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

by Thomas Levenson

  And what of Carter's claim that Chaloner had orchestrated the plan and engraved the plate? It was all lies, false testimony, bought and paid for: "Davis comes to Newgate to Carter very often and bids him stand to wh he has said, and said if we can hang Chaloner I shall get 500£ ...then I will get you out." Could not Newton see the obvious, Chaloner asked. The wrong man was in jeopardy: "I can planely make that these Tickets bussines is a piece of roguery and forgery of Davis himself to get money out of the Governmt."

  At the last, this tone of injured innocence fractured. Panic creeping in, Chaloner wrote, "I have been guilty of no Crime these 6 years." He had been confounded by conspirators and villainy; to prosecute him would be a sin: "if I die," he wrote, "I am murthered."

  Again, Isaac Newton did not choose to reply.

  The silence harrowed Chaloner. If he could not get the Warden to respond, if he could not involve his accuser in his version of the story, his last weapon—his gift for persuasion—was worthless.

  He tried again. This time he wrote first to a magistrate in his case, Mr. Justice Railton. In a long letter, he reminded the judge of all the criminal deeds he had exposed over the past several years. He had reported the Bank of England forgeries that had prompted the Bank's board to take his advice (and to seek, though not receive, a pardon for past crimes on Chaloner's behalf). There was his evidence about coiners operating inside the Mint. And no one should forget the Jacobite printers brought to the gallows on his testimony.

  Now, he told Railton, he was paying the price for his services to the Crown. "I was the cause of Carter's being put in the pillory before I discovered where Carter and his wife were coyning"—and now "their malice is so great that they endeav[ou]r clandestinly to insinuate to the Governmt yt I would be concerned about Malt Tickets." He begged the judge to remember his services to the government. If he did, then neither "yr wor[shi]pp nor the Court will believe the suggestions of such evill persons agt me."

  No reply from Railton survives, probably because none was made: Chaloner's fate turned on the pleasure of the Warden of the Mint. And so the prisoner fell back on his final gambit. By the end of February, with his peril undeniable, Chaloner wrote to Newton twice more. The testimony against him was not merely false, he argued, but nonsense. He could not possibly have done the crimes of which he was accused. Why not? Because, he now said, he was incompetent, unable to perform the essential tasks of the coining trade. "I remember I have said to you that I understand graving," he wrote. "But whatsoer I have said no man in the world can say I can or could grave a flat stitch." (Flat stitch engraving involves the use of a flat tool with fine grooves cut in its head; it is used to inscribe parallel lines, hatching that adds depth to letters or crests. It demands considerable skill, and its use would have been essential to produce plausible copies of the Malt Lottery tickets.) "I can chase a little," he conceded, "but I never graved a letter of flatt stitch nor otherwise but to play the fool with a Graver as any man may do." Chaloner knew that there was a bit of a problem here. "I remember I said to you once yt allthough I can grave and coyn," he acknowledged, but he had not intended that Newton take him literally. "I do not but it was but in generall speaking because I know the ways of graving Stamps from Taylor but pray examin Taylor if I can do any thing in flatt stitch."

  This from the man who had just weeks before boasted to Lawson that there was nothing "to be p[er]formed in Coyn or paper but that he can effect with ease." Chaloner had always brandished his skills as a weapon. His mastery of the theory and practice of coining was the foundation of published claims that he could better the Warden. He had used his superior knowledge to force confederate after confederate to take the lion's share of the risk in every scheme. Even in Newgate, he had used his reputation as bait, trying to bend witnesses to his version of the story with both threats and the promise of riches to come—once the ever-elusive William Chaloner had again beaten the rap.

  Now he disavowed it all, writing in his last letter before the trial that "I never could work at the Goldsmith's Trade in my life." He could not forge coins, his meager capacity sufficient only to run errands for men who could: "those pistolls was made by Coffee and Gravener and all that I ev[er] was guilty of was getting them the stamps." There was no cleverness in him, no nimbleness in his fingers. Again: "I never graved in flatt stitch graving in all my life and if now it would save my life I could not do it I have no Dye as God Allmighty shall judge me." And if once he had been tempted to sin, that impulse was no more: "The Tool I had before the parliamt was wasted and spoiled long ago."

  We know that Newton received this message, as he had the previous ones, for they survive in his Mint files. We can be virtually certain that he did not so much as contemplate a reply. When he did choose to answer a letter, he left traces, drafts and reworkings, four or more for sensitive documents in which he refined to perfection what was in his mind. Nothing of the sort exists in response to any of Chaloner's messages.

  Chaloner understood the unbroken stillness of his enemy. Over his criminal career, Chaloner had spent a fair amount of time in jail—perhaps more than a year—but he had never actually come to trial. Now it was obvious that he must, and for a crime that could lead him to the hanging tree at Tyburn. At the very end, he broke. Lawson reported to Newton that Chaloner had gone mad, "pulling his shirt to pieces and running stark naked at midnight abot. the Ward for ½ an hour together."

