in the World."

Newton knew the answer. "Is not infinite Space the Sensorium of a Being incorporeal, living and intelligent, who sees the things themselves intimately, and thoroughly perceives them, and comprehends them wholly by their immediate presence to himself...?" Thirty-five years before, Newton had contemplated abandoning Cambridge because he could not swear to the claims of the Anglican Church. That was his response, a credo that he could affirm without reservation.

For all the grandeur of vision expressed in
Opticks,
however, the science it contained was old. The most recent experiments it reported dated back twenty years; most had been completed a decade or more before that. By the early 1700s, and perhaps a decade earlier, Newton mostly ceased to be a natural philosopher. In his remaining years, he focused on historical and religious approaches to a fuller knowledge of God. He contemplated the true nature of Christ's body; he speculated about the lives of God's agents on earth (among whom he numbered himself) after the Apocalypse; using the Bible, he tried to calculate the end of days—he reckoned that the second coming would not occur before 2060. Though some of his work on these questions was published posthumously, while he lived this was a private passion. Convinced though he was that his science, his mathematics, and his historical research tended to the same ultimate truth, he believed his conclusions to be "strong meats for men," and thus, as was his lifelong habit, he kept his boldest thoughts to himself.