Newton and the Counterfeiter (7 page)

And so Newton, by candlelight on that cold gray day in December 1691, pushed to one side his angry draft. He took another sheet to try again. "I thank you," he wrote, "for putting me in mind of Charterhouse." He dismissed the idea, but gently this time: "I see nothing in it worth making a bustle for." He summoned the deference due a man in a position to do him good. He begged John Locke to accept "my most humble service & hearty thanks ... for so frankly offering ye assistance of your friends if there should be occasion."

Days later, when Locke hurried back inside after recording his observations on the weather, careful not to risk his weak lungs and generally frail health on a raw December morning any longer than necessary, it was not Newton's wrath that greeted him. Instead, he read contrite thanks for help given and help to come. Locke took no insult from the rejection of his first attempt, and the letters to and fro confirm that while Newton would remain in Cambridge for five more years, his imagination had already carried him down the road to London. The rest was mere logistics for friends to arrange, to permit the incomparable Mr. Newton to take his rightful place in the big city.

W
ILLIAM CHALONER'S PASSAGE
to London came much easier than Newton's. When he decided to go, he walked.

At the same time, his development had some parallels with Newton's. His distinctive qualities of mind made themselves apparent early, in a precocious display of malicious cleverness. Still, as with any great talent, it took years of thought, risk, and practice for Chaloner to achieve all the artful wickedness of which he was capable—an education that he, unlike Newton, had to undertake almost entirely on his own.

Only Chaloner's clash with Newton brought him into history, and most of the details of his early life did not make it into the picture, not even the date of his birth. But the man clever enough to challenge Newton evoked just enough wonder to inspire a sensational biography, written immediately after his execution. Like most true-crime tales then and since, it has to be read with care, as it alternates between admiring horror and respectable condemnation. But at least its anonymous author collected the bare facts of Chaloner's childhood.

He was at least a decade and as much as a generation younger than Newton. He most likely married in 1684, which pushes his birth date back to the 1650s at the earliest, and perhaps as late as the mid-1660s. Like Newton, he was born in the provinces, but his father was poor, a weaver in Warwickshire, in England's Midlands. He had at least one brother and one sister, both of whom he later brought with him into what became a family coining business.

He had had no formal education to speak of, but his biographer noted, "In his Infancy he shew'd a certain aptness to what he afterwards became perfect in." Unfortunately, "as soon as he was able to put any thing in Action, it was some unlucky Rogues Trick or other." At some point, his father and, presumably, his never-mentioned mother found themselves "unable to govern him." They sent him to Birmingham, then a small market town but already known for its metalwork shops and its sketchy regard for the reach of law, to be apprenticed to a nail maker.

Given the apparent trend of his character, they could not have made a more unfortunate choice of trade. Nail-making was at that moment caught between its history and the kind of transformation Adam Smith would make famous a century later in his description of the making of a pin. In Chaloner's day, each nail was still finished by hand, one at a time. The nailer would heat the end of a metal rod in a forge, then hammer the softened tip into a four-sided point. Next, reheating the rod to soften it, he would cut a nail length off. Finally, he would strike the blunt end of the piece to form the head, holding the nail on an anvil or in a tool called a nail header.

All this used to be part of general blacksmithing. But by the time Chaloner entered the trade, nail-making was well on its way to becoming less skilled and worse-paid piecework. The long iron rods were made with a machine called a slitting mill, which was invented in Liège, Belgium, in 1565 and made its way to England around the turn of the seventeenth century. Water power turned two sets of rollers. The first, smooth pair pressed heated bars of iron into thick plates; a second, grooved pair of rollers cut the plates into rods. Those with capital enough to run a slitting mill would advance nail rods to men too poor to pay for them outright, who would then cut an agreed number of nails from a given weight of metal and return them to the mills for a meager payment. Unsurprisingly, those at the bottom of the production line—men who had fire, tools, and a mastery of the basics of working with metal—looked for other opportunities.

