Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist

by Thomas Levenson

  Newton and the Counterfeiter

  The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist

  Thomas Levenson

  * * *

  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT

  BOSTON NEW YORK

  2009

  * * *

  Copyright © 2009 by Thomas Levenson

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,

  write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,

  6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Levenson, Thomas.

  Newton and the counterfeiter : the unknown detective career

  of the world's greatest scientist / Thomas Levenson.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-15-101278-7

  1. Newton, Isaac, Sir, 1642–1727. 2. Chaloner, William. 3. Counterfeits

  and counterfeiting—England—History—17th century. I. Title.

  Q143.N495L48 2009

  530.092—dc22 [B] 2008053511

  Book design by Brian Moore

  Printed in the United States of America

  DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  * * *

  For Henry

  who added years to the writing and joy to the years

  (as your grandfather once wrote in a similar context)

  &

  for Katha, always

  * * *

  Contents

  PREFACE

  "Let Newton Be" ix

  PART I

  Learning to Think 1

  PART II

  A Rogue's Progress 47

  PART III

  Passions 75

  PART IV

  The New Warden 107

  PART V

  Skirmishes 145

  PART VI

  Newton and the Counterfeiter 185

  EPILOGUE

  "He Could Not Calculate the Madness of the People" 238

  Acknowledgments 248

  Notes 253

  Bibliography 292

  Index 302

  * * *

  Preface: "Let Newton Be"

  IN EARLY FEBRUARY 1699, a middle-ranking government official found himself a quiet corner of the Dogg pub. He was dressed appropriately. After almost three years on the job, he knew better than to dress for the Royal Society when he wished to pass unremarked in Holborn or Westminster.

  The pub was, he hoped, a place where two men could speak discreetly. Big as London was, it could still be a very small town. Men employed in a given trade—legitimate or otherwise—tended to know one another.

  The man he awaited came in. His companions would have had to hang back, keeping an eye on their charge from a distance. The newcomer knew the rules—as he should—given his current address: Newgate Jail.

  The jailbird sat and started to speak.

  There was someone, he said, he had been getting close to, a man who liked to talk. That man was cagey, and smart enough not to trust entirely those with whom he spoke—naturally enough given the nature of his companions, who, like him, were all awaiting trial. But after weeks and months in the cells, staring at the same faces, the monotony of prison life had got to him, and there was not much else to do but talk.

  The official listened, increasingly impatient. What had the cellmate said? Did the informer have anything really worth hearing?

  No, not quite ... perhaps. There was a tool, an engraved plate—you know?

  The official knew.

  It was hidden, the informer said—of course, for that was what he had been placed in the cell to learn: not just that the plate was hidden, but where.

  It was not necessary to remind the jailbird that he lived or died at the official's choice.

  The plate is hidden, the informer said, inside a wall or a hollow at one of the houses William Chaloner had last used for a run of counterfeit cash.

  Which one?

  He didn't know, but Chaloner had boasted that "it was never lookt for in such vacan[t] places."

  The detective swallowed his irritation. He already knew that Chaloner was no fool. What he wanted now was something he could get his hands on.

  The jailers picked up the hint. It was time to return their charge to Newgate, with orders to do better.

  When they were gone, the other man left the pub on his own. He made his way back into the heart of the city, entering the Tower of London through the main west gate.

  He turned left and crossed into the precincts of the Royal Mint. There he returned to his usual routine, interrogating another witness, reading over depositions, checking the confessions to be signed.

  It was all part of the job, to weave a chain of evidence strong enough to hang William Chaloner—or any counterfeiter whom Isaac Newton, Warden of the Royal Mint, could discover.

  Isaac Newton? The founder of modern science; the man recognized by his contemporaries—and ever since—as the greatest natural philosopher the world has ever seen? What had the man who had brought order to the cosmos to do with crime and punishment, the flash world of London's gin houses and tenements, bad money and worse faith?

  Isaac Newton's first career, the only one most people remember, lasted thirty-five years. Throughout that period, he was a seemingly permanent fixture at Trinity College, Cambridge—first as a student, next as a fellow, and finally as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. But in 1696 Newton came to London to take up the post of Warden of the Royal Mint. By law and tradition, the position required him to protect the King's currency, which meant that he was supposed to deter or capture anyone who dared to clip or counterfeit it. In practice, that made him a policeman—or rather, a criminal investigator, interrogator, and prosecutor rolled into one.

  A more surprising candidate for the job would be hard to imagine. Newton, in both popular memory and the hagiography of his own time, did not get his hands dirty. He did not so much live as think—and he thought in realms far above those reached by ordinary minds. Alexander Pope captured contemporary sentiment about him in a famous couplet:

  Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night:

  God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.

