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

by Thomas Levenson

  Regardless of such relative comfort, the underlying fact of Newgate remained: it was a deadly place. Raw sewage; overcrowding; bad water for those who could not bribe their way to beer or wine; sleeplessness; cold and damp: put it all together and you had an almost purpose-designed incubator for disease. Typhus was so widespread there that mere remand to prison for any length of time could be a death sentence. Year after year, many more inmates died of the disease than lived to meet the hangman.

  All this was what Peter Cooke and Thomas White, with their conflicting stories, faced from May to July 1696. Their executions were delayed and then delayed again, often for as brief a respite as a week or so, all to allow them to weigh exactly how horrible their lives were—and to consider how much worse (and brief) those lives could become. By the beginning of August, they finally achieved the proper frame of mind. Then, at last, the Warden of the Mint invited them to search their memories for any new information about the scandal at the Mint.

  White faced the greatest and most imminent danger. The earlier case against him had been controversial, and its course illustrated the difficulty officials faced obtaining convictions for even notorious offenders. The evidence presented during his prosecution had been unconvincing at best. The Middlesex County grand jury had thrown out the charges against him three times before the prosecutor went jurisdiction-shopping and found a London grand jury that could be badgered into issuing an indictment. The persistence suggests that White had well-placed enemies, a hint confirmed after his conviction. A member of Parliament demanded his execution—and promised complications in the House if White was spared.

  Newton's leverage was immense: if one conviction was not enough, by the time of their first interview, he had received information of another of White's crimes, information that White had helped two other men to set up a coining press—itself a capital offense. Newton was thus White's only hope, but at first it looked as if the convict had overplayed his very weak position. In his first interrogation he chose not to betray his two accomplices in the matter of the coining press, and Newton prepared to walk away, leaving White to the gallows. Just in time, White began to talk. Newton held his canary tight, petitioning after each interview for a stay of execution of no more than two weeks. He kept the game going for months, delaying the hanging thirteen times in all, until he was sure that White had betrayed every person he plausibly could (and perhaps a few more besides). Finally, in May 1697, Newton let his singing bird out of the cage, arranging White's pardon after he had survived a full year in Newgate.

  Peter Cooke grasped the essentials of the game much more quickly. He offered up at least three men as soon as he was asked. One was a deserter, and was promptly returned to the army. The second informed in his turn, productively enough to secure his own pardon. The third had nothing of sufficient value to offer. He was convicted and transported to the West Indies—the Fever Islands—a punishment that was understood to be a drawn-out sentence of death.

  The information won Cooke his reprieve, but it did nothing to help Newton make sense of the case of the missing dies. Through August and September, he interrogated another six men—possibly more. He arrested more than thirty suspects, and as the autumn progressed, he set yet more investigations in motion.

  What was William Chaloner doing while Newton and his growing crew of informers, runners, and clerks spread out across the city?

  He remained in plain sight. After his release from Newgate, late in the winter of 1696–97, he found new lodgings in London. Newton had apparently interviewed him just once, possibly in August, certainly by the end of September. Everyone else caught up in the case had been questioned and threatened repeatedly by a relentless Newton until they broke. Chaloner alone stuck to his story that it was the Mint itself that harbored a criminal conspiracy—and Newton could not shake him from his claim.

  As Newton was discovering, for all the severity of the law, coining proved to be a difficult crime to prosecute. Even securing an indictment was hardly a sure thing, as White's example demonstrated. Beyond the justified skepticism engendered by the reward system, the very bloodiness of the "bloody code"—the enormous list of offenses for which the punishment was death—made juries ever more reluctant to convict unless compelled by overwhelming evidence. In this case, William Chaloner had prudently kept himself at a safe remove from the incriminating dies. Cooke and White had been able to testify only that Chaloner had been somehow involved in the scheme, one of a group.

  Thus insulated, Chaloner simply held firm, denying involvement, pressing his charges against the Mint, even offering to assist Newton in straightening out the scandal at the Tower. All Newton had to do, Chaloner told him, was to hire someone whom he could recommend without hesitation, Thomas Holloway—just coincidentally, Chaloner's old coining partner—to serve as supervisor at the Mint.