Groats, worth four pence, were always rare coins, produced only sporadically by the Royal Mint. A small number were struck in 1561, and later, expanded production from Welsh silver mines led to another issue of the little silver pieces in 1639—these decorated with the ostrich plumes of the Prince of Wales. They were made again from time to time, but few of the coins that were called groats ever saw the inside of the Royal Mint. Instead, private enterprise stepped up, supplying counterfeits—with a notable proportion of the dud money of any denomination produced by men grown weary of turning out twelve hundred nails from every four pounds of iron. Such counterfeits were called Birmingham groats, testimony to the enthusiasm with which the city's metalworkers embraced the craft.

Chaloner's new master seems to have produced his share. Young Will proved a quick study, and soon grasped the "rudiments of Coyning." His teacher did not, however, reap the benefits of his tutelage for long. The son whose father could not govern him was already too ambitious to serve any other man. No later than the early 1680s, William Chaloner abandoned his master and set out on "St. Francis's Mule"—that is, on foot—"with a purpose to visit London." The capital was for him more of a goal than a specific destination. He had no plan, no idea of what to do once he got there.

But the decision to escape to London set in motion the critical phase of Chaloner's education. It would take him the better part of ten more years to master the lessons the city could teach him—the course of instruction that would turn a clever village boy with an elastic moral sense into the man who could present Isaac Newton with formidable opposition.

***

On arrival, though, even so knowing a young ruffian as William Chaloner would have had no preparation for the shock of London. The city was vast, unimaginably larger than any other place inhabited by English men and women. Its population of almost 600,000, more than ten percent of the national total, was greater than that of the next sixty largest so-called cities and towns combined. Norwich, in second place, was home to between 20,000 and 30,000; at most 10,000 lived in Chaloner's Birmingham.

Seventeenth-century London was a mob of strangers. Its death rate exceeded the birth rate by several thousand a year into the eighteenth century. Yet still it grew, cannibalizing the countryside—drawing from two to three hundred young men and women a day from their villages and towns, come to chase their fortune in the one true metropolis in all of England.

Even the wiliest and most ambitious of these country folk were stunned by their first impression of the capital, which was commonly described as a kind of hell, a "region of dirt, stink and noise." Chaloner would have known he was getting close when he passed the heaps of human and animal waste carted just outside the city every day and dumped along the roadways. Travelers gasped, covered their faces, sped by as fast as they could, gagging.

The city proper brought its own terrors. Prudent Londoners did not drink plain water, especially not from the Thames, for reasons Jonathan Swift made clear in his verses on a rain shower in 1710: "Sweepings from Butchers Stalls, Dung, Guts, and Blood, / Drown'd Puppies, stinking Sprats, all drench'd in Mud / Dead Cats and Turnip Tops / come tumbling down Flood."

Still, while one could live on beer and gin, everyone had to breathe the air. With more than half a million people crammed together, stepping over piles of droppings left by horses, burning wood and coal for warmth, and furnaces, kilns, and ovens making what the city demanded—beer and bread, soap, glass, lime and dyes, pottery, ironwork, and on and on—the atmosphere in the capital was toxic. The resulting "impure and thick mist," if not quite so chokingly fatal as the evil fogs of Victorian London, was still foul enough to drive King William to the suburb of Kensington in 1698.

London did have its rewards, of course: the hope of wealth, or at least of better than subsistence living. The city formed the unquestioned economic center of the nation at a time of radical transformation. It was a fabulously lucrative change: in the late seventeenth century, England fostered a world-spanning web of commerce, with London as its hub. City-based cartels and joint-stock companies pursued their profits in the Baltic and the eastern Mediterranean. Trade with North America was growing. The East India Company had begun capturing all India for the British Crown. Africa, the West Indies, the American colonies, and the home country formed a network that spun slaves, gold, sugar, rum, and cloth around the Atlantic Ocean. The China trade consumed British silver—the preferred precious metal of the Chinese—in exchange for silk and fine ceramics. Almost all of this, three-quarters of England's international trade, passed through London's docks, warehouses, banks, and exchanges.