  Newton lived, or was imagined to live, beyond the passions and chaos of daily life. It did not take long for his successors to canonize him as a saint in the transforming church of reason. It was no accident that on a 1766 visit to London, Benjamin Franklin commissioned a portrait of himself that shows him sitting at a desk, studying, while a bust of Newton watches over him.

  Yet despite having no training or experience or evident interest in the management of men or things, Newton excelled as Warden of the Mint. He tracked, arrested, and prosecuted dozens of coiners and counterfeiters during the four years of his tenure. He knew—or rather, he learned very quickly—how to tangle his opponents in intricately woven webs of evidence, careless conversation, and betrayal. London's underworld had never confronted anyone like him, and most of its members were utterly unprepared to do battle with the most disciplined mind in Europe.

  Most, but not all. In William Chaloner Newton found an adversary capable of challenging his own formidable intelligence. Chaloner was no petty criminal. His claimed production of thirty thousand pounds in counterfeit money represented a true fortune—as much as four million pounds in today's currency. He was literate enough to
submit pamphlets on finance and the craft of manufacturing coins to Parliament and cunning enough to avoid prosecution for at least six years of a very ambitious criminal career. He was ferocious to a fault, with at least two deaths to his credit, and a profit made from each. Most of all, he was bold. He accused the new Warden of incompetence, even alleged fraud in his management of the Mint. Thus joined, the battle between them raged for more than two years. Before it was over, Newton had made of his pursuit of Chaloner a masterpiece of empirical research. And as he did so he revealed a persona at once less familiar and more coherent, more truly human than the Newton of the hagiographies—a man who not only propelled the transformation in ideas called the scientific revolution but who, along with his contemporaries, lived, thought, and felt them, day in and day out.

  That transformation happened both within and to Isaac Newton. To become the man who could run the infamous Chaloner to ground, Newton had to master the habits of mind required for the task. That process, the making of perhaps the most unlikely detective on record, can be dated to the day a young man walked through the gates of a small town in Lincolnshire to further his education.

  Part I

  Learning to Think

  1. "Except God"

  JUNE 4, 1661, CAMBRIDGE.

  The tower of Great St. Mary's catches what daylight remains as a young man passes the town boundaries. He has come about sixty miles, almost certainly on foot (his meticulously kept accounts show no bills paid to livery stables). The journey from rural Lincolnshire to the university has taken him three days. The walls of the colleges shadow Trumpington Street and King's Way, but at this late hour, Trinity College is closed to visitors.

  The young man sleeps that night at an inn, and the next morning he pays eight pence for the carriage ride to the college. A few minutes later, he passes beneath the Gothic arch of Trinity's Great Gate and presents himself to college officials for the usual examination. Their scrutiny does not take long. The records of the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity for June 5, 1661, register that one Isaac Newton has been admitted into its company.

  On its face, Newton's entrance to Trinity could not have been more ordinary. He must have seemed to be yet another example of a familiar type, a bright farm youth come to university with the aim of rising in the world. This much is true: now nineteen, Newton was indeed country-bred, but by the time he set foot in Trinity's Great Court it was apparent that he was deeply un-suited for rural life. And he would prove to be a student unlike any the college had ever encountered.

  ***

  Nothing in his beginnings suggested any such promise. On Christmas Day, 1642, Hannah Newton gave birth to a son, who was so premature that his nurse recalled that at birth he could fit into a quart jug. The family waited a week to christen him with the name of his father, dead for three months.

  The infant Isaac was at least reasonably well off. His father had left an adequate landholding, including a farm whose owner enjoyed the grand title of Lord of the Manor of Woolsthorpe. For the time being, however, the inheritance fell to baby Isaac's mother, who was soon able to remarry up. Hannah's second husband, a local clergyman named Barnabas Smith, had a church living, a considerable estate, and admirable energy for a man of sixty-three; he would produce three children with his new wife over the next eight years. There was, it seemed, no place for an inconvenient toddler in such a vigorous marriage. A little more than two years old, Newton was abandoned to the care of his grandmother.

  Of necessity, the child Newton learned how to live within his own head. Psychoanalysis at a distance of centuries is a fool's game, but it is a matter of record that, with one possible exception, the adult Newton never permitted himself real emotional dependence on another human being. In the event, his upbringing did not dull his brain. He left his home and village when he was twelve, moving a few miles to the market town of Grantham to begin grammar school. Almost immediately it became obvious that his intelligence was of a different order from that of his classmates. The basic curriculum—Latin and theology—barely troubled him. Contemporaries recalled that when, from time to time, "dull boys were now & then put over him in form," he simply roused himself briefly "& such was his capacity that he could soon doe it & outstrip them when he pleas'd."

  In between such interruptions, Newton pleased himself. He drew eagerly, fantastically, covering his rented room with images of "birdes beasts men & ships," figures that included copied portraits of King Charles I and John Donne. He was fascinated by mechanical inventions, and he was good with tools. He built water mills for his own amusement and dolls' furniture for the daughter of his landlord. Time fascinated him: he designed and constructed a water clock, and made sundials so accurate that his family and neighbors came to rely on "Isaac's dials" to measure their days.