  The fits came and went, interspersed with periods of lucidity and milder delusions. In his first frenzy, Lawson wrote, "the men bound him hand and foot in his bed, but now he seems more rationall." In the restored quiet of the cell, Chaloner confided to Lawson the reason for his calm: "he hears very good newes yt they cannot bring andy Indictmt agt. Him and he questions not but [that he] slip out ... as he hath done 5 times before."

  Lawson seems to have believed that there was some truth in Chaloner's ravings. At least one other observer agreed. His biographer wrote that "the apprehension of what he might come to, struck him into a Fit of Sickness, and wrought so strong upon his Brain, that he was sometimes Delerious." When the madness came upon him "he was continually raving that the Devil was come for him and such frightful Whimseys."

  At the same time, no one doubted that Chaloner recognized a good trick when he saw it—and he soon sought to put his madness to use. Lawson reported that he twice heard Chaloner say "that when the Sessions came and if he found himself in danger he would pretend himself sick otherwise he would be well and take his tryall." His biographer agreed. "These intervals of Lunacy," he wrote, "he endeavor'd to improve to a height sufficient to put off his approaching the Tryal, counterfeiting the Madman as well as he could."

  24. "A Plain and Honest Defence"

  THE RUSE did not work. William Chaloner could not stop Newton's progress. The next court sessions opened at the beginning of March 1699 in the Guildhall, whose medieval Great Hall had served as the center of London's government since 1411. There, grand juries for London and the county of Middlesex convened. These panels were not mere rubber stamps, issuing indictments at the command of any ambitious prosecutor. Rather, they were designed to ensure that no one stood trial at the caprice of the sovereign or some powerful rival. Before he could proceed, each plaintiff was compelled to present enough of the evidence he planned to bring to the trial court to a jury of Englishmen who had the unchallengeable right to dismiss what they saw as frivolous or unfounded charges.

  This was the hurdle Newton had failed to leap in his previous attempt to bring Chaloner to trial—and now, at last, he unwound the long game he had played to avoid a repetition. On March 2, as the Crown opened its presentation to the jury hearing cases that fell into the Middlesex jurisdiction, no mention was made of the Malt Lottery plot—unquestionably to Chaloner's surprise, given that he was still trying to disavow his engraving skill. Instead, Newton had prepared three completely different indictments.

  To save some of his ammunition for the case he would present to the criminal jury, Newton
used just two of the six witnesses he would call later, supporting their testimony with additional evidence developed over the course of his interrogations. Those two witnesses—Thomas Taylor and Katherine Coffee—offered the jury what they claimed was direct knowledge of Chaloner's role in the matter of the forged French pistoles. Next, thanks to the information received from Elizabeth Holloway, Newton could provide sworn depositions to back up the story behind the next charge, that Chaloner had induced Thomas Holloway to escape to Scotland to undermine the earlier prosecution. And for the third indictment, again supported by his trove of depositions, Newton offered a story of Chaloner's forging a wide variety of English coins, from sixpences to guineas, in what amounted to a coining orgy. On a single day in August 1698, he charged, Chaloner had struck gold pistoles and guineas, along with almost one hundred silver pieces: twenty crowns, forty half-crowns, twenty shillings, and ten sixpences.

  This last charge was absurd on its face. No coiner would have set up such a profligate and inefficient production line—six different coins, indiscriminately silver and gold. As Chaloner could have told him—as he had in fact written in his two published accounts of coiners' methods and tools—skilled workmen used molds and hammers or presses to make their coins. Each mold or die served a particular denomination. It would have hopelessly confused the process to change sizes, values, and metal recipes hour by hour across the day. Any sensible coiner set up the production line for one denomination and worked it until he or she was done. Newton surely knew this too, but he presented his story with a sufficiently straight face. Whatever corruption of the panel Chaloner had attempted, failed. The Middlesex grand jury for the March 1699 sessions of court returned three true bills against him, one for each of the crimes the Warden had alleged.

  Chaloner, asked to plead to the indictments, stood mute. This was his last attempt to postpone the trial. English legal practice required an affirmative statement from the accused: guilty or not guilty. Standing mute dragged proceedings to a halt. There were, however, methods to persuade the obstinate. In the most gruesome, peine forte et dure, the silent accused would be taken to a cell and shackled to the floor. Warders would pile blocks of iron on the prisoner's body until he either pled or died. In Chaloner's case, two of the indictments could have earned that treatment, and the judges could have ruled his silence on the third as an admission of guilt. Chaloner bowed to the inevitable, and "at length he was prevail'd upon, and pleaded Not-Guilty."

  Isaac Newton and William Chaloner fought their last battle the next day, March 3. English trials in the late seventeenth century were swift and ruthlessly to the point. There were no lawyers. Prosecutions in most felony cases were handled by the victims of crimes themselves, or by local authorities in cases, such as murder, where victims could not speak on their own behalf. Crimes against the Crown required some agent of the state—the Warden of the Mint or his designated mouthpiece, for example—to stand as the aggrieved party.

