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

by Thomas Levenson

  Adding to the sense that this was a planned rather than an opportunistic move was Chaloner's timing. He saw his chance at the very moment that England was, literally, running out of money in what was a nationwide demonstration of Gresham's law—the axiom that bad money drives out good. The crisis was driven by a peculiarity of England's coinage, the fact that for almost three decades the country had two types of money in circulation: the hand-struck coinage produced up to 1662, and the coins manufactured since on machines installed in the Mint that year.

  The older currency, struck by a Mint moneyer swinging his hammer, was irregular and prone to wear. Worse, it had smooth rims, which meant that anyone with a good pair of shears and a file could snip the edge of a coin and then file the piece smooth again. A cut here and a slice there and pretty soon a coin clipper could accumulate a healthy pile of silver, at the expense of a debased currency.

  Clipping became epidemic in the 1690s, to the point that at the height of the crisis, "it was mere chance whether what was called a shilling was really ten pence, sixpence, or a groat," according to the Victorian historian Lord Macaulay. In one test of the state of the currency, Macaulay reported, "Three eminent goldsmiths were invited to send in a hundred pounds each in current silver to be tried by the balance." That much money, he wrote, "ought to have weighed about twelve hundred ounces. The actual weight proved to be six hundred and twenty four ounces." And so it went throughout the kingdom: money that should have tipped the scale at 400 ounces actually weighed 240 ounces at Bristol, 203 at Cambridge, and, at rival Oxford, a mere 103.

  Clipped coinage was hardly new: it had been punished as high treason since Elizabeth's reign. Ever since, clippers were regularly caught, tried, and condemned to death by the rope or by fire, but with little effect, especially in the orgy of clipping that took place between 1690 and 1696. As Macaulay wrote, the news that one condemned clipper was able to offer six thousand pounds for a pardon "did much to counteract the effect which the spectacle of his death was designed to produce."

  There was a still faster route to wealth available to those with access to more sophisticated tools. By 1695 counterfeit money accounted for about ten percent by value of all coins in circulation. The secret of that success lay in the counterfeiter's ability to crack the second and more formidable of England's two types of legal currency.

  London had seen nothing like the new moneymaking machinery the Mint installed in 1662. The ubiquitous Samuel Pepys, then secretary to the Navy Board, wangled a personal tour on May 19, 1663. In the narrow Mint rooms crammed alongside the outer wall of the Tower of London, he saw an extraordinary spectacle of heat, noise, smoke, and men pushed to the point of collapse as they raced to keep up with the pace of the giant machines.

  In the first room he toured, Mint workers tended intense charcoal fires beneath iron cauldrons, each large enough to melt up to a third of a ton of silver bullion at a time. Other workers poured the liquid metal into sand molds to make small rectangular ingots. Once the ingots cooled, the machines took over. Men broke the molds and passed the silver blocks through huge, crushing rolling mills, powered by horses driving giant capstans one story below. The thin plates that emerged went to lever-driven punches that pounded out round discs to be flattened by a screw press.

  Pepys noted approvingly that the new money was "neater ... than the old way," displaying an unprecedented level of consistency. By law, each shilling was supposed to contain a precise weight of silver, and this mechanical approach linked the symbolic claim of value on the face of the coin—the marks on the coin that declared "this is a shilling"—to the material promise: "this coin contains 88.8 grains of silver, value, twelve pence."

  The next machine down the production line was the key to the Mint's ultimate goals and was "the great secret," wrote Pepys, who wasn't allowed to see it. It was one of the earliest edging machines to be used for a national currency. It worked by rotating each coin blank over a pair of steel plates. As a Mint moneyer turned a hand crank connected to a toothed cog, the plates engraved an inscription into the rim of each coin—on the larger denominations, the phrase that still figures the edge of the British one-pound coin: decus et tutamen, "a decoration and a safeguard." This was the Mint's secret weapon, for edged or "milled" currency could not be clipped without the crime revealing itself in a gouge in the milled rim.