  Such glimpses of an eager, practical intelligence come from a handful of anecdotes collected just after Newton's death, some seventy years after the event. A closer look can be gained in the notebooks he kept, the first surviving one dating to 1659. In tiny handwriting (paper was precious) Newton recorded his thoughts, questions, and ideas. In that earliest volume he wrote down methods to make inks and mix pigments, including "a colour for dead corpes." He described a technique "to make birds drunk" and how to preserve raw meat ("Immers it in a well stopt vessel under spirits of wine"—with the hopeful postscript "from whose tast perhaps it may be freed by water"). He proposed a perpetual motion machine, along with a dubious remedy for the plague: "Take a good dose of the powder of ripe Ivie berrys. After that the aforesd juice of horse dung." He became a pack rat of knowledge, filling page after page with a catalogue of more than two thousand nouns: "Anguish. Apoplexie.... Bedticke. Bodkin. Boghouse.... Statesman. Seducer.... Stoick. Sceptick."

  The notebook contains other lists as well—a phonetic chart of vowel sounds, a table of star positions. Fact upon fact, his own observations, extracts cribbed from other books, his attention swerving from "A remedy for Ague" (it turns on the image of Jesus trembling before the cross) to astronomical observations. The mind emerging on the pages is one that seeks to master all the apparent confusion of the world, to bring order where none was then apparent.

  At sixteen, though, Newton had no idea how to reconcile his abilities to his place in life. An exercise notebook from his school days provides a glimpse of real misery. It is a unique document, the purest expression of despair Newton ever committed to paper. He sorrows for "A little fellow; My poore help." He asks: "What imployment is he fit for? What is hee good for?"—and offers no answer. He rails, "No man understands me," and then, at the last, he collapses: "What will become of me. I will make an end. I cannot but weepe. I know not what to do."

  Newton wept, but his mother demanded her due. If Isaac had exhausted what his schoolmaster could teach him, then it was time to come home and get back to what should have been his life's work: tending sheep and raising grain.

  Let the record show that Isaac Newton made a miserable farmer. He simply refused to play the part. Sent to market, he and a servant would stable their horses at the Saracen's Head in Grantham and then Newton would disappear, making a beeline for the cache of books at his former landlord's house. Or "he would stop by the way between home & Grantham & lye under a hedg studying whilst the man went to town & did the business." On his own land he paid no more attention to his duties. Instead, he "contrived water wheels and dams" and "many other Hydrostatick experiments which he would often be so intent upon as to forget his dinner." If his mother gave him orders—to watch the sheep, "or upon any other rural employment"—as often as not Newton ignored her. Rather, "his chief delight was to sit under a tree with a book in his hands." Meanwhile, the flock wandered off or the pigs nosed into his neighbors' grain.

  Hannah's attempt to break Newton to rural harness lasted nine months. He owed his escape to two men: his uncle, a clergyman and a graduate of Cambridge, and his former schoolmaster, William Stokes, who pleaded with Newton's mother to send her son to university. Hannah
relented only when Stokes promised to pay the forty-shilling fee levied on boys born more than a mile from Cambridge.

  Newton wasted no time getting out of town. Although the term would not begin until September, he set out from Woolsthorpe on June 2, 1661. He took almost nothing with him, and on arrival he equipped himself with a washstand, a chamber pot, a quart bottle, and "ink to fille it." Thus armed, Isaac Newton took up residence in Trinity, where he would remain for thirty-five years.

  At Cambridge, it was Newton's ill luck to be poor—or rather, to be made so by Hannah, who again registered her disdain for book learning by limiting his allowance at university to ten pounds a year. That was not enough to cover food, lodging, and tutors' fees, so Newton entered Trinity as a subsizar—the name Cambridge gave to those students who paid their way by doing the tasks that the sons of richer men would not do for themselves. Having just left a prosperous farm with servants of his own, Newton was now expected to wait on fellow students at table, to eat their scraps, to haul wood for their fires, to empty pots filled with their piss.

  Newton was not the most wretched among his fellow sizars. His ten-pound stipend counted for something, and he had a family connection to a senior member of the college. He could afford at least a few creature comforts. Cherries and marmalade show up in his expenses, as do such essentials as milk and cheese, butter and beer. But in his first years at the college, Newton lived at the very bottom of Trinity's hierarchy, standing while others sat, a man of no social consequence. He made almost no impression on the undergraduate life there. His entire correspondence contains just one letter to a college contemporary, written in 1669, five years after he completed his B.A. As Richard Westfall, Newton's leading biographer, has established, even after Newton became by far the most famous of his generation at Cambridge, not one of the students from his year admitted having met him.