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

by Thomas Levenson

  And so it went: Elizabeth Holloway finally revealed the whole intricate story of her family's journey to Scotland, which had allowed Chaloner to escape Newton's first prosecution. Consistent to the end, she revealed, Chaloner had cheated her husband, paying him a dozen pounds instead of the promised twenty. (According to Elizabeth, the sea captain contracted to carry the Holloway children north also got shorted eleven shillings out of a fare of three pounds eleven shillings.)

  Newton pushed on, voracious, almost indiscriminate. Cecilia Labree, in Newgate awaiting execution, was urged by a friend to "save her self by confession"—admission, that is, of more than her own crimes. So "for making her confession more effectuall," her friend told her that Chaloner and a confederate "had then a Coyning Press at Chiswick" and that they "were then concerned togeather in making Gineas there." Labree followed that advice, trotting out the story for Newton. The gambit did not save her—she was condemned to die later in 1699—but it added to the pile of similar accounts Newton was compiling.

  His approach was taking shape: the particulars provided by any given witness mattered less than establishing that an army of men and women were prepared to say that they had seen/helped/heard of Chaloner making shillings/half-crowns/ crowns/pistoles/guineas seven years ago, or five, or three years past, or last summer. Newton was making sure he could overwhelm any jury, to the point where the details of exactly what happened when simply wouldn't matter.

  22. "If Sr Be Pleased..."

  OF COURSE, ALL THE while Newton was building his case, William Chaloner could hardly be expected to remain idle in his own defense. He knew that Newton was pressuring his fellow inmate Thomas Carter, who in turn was well aware that he was almost certainly doomed. Carter had, after all, been caught red-handed, with witnesses to place the forged Malt tickets directly in his hands. Clearly, his only hope was to trade his life for someone whose skin was more valuable than his own. Both Chaloner and Carter were housed on the Masters side of the prison. It was impossible to keep the two men from speaking from time to time, and Chaloner took full advantage of the opportunity to push Carter to act against his self-interest.

  He started by trying to persuade Carter "to joyn with him representing if they joined they should save themselves," pressing Carter so relentlessly that Carter asked one of his jailers "to forbid his access to me." Chaloner's message was unwavering: what was past was past, but now they were a team, or as he told Carter, "Wee have played the fool one with another hitherto for want of an understanding betwixt us but now if you'l joyn with me nothing can hurt us & weel fun them all."

  That was the carrot. Chaloner also wielded a stick. He wrote to Secretary Vernon, betraying Carter as a repeat offender, formerly confined "in most Gaols in England" for coining, house-breaking, and forgery—not to mention his seven times in the pillory. Carter was beside himself when he found out that Chaloner had attempted to undercut his value as a witness. "I askt him," Carter wrote, "why he informed yo[ur] hono[ur] that I was outlawed." The answer was obvious: "he said because I should not be an evidence agt. him." With that, Chaloner seems to have believed that he'd neutralized his former friend, thus gutting the charges based on the Malt ticket scheme.

  He misjudged his man. Newton had been there before him. From the moment he returned to Newgate, Chaloner never lacked company, fellow prisoners sharing his quarters. At least three of his cellmates were working for the Warden, and first among them was Thomas Carter.

  Carter had done his best to get into Newton's good graces, adding to his Malt Lottery confession the details of half a dozen coining schemes he had joined over the past several years. But Newton wanted more—testimony against Chaloner of hitherto unsuspected crimes, in terms more persuasive than the testimony of one member of a gang against another—and that Carter could not give him without help.

  Enter John Whitfield, last overheard murderously and treasonously promising death to Isaac Newton "if ever King James came again." Then, it had been the debtor surgeon Samuel Bond who retailed the remark to establish his credit with the Warden. Now it was Whitfield's turn to try to eavesdrop his way to Newton's mercy. At Newton's command, Carter ran Whitfield. His instructions were simple: get close enough to Chaloner to hear whatever he might say—especially the location of the missing Malt ticket plate. In early February, Whitfield wrote to Newton, "I have managed that affaire and I think it may be to the satisfaction of all that hear it." But he declined to commit whatever he knew to paper, angling for a meeting with his handler instead. Let him be conveyed out of Newgate, and then, if "Sr be pleased to come to the Dogg ... I do not doubt but I may be worth yor while and some find hiden Treasures lye in Concaves where never found by reason."