  The final step in the process—striking the coin faces with the appropriate image—was newly mechanized as well. A Mint worker sitting in a pit below floor level would place a coin blank into the striking chamber. Four men pulled on the ropes at either end of a huge capstan, causing its arms to spin and the press to drive two steel dies into the faces of the coin, producing an impression deeper and sharper than a man with a hammer could hope to match. As the dies retracted, the moneyer sitting in the pit would flip the newly struck coin out of the chamber and replace it with a new blank.

  When driven hard, the teams at the presses could produce a coin every two seconds. Even at somewhat slower speeds and with every trick of mechanical advantage brought to bear, however, the machines consumed men. Those at the capstan bars exhausted themselves within fifteen minutes, and losing fingers was reckoned to be an ordinary hazard for those who fed blanks into the striking chambers. Perversely, the brutality was part of the appeal of mechanizing the Mint. If a trained crew found it so draining to produce the new coins, then would-be criminals should find it nearly impossible to copy them. As Pepys approvingly concluded, the new machines yielded a currency that was "freer from clipping or counterfeiting" than ever before. No mere London ne'er-do-well could copy coins "without an engine of the charge and noise that no counterfeit will be at or venture upon."

  Pepys drastically underestimated the ingenuity of England's underworld. William Chaloner, for one, was already comfortable working with hot metal. And in a goldsmith named Patrick Coffee he found one last master, who taught him the essential techniques of counterfeiting over a period of several months, probably extending into early 1691. Neither Coffee nor Chaloner left notes describing exactly what was learned in this final apprenticeship, but surviving trial records of coiners prosecuted at London's criminal court, the Old Bailey, in the late seventeenth century provide a clue.

  Those cases show that it was as important to learn what not to attempt as what to do; inept counterfeiters attempting to exploit the currency crisis supplied the Old Bailey with a constant diet of rapidly dispatched defendants. Perhaps the most spectacular display of incompetence came from an unnamed "inhabitant of the parish of St. Andrews Holbourn," brought to trial accused of copying French coins. His work was astonishingly awful, and he was acquitted, the jury accepting his rather bold argument that the poor quality of his work confirmed that "he had tryed to Coin with Pewter as afore-said for Diversion, or the like, but never was concerned in Coining any manner of Money." Few others tried this defense.

  Mary Corbet was more typical. She faced the court on April 9, 1684, charged with transforming "twelve Pieces of Copper, Tinn, and other false Metals, into the Likeness and Similitude of the currant Coin of this Kingdom, called Queen Elizabeth's Shillings, and twelve other pieces of like counterfeit Metal, into the Likeness, &c. of Queen Elizabeth's Six-Pences." Corbet had taken the prudent course: the pre-1662 hand-hammered money was so debased, as early as 1684, that making facsimiles of the irregular coins presented fewer challenges than trying to mix up a batch of the new, milled coins. Two witnesses testified that Corbet melted "a certain Quantiy of Pewter, Copper, and such like Metals, (as much at a time as weighed about a Pound weight) in an Earthen Porringer," and that she then poured her hot metal "into Moulds of Wood, which fashioned it like the Shillings and Six-Pences before mentioned." That was it: Corbet ran her coining operation with a heatproof pot, a vigorous fire, and a simple mold.

  As usual, the production side of the counterfeiting business was the easy part. The dud coins had to be spent, and here a better choice in her confederates might have saved Corbet. The witnesses against
her were two women caught trying to pass her products. Based on their testimony, she was found guilty of high treason, for which the penalty—for women—was to be burned alive (though in many cases "mercy" was granted and the condemned would be strangled and her corpse burned). Corbet appealed the sentence, "pleading her belly"—that is, that she was pregnant—in the hopes of receiving a reprieve at least until the notional child was born. A jury of women was impaneled on the spot, felt her abdomen for any signs of a moving fetus, found none, and left her to her fate.