  Newton brushed that aside. Though still in his first months as a crime fighter, he knew better than to accept "help" from suspects. But the fact remained that there was no obvious reason to hold on to Chaloner. He didn't have the dies. Those who accused him of involvement were already under sentence of death for separate matters—which meant that any jury could reasonably discount their testimony as an act of desperation. And Newton did not yet know whom he was really dealing with in William Chaloner.

  In our age of constant communication, we must keep in mind how hard it could be to keep track of the bad guys in Newton's time. Chaloner had surely left enough tracks to register as a rogue. Newgate's keepers would have recognized him from his two previous visits. Some in the government would have remembered him from the affair of the Jacobite pamphlets, and someone at the Treasury should have recalled the thousand-pound reward paid him in 1695.

  But England would not see a modern police force until Robert Peel established the world's first: the Metropolitan Police that began to operate in London in 1829. With the Met, bureaucratic notions of routine record keeping, the sort of dull, effective note taking and filing that would permit the police to keep track of its villains, finally became routine. But in 1696, Chaloner could bank on the fact that this kind of policing did not exist. Identification was haphazard, anecdotal. Those taking on police functions had as yet no obvious way to talk to each other in the usual course of events. Agents of the Crown chasing political conspiracy had no reason to flag evidence for the Warden's men seeking counterfeiters. Whitehall might be in possession of a rap sheet pages long for a given criminal, and no one at the Tower would have a clue.

  Which meant that to Newton, in August 1696, Chaloner was just one more shady character in the huge and indiscriminate pile of information with which he had to work. Newton knew that witnesses talking in the shadow of the gallows would say anything they could to escape, so there was a cloud of doubt as to Chaloner's actual role in the crime at hand. Under the circumstances, no conviction was likely. Newton had no real option but the one he took: he asked Chaloner what questions he could. Chaloner answered, careful to avoid contradiction. Newton listened, and then let his man go.

  From Chaloner's perspective that escape was a victory, even though he had failed at part of his scheme. He had not been able to entice the new Warden into taking Thomas Holloway into the Mint. Yet he had done well. He had accused the Mint of criminal conspiracy and gotten away with it. The whiff of scandal still hung over the Mint and its officers, and Chaloner had managed to fade from view.

  For Newton's part, this first encounter with Chaloner did not register very deeply. He was a busy man. His real work, if not his official duty, lay with the ongoing recoinage. Until and unless Chaloner again chose to inject himself into Mint business, he was in no danger whatsoever from Isaac Newton.

  Chaloner drew his own conclusion from the seeming ease with which he had wriggled out of jeopardy. Even though the Holloway scheme had failed, there were other ways to take advantage of the confusion in the country's money. By the spring of 1697, he hit upon a new plan that should have allowed him to dip at will into the river of
wealth flowing through the Tower of London. He had, he believed, no reason to fear the inevitable result: a head-to-head confrontation with the apparently easily fooled Warden of His Majesty's Mint, that unworldly natural philosopher so recently come from the provinces.

  16. "Boxefulls of Informations in His Own Handwriting"

  FORCED TO BECOME a criminal investigator, Isaac Newton committed himself to doing the job well. In August and September 1696, he devoted as many as half his working days to the case of the missing dies. Once he got through the initial round of interrogations, he paused to consider just how a proper investigation should be run.

  He soon established his basic strategy. He knew that coining was of necessity an organized crime. And if he could not work that out from first principles, Cooke's and White's testimony taught him the facts of the counterfeiter's life: it was impossible to coin on any scale without confederates—which meant that there were always at least three or four people who could bear witness against each other, even before a single dud guinea reached the street.