  And so it happened that Isaac Newton, Warden of His Majesty's Mint, took himself to the Dogg pub and had Whitfield brought to him there. Whitfield told him that Chaloner had hidden the plate in some hollow in one of the buildings to which he had access in the last week or so of the conspiracy. But he did not know where the Mint's men should search, nor even in which house they should start. He could tell Newton only that "it was never lookt for in such vacan[t] places."

  Newton did not leave a record of the meeting, so there is no way to tell how annoyed he was by this bait and switch. The sequence of events suggests that he remained patient. Whitfield returned to Newgate, apparently with instructions to continue insinuating himself into Chaloner's confidence. He failed. Chaloner still had some contacts at large in London, and Thomas Carter reported, "After Mr Whitfield was with you at the Dogg, Chaloner was a little suspicious of him."

  A game of cat and mouse followed. Chaloner, famous for the love of his own voice, now had to learn how to shut up. To an extent, he did. What Carter had tried to paint as a temporary setback for Whitfield was a complete rejection. "Mr. Whitfield has endeavoured all he can to get more out of him as farr as is conven[ien]t," Carter confessed to Newton, but Chaloner would not be drawn. "All his discourse to him is that he hopes he is a man of honour and will not talk of any thing els[e] to him." That was bad news for Whitfield—Newton valued results much more than effort—and hence bad for Carter too. Carter pleaded with his captor for one more chance. With Whitfield useless, Carter told Newton, "I hope I have got as good an In-strumt. If you please to think well of it I will get out of him all that he has done and all that he intends."

  Newton did. Carter's new man was John Ignatius Lawson, once a physician, now a coiner lately arrived in Newgate. He turned out to be perfect for the job. Most important, Newton owned him top to bottom. The Warden had several witnesses prepared to swear they had seen Lawson with coining tools, bending over a furnace, casting guineas and pistoles, trimming oversized pieces with metal scissors. Newton even had one man willing to swear that Lawson had said "he could make a fool of 20 such as the Warden."

  Not anymore. Arrest and then weeks in Newgate had broken the former doctor. His co-conspirators had abandoned him, he told Newton, having "run away with all my goods starved one of my Children to death and sent the rest a begging." He was starving, trying "to live wth. a pennyworth of bread 4 dayes." He begged for help. "I throw myself wholly at yo[ur] feet," he wrote in his first letter to Newton, and in one of the last he pleaded once more: "I hope Charity will moe you to lend me yo[ur] hand ... and the remaind[er] of my life I shall wholy rend[er] at your disposall."

  Newton took Lawson up on his offer, and was repaid almost immediately. Lawson was a sponge, absorbing everything he heard in the cells. He did not confine himself to Chaloner alone. Among Lawson's early dispatches, Newton found the entire history of Ball and Whitfield's coining conspiracy, down to the damning tiny anecdote that "Ball sold his horse to a hatter in Southwark for to raise money to make ye pistols." A hatter! Now here was a witness to persuade a jury, ready to testify to the perfect detail that could convince twelve honest men he had actually seen what he presented as fact.

  Lawson kept such tales coming. As he told them, coiners seemed driven to incriminate themselves just when he
happened by. There was John Deacon, who in April 1698 approached him in the Swan tavern in the Leadenhall market to repair a guinea press. Katherine Coffee had tried to replicate one of Chaloner's coining techniques in "a Chamber at the sign of the Red Cow in makt Lane near St. James's makt" in front of six witnesses—i ncluding Lawson. "Perkins the Smith" had no more discretion: "one morning I came into his shop where he and his man Tom was striking with a Cast punch the face of a King William Shilling." For some reason, Perkins felt compelled to tell Lawson who had ordered the punches—a thief-taker named Wood—and Lawson dutifully passed that nut of information on to the voracious Newton.

  Lawson went on, detailing incident after incident, recorded on page after page of Newton's files—clearly intent on delivering every last scrap he had heard, seen, or merely believed plausible (like the fashion detail that Katherine Coffee had carried her coining tools in "a black Leather bagg like the case of a small Bible"). But all this was garnish. Newton wanted the meat of the case, and that meant Lawson had to worm past Chaloner's sense of self-preservation and get the man to talk.