London dominated the domestic economy as well. Even in years of good harvests, wages in the capital beat those for rural labor by as much as fifty percent. By virtue of its population and its wealth, London formed by far the largest single market in England for food, fuel, cloth, and manufactured goods. Londoners ate sheep from Gloucestershire, drank beer brewed with east-country barley, pulled its herring from the North Sea and cooked them over Newcastle's coal. Interconnected webs of carts, rental horses, and stagecoaches sprang up to carry everything, and London's streets became a tangled mass of animals and people, crowds upon herds, a swaying, shouting, shitting din—exhilarating, terrifying, incomprehensible to anyone encountering it for the first time.

This European urban experience, lived on such a scale only in London and perhaps Paris, formed a network not simply of goods and people but information, from the proper coffeehouse to patronize (Dick's or Will's for Whigs, the Devil tavern or Sam's for Tories), the state of the Baltic market for naval stores, and the most sophisticated houses of prostitution (Mother Wisebourne's establishment off the Strand was a connoisseur's favorite) to the lodes of data that mattered ever more as the city molded the world around it, like the soundings provided by merchant sailors from ports around the world that enabled Isaac Newton to analyze the moon's influence on the tides in the
Principia.
Thus, despite the stench, the sickly living, the fact that there was no place in England where it was worse to be poor, they kept coming, the country-born who overflowed the city's tenements. London's centripetal force, its gravity, was irresistible, and increasing. It was where the action was.

Chaloner's first weeks and months in the big city were typical for newcomers: bad and worse. His biographer reported that on his arrival he found himself "something at a loss of Acquaintance, and knew not what course to take for a Livelyhood." He faced the hard truth that London lived and traded through an intricate weave of associations that seemed impenetrable. Obviously, court or government patronage—Newton's approach—was beyond the reach of a masterless apprentice, and the nexus of trade and high finance even more so. The crafts were also off limits. Though the guild system was weakening in the late seventeenth century, tight networks of skilled men locked out even capable strangers, much less half-trained runaways. As late as 1742, London hatters beat to death a man who dared shape headgear without having gone through the apprentice system. About twenty-five men controlled the cheese trade between London and the major producing region of Cheshire, forcing the hundreds of smaller cheesemongers to accept whatever price the cartel set. The scientific revolution and the incipient industrial one supported a range of new enterprises—precision instrument makers, for one. Chaloner had real dexterity with metal and some knowledge of tools, but even were he willing to submit to a new master, he lacked the bona fides that would have persuaded an established shop to take him on. And so it went, for him as for any unknown newcomer. Despite the high wages available to some, the great mass of London's immigrants found themselves underemployed, battling each other for minute advantages in the daily struggle for existence.

Access to the underworld was tightly controlled too. London's criminals organized themselves into ladders of rank and status as rigid as those of the straight world on which they preyed. Highwaymen like Dick Turpin, celebrated as a kind of latter-day Robin Hood, were the aristocrats. They were generally from higher-class origins than their fellow felons, as they had to have learned how to ride. The tally of those hanged for highway robbery includes parsons' sons, impoverished scholars, spendthrift younger scions of respectable houses—gentlemen, broke, bored, or both.

But if genteel crime was beyond Chaloner, what about the journeyman variety? London in the 1680s and 1690s had no shortage of tempting targets: the cheek-by-jowl jostling between the rich and the ever-renewing crowds of scrabbling poor offered plenty of scope for a little income redistribution. But while the London criminal world was not as organized as it would become early in the next century, it still arrayed itself according to an order a stranger could not simply enter at will. Street thugs evolved specialized techniques for the crush of London's roads. One gang of footpads, led by the marvelously named Obadiah Lemon, taught themselves to use fishing lines and hooks to snag hats and scarves out of moving vehicles. Others preyed on coaches when they slowed at bridges or other obstacles. Pickpockets often started young, practicing on dummies under the eyes of older relatives or friends already skilled in the art, aspiring to rise to the status of "masters of the trade ... versing upon all men with kind courtesies and fair words, and yet being so warily watchful." They worked in teams, with a carefully worked-out division of labor. One or more stalls (decoys) would lure a cony or a cully (the victim) into a position to be robbed by a foin or a nip. The foins were the elite practitioners, who prided themselves on their dexterity and their ability to distract their victims while they reached into a pocket; the lower-status nips merely slashed and grabbed. Either way, the stolen purse went to the snap, who usually lurked behind or next to the foin or nip, who could then melt into the background.