  That was where the greater vulnerability lay, of course; the problem of making an illegal sale has plagued aspiring crime lords throughout recorded history. Then as now, master counterfeiters did everything they could to avoid direct contact with the street-level trade, selling off coins in large lots to buyers who would then recruit others to pass the money into daily use. But there was still a chain of contact that could trace a single false piece back up the line. Worse, given the ratio of risk to reward at the bottom of the food chain, street-level traders in bad coin had every reason to talk when caught. In theory, and sometimes in practice, even a trivial quantity of bad money could doom someone to a coiner's death. And always, while captured suspects waited to see what clemency might be theirs, the evils of Newgate remained an effective way to loosen tongues.

  All this dictated Newton's approach. To break the threat of counterfeiting, he would need to capture and convict major players. To do so, he had to have witnesses and physical evidence that would link those players directly to the crime, to the making and disseminating of coin—a strong enough link so that even the most soft-hearted jury would convict. To find that evidence and to connect it to the men he wanted, he needed to roll up the networks no counterfeiter could do without, starting at the bottom, trading precisely measured grains of mercy for the knowledge he needed. Like any street cop in history—and unlike any other fellow of the Royal Society or Cambridge don—he would have to wade hip-deep into London's underworld.

  He began to do so no later than September 1696. While pursuing the implications of Cooke's and White's confessions, he recruited his first agents to develop other cases, men he sent out in an unprecedented sweep of undercover operations. On September 11, 1696, his accounts record five pounds "paid Humphrey Hall to buy him a suit to qualify him for conversing with a gang of coiners of note." That was some suit: five pounds was a month's pay for a clerk at the Mint. Newton was clearly aiming high here, sending Hall to mix with a flash crew, notable crooks who dressed to match their success.

  Over the next several months, Newton ranged further in the hunt. To solve any problems of jurisdiction, he got himself appointed a justice of the peace for seven counties surrounding London's metropolitan sprawl. Thus armed, he dispatched men in pursuit of coining rings wherever the evidence led. An agent who lived in the London suburb of Islington traveled back to Newton's recent home, Cambridgeshire. There, posing as a coiner on the lam from the capital, he wormed his way into a fully equipped coining operation, complete with furnace, flattening mill, and a version of the Mint's "secret" milling machines.

  These investigations were expensive. The brothers Benjamin and Charles Maris, who traveled through Worcestershire and Shropshire in late 1696, billed Newton £44 2s. for wages, expenses, and tongue looseners. Bodenham Rewse, also known as Benjamin Reuss, listed in court documents as an embroiderer living in Bow Street, actually made his living as a thief-taker. Between 1693 and 1695, he and a partner brought charges against twenty-two prostitutes and more than a dozen owners of brothels. But his career really took off when he entered the Warden's service. Newton clearly trusted him, giving him several arrest warrants to execute, and then paying him £34 to pursue coiners operating to the west of the city. Both men benefited. Newton was able to prosecute several coiners based on his man's investigations, and by 1701 Rewse had picked up enough spare change in bounties and rewards to be able to buy the post of head turnkey at Newgate—thus reaching the top of the system of more or less legal plunder that could turn jailers into rich men. In all, when Newton accounted for his out-of-pocket expenses incurred in the pursuit of coiners from 1696 to 1699, he came up with a total of £626 5s. 9d., or well over a year of his own salary as Warden. That was more than enough to support a serious private force, answering only to Newton, to be aimed at whomever he chose.

  Inevitably, some agents turned bad. By 1697, both the Maris brothers ended up on the wrong side of the locks at Newgate, one for smuggling, the other for coining. Others the Warden employed were worse. Hopton Haynes, usually almost worship-fully loyal to his patron, acknowledged that the agents Newton recruited "lay under violent suspicion of being scandalously mercenary." There was Samuel Wilson, who confessed to Newton that he had sold "a pair of Dyes for making mill'd Shilings" for five pounds. Newton gave his informant a Warden's warrant to arrest the buyer—and Wilson seized on the document as a gift, "as good a Sham as could be to get money." He used the warrant to blackmail victims for a year and a half before he was betrayed in turn.