  In this he had one great advantage over both of Newton's previous informers. Like Chaloner, Lawson had operated in the inner circles of London's coiners. He knew the same kinds of people—gold and silver dealers who supplied the raw materials, engravers and smiths who made and finished the coiner's tools, pub owners who provided meeting places and the occasional back room in which to work. But, crucially, he and Chaloner had never worked together. The cases against them did not overlap. Lawson could not testify against him. And so he slipped through Chaloner's defenses, becoming his intimate companion, eating, sleeping, and conversing in the same cell.

  Chaloner seems to have welcomed the new man with real relief. Here at last was someone who couldn't hurt him, yet would recognize his mastery of their shared craft. He confided in Lawson, boasted to him, and accepted the sustained compliment that an eager listener pays his entertainer. Once he started to talk, all the secrets he had kept so carefully from such obvious spies as Carter and Whitfield came pouring out. After each long, wandering session Lawson passed on his report to the Tower. By late January, Newton knew within a day—at most two or three—all that Chaloner feared, hoped, or planned.

  Thus, when Chaloner wondered out loud if Carter had any Malt Lottery tickets left to produce against him at trial, Newton knew Chaloner was still preoccupied with the wrong charges. When Chaloner told Lawson that Patrick Coffee and Thomas Taylor, the goldsmith and engraver who had set him up as a coiner almost a decade ago, were at large, Newton knew which witnesses his prisoner feared most. Chaloner told Lawson that Katherine Coffee might be an equal threat, but thought she would "be ript up and dy before she confess any thing." This wasn't speculation; Chaloner had found a man outside the prison—a Mr. Hount or Hunt—to keep watch on her. Newton promptly took her deposition, in which she tied Chaloner directly to the making of forged French pistoles.

  Chaloner told Lawson that he had much more to fear from Elizabeth Holloway—and, with two interviews already on record with her, Newton knew that he was right. Then there was Jack Gravener, brother to Joseph Gravener, who had married Chaloner's sister and worked with Coffee to gild Chaloner's first runs of pistoles and guineas. Joseph had already gone to the gallows, but Jack was still alive. Chaloner told Lawson that Jack could hang him, for he "hath seen him coyn many a thousand Gineas which he sold at 10s a piece."

  Newton did not or could not track down the surviving Gravener, but Lawson's torrent of information kept coming. Chaloner boasted to Lawson that he had produced thirty thousand false guineas in all—which, even at its fifteen-thousand-pound street value, still amounted to a fortune, a couple of million in today's money. Chaloner took pride in his skills, preening to Law-son that "he graved the Plate for Mault Tickets and was to grave another for £100 tickets and could do a plate in 4 or 5 hours time & that no man in England could grave them better than he." Chaloner told his confidant some of his favorite tricks—how he used "buttons of Tin plated over with Silver," for example, frauds that could make a coiner a thousand pounds a week.

  He also confessed to the petty crime of counterfeiting the three pounds that his agent Gillingham had used to cheat the captain carrying the Holloway children to Scotland—one of the deceits that had enraged Elizabeth Holloway to the point of telling Newton everything she knew.

  All this was useful—vital, even. But Lawson truly earned his reward when he managed to extract from Chaloner exactly how he planned to derail his trial. By February, Chaloner had come to realize that whatever jeopardy he faced in the Malt Lottery scheme, Newton was clearly accumulating a much broader case. So he knew he had to find a way to render meaningless the growing mountain of testimony to his older crimes. Chaloner's first gambit was admirably direct. In his second report to Newton, apparently in early February, Lawson reported that Chaloner's "friends send him word this evening that they have made friends with 6 of one Jury and 8 of another to throw the bill out." (That is, he would suborn the grand jury to deny the bill of particulars—the indictment.)