  There are dozens of cases like these in the record, a litany of marginally capable small-timers, regularly caught and brought to trial. A surprising number ended in acquittal, often in the teeth of powerful evidence. The very severity of the punishment worked against the authorities at times. Certainly, even as Parliament increased the penalties for the variety of coining crimes—owning coiner's tools, possession of bad coins, and so on—juries would go to considerable lengths to avoid condemning appealing or reputable defendants.

  Occasionally, though, much more sophisticated operators would stumble, and the scale of their operations—the amount of damage they could do—usually ensured a concerted effort by the prosecutor to leave no room for misplaced mercy. As a consequence, a few trial records contain fairly detailed accounts of the way expert coiners worked.

  For example, there was the case of Samuel and Mary Quested, brought before the Old Bailey on October 14, 1695. They were charged with "forging and coining 20 false Guinea's 100 King Charles the First shillings, and 10 King James's the Second Milled shillings." According to witness depositions, Samuel Quested had practiced as a coiner for several years. At first, following the historical evolution of the Mint's methods, "when he coined money he struck it with a hammer." But producing copies of a rapidly evaporating currency was not nearly as lucrative as forging modern, milled coins, so Quested, probably aided by his wife, created their own version of the official production line. When Mint agents searched the cellar of Quested's house, "they found a Cutter to cut out the Plate fit for Coining"—the machinery needed to complete the first step in the minting process, cutting accurate coin blanks. Next the investigators passed out of doors, where "they found the Dyes to make Guinea's, Shillings and Halfpence, in an old Stocking hid under the earth." These, combined with another discovery—"in an Outhouse they found a Press to coin money with"—showed that the Questeds had the capacity to strike a design in deep relief on the faces of their coins. One more critical process remained—and the Mint men continued their search until "in the Orchard they found Instruments to mill the Edges of Milled money, and divers other Dyes."

  With that, Samuel and Mary Quested could complete near-perfect imitations of the King's coins, down to the edging that was a decoration, but no protection. Witnesses deposed that they had seen Mary Quested mill guineas made out of what was described as "a coarse sort of gold"—most likely clippings from valid coins mixed with pewter or brass or other base metal. Whatever the precise metal recipe used in the Quested workshop, their products were clearly of the highest quality. Their false guineas traded for twenty shillings each, which, as the court record grimly noted, was the same value "as guineas go now."

  From the start of his coining career, William Chaloner aimed for the kind of perfection the Questeds had achieved—coins that could pass without detection. Patrick Coffee had brought him almost to that point. Based on the evidence of the coins he eventually produced, Coffee's instruction enabled Chaloner to prepare metal plates for punching into coin blanks. Coffee also taught him how to build and use a serviceable coin press, one able to strike a deep engraving on the front and back of each coin; and, at a minimum, he showed him how to use molds to produce a plausible imitation of the milled edging that was the Mint's pride and the clipper's enemy.

  With that, Chaloner would have been almost—but not quite—ready to begin coining at the highest level. He still lacked one crucial tool. The quality of his finished coins depended on how well a coiner could reproduce the design of a legitimate coin's face. To do so, a coiner needed near-perfect dies for use in his coin press. It took a master engraver to make such dies, with a level of skill far beyond what either Coffee or Chaloner could muster on his own. Chaloner found his die maker in Grays Inn Lane, at the workshop of the print seller and engraver Thomas Taylor.

  At first glance, Taylor seems an unlikely recruit. For the most part, he is remembered as an honorable minor member of the society of learned men—the so-called Republic of Letters—known to his contemporaries for publishing the landmark map collections England exactly described and The Principality of Wales exactly described — two examples of the new demand at that time for more precise renderings of the physical world. In 1724, as part of a wave of post-Newtonian popularization of astronomy and physics, Taylor produced a broadside illustration of a solar eclipse, complete with diagrams explaining the orbital geometry that lies behind each total eclipse.