  Then there was the terrifying John Gibbons, porter of Whitehall and already one of William Chaloner's more valuable contacts. The authorities in London, Newton among them, used Gibbons for years as a thief-taker, charged with performing what would become essential police functions: running informers, searching suspect premises, executing arrest warrants. Gibbons used these powers to operate a lucrative side business. He did arrest those who forced him into such unprofitable inconvenience, and he pocketed whatever bounties he could claim, but his protection racket earned him much more.

  Newton eventually recognized that his man had gone too far to the bad. He turned his attention to the problem in the spring of 1698. Witness after witness told him how thoroughly Gibbons had come to terrorize the coining world. One informant told Newton that paying Gibbons "a certain pension quarterly and yearly" was a fact of life, part of any London coiner's overhead. Gibbons's onetime lover Mary Townsend testified that he had been running his protection scheme for at least six years, while a captured coiner named Edward Ivy (aka Ivey) confirmed that the racket was still going strong: "Gibbons corresponds with a great many Clippers and Coyners and used to receive severall summs of money from them as contribution for coniving at ym. [them] and was wont to Solicit for any of ym. when they were in restraint." Gibbons's standard price seemed to be fifty pounds, though he would occasionally suggest alternatives, and he did not always, or only, demand cash. Elizabeth Bond told Newton that she had seen Gibbons lead a Mrs. Jackson into "a little adjouning room with a Bedd" and that when they emerged, "Mrs. Jackson trembled with her hands and Jawes and lookt pale." Jackson could merely have been terrified, but the pointed mention of the bed suggests something more, and the hint of sexual extortion runs through the witnesses' accounts. At the height of his power, Gibbons put the bite on most if not all coiners who came to the attention of the authorities, among them William Chaloner, who, Gibbons boasted, was "sought after for coyning of Gineas and pistols" but was "safe enough for he had secured him."

  Newton neither participated in nor tolerated his agents' excesses, but, then as now, corruption was an inevitable byproduct of policing any highly profitable illegal business. The fact that he had to use thieves, extortionists, and coiners themselves to capture those he wanted more did not much matter to him. Partly the problem was self-correcting: the worst of his men tended to overreach to the point where he could deal with them as needed—and in the meantime his thugs got
results. By early 1697, Newton's network of informers, undercover agents, and street muscle had turned him into the most effective criminal investigator London had yet seen.

  Newton was willing to stick his own oar in too, as needed. In October 1699, he submitted another bill to the Treasury. He asked for £120 to cover "various small expenses in coach-hire & at Taverns & Prisons & other places." He spent that sum on personal forays through London, buying drinks for informers, sweetening the deal for accomplices—all in all, diving as deep as needed into the muck of the capital's criminal landscape.

  He did not shy from the more brutal side of the job either. He personally examined those he and his men caught—showing up in the cells at Newgate if necessary, hauling informants into the Mint's narrow, private chambers at the Tower if he could. Typically, Newton would ask the questions and take notes while a clerk wrote a summary of the deponents' confessions, to be signed once the ordeal ended. Most of those documents have disappeared, perhaps suspiciously. John Conduitt, Newton's nephew by marriage and his successor at the Mint, reported that he helped Newton burn "boxefulls of informations in his own handwriting."

  Conduitt chose not to explain why Newton wanted to destroy the papers, but one inference is that Newton enjoyed the role of inquisitor too much. In this view, Newton proved willing, perhaps eager, to terrorize his captives in pursuit of the necessary confessions and betrayals with a viciousness that even that strong-stomached time would tolerate. Formally, torture had not been used in England as an investigative tool for about half a century before Newton came to the Mint. Elizabeth I had faced repeated rebellion, often animated by Catholic ambitions on her Protestant throne—and she was England's most prolific torturing monarch, authorizing fifty-three of the eighty-one warrants on record. The rack was the most common tool used to extract confessions, but occasionally Elizabethan inquisitors grew more inventive. On November 17, 1577, Thomas Sherwood was consigned to a dungeon overrun with rats, and on January 10, 1591, four torture commissioners were ordered to confine the dangerous priest George Beesley and a co-conspirator in the tiny cell known as Little Ease. There, Beesley could not sit or stand or move at all.