  At the same time, Chaloner developed a second line of defense. If he could not bribe his way out of Newgate, perhaps he could buy his escape with the one possession of real value he had left: the still missing Malt ticket plate. Secretary Vernon had already told him that "if he did not deliver up the plate ... it should be worse for him." Accordingly, Chaloner was beginning to weigh the costs and benefits of so open an admission of guilt. He told Lawson that his treasure was in the custody of the daughter-in-law of the wife of an accomplice and indicated that he was wavering: "If he thought it would do him any Service he hath it ready to produce."

  Weeks passed. Chaloner remained in Newgate, scheming. Law-son kept watch. Newton had already allowed two sessions of the criminal courts to pass since Chaloner's arrest. The next would begin on March 1, 1699.

  Chaloner sensed that he was almost out of time. He could not be sure that his corrupted jurors would stay bought. He knew that he could not prevent at least some damaging witnesses from testifying in open court. He could think of only one last gambit to try, one unimaginable just weeks before: he decided to write to Isaac Newton and tell him why he should spare his life. It was the first time in the three years through which the men had fought that one of them had addressed the other directly.

  Chaloner would tell all, he promised. "In obediance to your wor[shi]pp I will give you the best acct I cann remember." He would provide names, accomplices, men whose crimes he reckoned Newton knew, and "a great many more but I have not time to give you a whole accot of"—not with the days hastening toward the start of the next court session. But given space, hours, liberty, then "I should be glad to any Service to the Governmt yt is in my power."

  23. "If I Die I Am Murthered"

  ISAAC NEWTON WAS PREPARED to listen—or rather, to take note of whatever Chaloner wished to tell him. Four letters survive in his records, three addressed to the Warden, one to a judge in the criminal courts which Newton copied into the file. One by one they register Chaloner's growing panic. Taken together, they form his last throw, an attempt through sheer weight of words to force Newton to accept what Chaloner wished to be true.

  Chaloner began calmly. Not yet acknowledging his imminent peril, he sent Newton a two-paragraph note that, more in sorrow than in anger, claimed, "I am not guilty of any Crime." Oh, no: he was merely a bystander, caught up in others' wrongs. "Sr I presume you are satisfied what ill men Peers and ye Holloway are who wrongfuly brought me into a great deal of trouble to excuse their villainy."

  Five years earlier, Chaloner had escaped punishment by sticking to his story that his former partner, Blackford, had betrayed him to save his own skin. Then as now, Chaloner's claim had the virtue of being mostly true. There was, of course, the problem that he had lately accused the Warden of incompetence and malice. Surely the Warden would not take a man's life over that regrettable incident. "You are greatly displeased with me abt the late bussines in
Parliamt," Chaloner acknowledged. But the whole affair was, as usual, someone else's fault, as Chaloner had been compelled to appear by "Some p[e]rsons agt my desire."

  Newton read this, and wrote ... nothing.

  Chaloner, unnerved, tried again, this time with more care to match his story to the evidence arrayed against him. So the Warden thought he knew the truth about Chaloner's early career? Not so. He had been no mastermind, just a go-between. His usefully dead brother-in-law Joseph Gravener had been the man in charge of a "great Trade in Clipping and Coyning." It was Gravener who rented a "Great Jewe's house in Mark Lane," fortifying it with "Iron barrs and very strong door on the staires strenghtend with iron" so that "20 men could not get in under an hour." There "they made ye Pistols some hundreds of them." Chaloner's role in this? "I knew all of these things his being my brother but I did not act." All he got was a stipend of forty shillings a week—walking-around money, a keep-quiet bribe.

  Chaloner knew he needed to do more than put the blame for ancient criminal history on a dead man. There was Carter to account for, and behind him, the two-faced Davis. The Malt ticket plate itself, Chaloner said, was merely a bit of fun—a demonstration of his engraving skills, perhaps—"and if I intended to have anything to do in counterfeiting of Malt Tickets than I desire God Allmighty may never receive my soul." As for the people involved, wasn't it obvious that Davis had connived at the entire affair? "I understand by Carter," Chaloner wrote, "that Davis gave Carter a Ticket to do it by"—another strategically useful true statement. Then, when Davis "goes to the Governmt and discovers that such a thing was going and got money to make further discovery," Carter took fright, and Chaloner destroyed the plate to ease his friend's terror. Thus, he concluded, "it may plane appear to an y Impartiall man that Davis made this Plott to get money out of the Governmt."