  Reproducing that kind of detailed imagery required highly specialized skills. But for all his ability, Taylor seems to have found, as many have since, that publishing is a tough business. Selling maps out of taverns (he advertised the Golden Lion on Fleet Street as one of his business addresses) did not cover the bills. So, at least in his youth, Taylor was willing to provide his services to William Chaloner. His workmanship proved first rate. In 1690, Chaloner took delivery of dies for French pistoles—gold coins worth about seventeen English shillings. In 1691, he came back for more and commissioned Taylor to make him a second pair of dies, these engraved with the face and reverse designs of golden English guineas.

  At last Chaloner was ready for his first major attempt at currency crime. He produced his initial run of counterfeit coins with his new tools and knowledge sometime in 1691, using an alloy of at least moderately pure silver to strike a large run of pistoles (thousands at least) followed by "a great number of Guineas, all of silver gilt." He still needed help—Coffee and another man, his brother-in-law Joseph Gravener (who also answered to Grosvenor), performed the final step of gilding the pieces with a thin skim of gold. Chaloner's chief confederate, Thomas Holloway, together with his wife, Elizabeth, handled the crucial task of passing the false coins into the hands of the petty crooks who put the counterfeits into circulation. Holloway later confessed that he had had no trouble unloading the merchandise. The amounts involved were impressive: Holloway said that he had taken "at least 1000 of Chaloner's French Pistols and ... hath seen many 100ds of his Guineas," which Chaloner sold for eleven shillings each.

  Holloway also said that he had heard Chaloner "boast his workmanship"—and with cause. Chaloner could not keep up with the demand. His biographer reported that, having "thought it Probable to Counterfeit" good money, now he raced to produce as much as he could. "The Trade went briskly," and "Chaloner's Guinea's flew about as thick as some years ago did bad Silver." The payoff would have been enough to catapult Chaloner into real wealth almost overnight. Using Holloway's numbers, Chaloner's profit in his first several months would have exceeded one thousand pounds, or roughly twenty times the annual wages a skilled laborer in London could expect. These were high times, when "every thing seem'd to favour his Undertakings," and "he seem'd to have found the (so-much-sought-after) Philosopher's Stone; or (like Danae from Jove) had Showers of Gold daily falling into his lap."

  William Chaloner responded to this sudden fortune with glee and appetite, plunging into all the pleasures now open to him. He reveled in the company of women, and as his biographer noted with his characteristic mix of awe, envy, and condescension: "To compleat (as he thought) his happiness, he wanted nothing but a Phillis, (For a Coyner, you must know, is as rarely to be found without a Harlot, as a Sea Captain's Wife without a Gallant)." London had no shortage of willing (or purchasable) candidates, and the open-handed Chaloner soon found the first of a series of mistresses. "As the Devil would have it, a Phillis he found, every way fit for himself." And so "he forsook his Wife, a very good Woman, by whom he had se
veral Children," to take up with a woman whose parents "lovingly Bawded for their Daughter, and she as dutifully ask'd her Mother's Blessing when she went to bed with her Spark."

  At first Chaloner occupied himself with his new companion at her parents' house, but the tide of cash soon carried him to grander quarters. As Newton later disdainfully reported, "in a short time [Chaloner] put on ye habit of a Gentleman," and set out to cloak himself in all the outward appearances of respectable wealth. He found a pleasant address, "a great house in Knightsbridge"—then a semirural suburb—which he ornamented with that conventional blazon of sufficient fortune: his own service of (presumably real) silver plate.

  Such ostentation was dangerous. Chaloner's boisterous display of new wealth lifted him out of the anonymous ocean of London's poor. He was becoming a name attached to a face, visible well past his immediate circle of henchmen and targets. That made him vulnerable to anyone moved or compelled to inform. Chaloner's first foray as a coiner lasted about two years—a long run for such a high-volume operation. But he came to grief in the usual manner, when William Blackford was caught and tried for passing false guineas. Blackford was condemned to death, but bought himself a reprieve by implicating the man who supplied him with "some hundreds (if not thousands) of his Guinea's and Pistoles": Mr. William Chaloner. After he got word of Blackford's testimony, Chaloner spent two days coining as many guineas as he could, to supply him in the long drought to come. Then he stashed his precious dies and some other equipment with Thomas Holloway and disappeared.