  Chaloner had to speak for himself. There was no presumption of innocence. He had to offer an affirmative defense—either an outright argument of innocence or some demonstration that the prosecution's witnesses and evidence were sufficiently tainted so as to leave the case unproven. It was still an unpopular position that the defendants might benefit from the counsel of someone learned in the law. As the influential early-eighteenth-century legal scholar William Hawkins wrote, it should require "no manner of Skill to make a plain and honest Defence."

  The trial took place in the Old Bailey, which stood just beyond the western side of the London city wall, about two hundred yards from St. Paul's Cathedral and conveniently close to Newgate. The building, erected in 1673 to replace the courts lost in the Great Fire of 1666, contained a ground-floor courtroom that was open to the sky, the better to reduce the risk that prisoners with typhus would infect judges and juries. (The danger was real. The courtroom was enclosed in 1737, and in the worst of the incidents that followed, sixty people died following a court session in 1750, among them the Lord Mayor of London.) Two upper stories loomed over the well of the court, leaving it in shadow for much of the day. The accused—Chaloner, when his day in court came—stood in the gloom on a platform, the infamous dock. There, standing behind the rail, the bar to which lawyers are still called, the prisoner faced his judges and the witness box in which he would by right confront those who would testify against him. Partitioned boxes to his left and right held the jury, and above the jury boxes, balconies on either side held respectable onlookers, peering down to complete the image of the courtroom floor as an arena, the den in which men and women faced the prospect of death.

  Less worthy spectators packed into the yard behind the open end of the court. For many, the Old Bailey sessions provided a day out—a circus act—but the crowd also included (or so the authorities complained) criminals yet uncaught, preparing against the day they might find themselves facing judgment. Chaloner's entrance would have set an extra buzz running through that crowd, famous enough as he was to attract the seventeenth-century analogue of the celebrity reporter. One of those scribblers left a description of the Chaloner trial that is still the most vivid (if not entirely unbiased) portrait of Newton's antagonist.

  When Chaloner's case was called, he had almost no time to think. The court sitting in the Old Bailey heard an average of fifteen to twenty cases a day; many took just minutes from start to finish. As the trial began, his predicament grew worse. In an age without advocates for the defense, there was a presumption that judges "should be the advocat for the prisoner in every way where justice would permit it."

  Not this time. Standing alone at the bar, Chaloner stared at the formidably irascible Salathiel Lovell, Recorder of London—the chief jurist for the jurisdiction. Notoriously intemperate, Lovell had a reputation as a hanging judge. In one famous case involving a supporter of the deposed King James, he ignored the legal complexities his fellow judges had seen in another case and "cut asunder the Gordian knots of law he could not untie ... and directed the jury to bring him in guilty, which they did." He had low friends too, conniving with the thief-takers who could be as much the source of as a solution to crime. Daniel Defoe, one of many who loathed Lovell, wrote, in Reformation of Manners:

  Fraternities of Villains he maintains,

  Protects their Robberies, and shares the Gains;

  Who thieve with Toleration as a Trade,

  And then restore according as they paid.

  Worse still, according to Defoe, Lovell offered justice for hire:

  Definitive in Law, without Appeal,

  but always serves the hand who pays him well:

  ...

  He has his Publick Book of Rates to show

  Where every Rogue the Price of Life may know.

  Defoe was a master polemicist, and his claims are not facts. Absent hard evidence, the most that can be said is that if Lovell was not running a protection racket, he did turn a usefully blind eye in order to buff his reputation as a relentless investigator and scourge of crime.

  All of which meant that in better times, a judge with Lovell's reputation would have been a perfect target for the cheerfully corrupting William Chaloner. Now, though, broke and unable to bribe anyone, much less as expensive a man as the Recorder, his only value to Lovell was as someone whose conviction could bolster the judge's credentials as London's chief crime fighter. Chaloner was famous, with a trail of public bombast behind him to ensure that his conviction would be noticed in all the right places. He was friendless now as well, so Lovell need fear no covert attack on his own interests. Above all, the powerful—Newton, certainly, and Vernon, and behind them the ruling Whig establishment—wanted Chaloner gone. Lovell understood the value of pleasing those who could reward him. (Three years later, he would ask the King for a landed estate in recognition of his vigor in hounding coiners.) Chaloner could not have drawn a worse judge.

  The Recorder made his influence felt from the beginning of the trial. Speaking from the bench, one of the judg
es—unspecified in the record, but almost certainly the vocal Lovell—opened the proceedings by calling the defendant notorious, clearly indicating to the jury which way the wind blew. The impression of an overwhelming presumption of guilt grew as Newton's parade of six prosecution witnesses entered the chamber.

  With that entrance, Chaloner was able to gauge the direction of the testimony he would have to counter. Before he had an instant to gather his wits, however, the trial began.

  That prosecution was a probably deliberate muddle. Newton seems to have taken to heart the advice he got a year earlier, that he could simply throw enough dirt around to convince the jury that Chaloner must have done something bad. The prosecution's witnesses essentially ignored the central claim of the indictment. Rather than dwell on proving that Chaloner had actually produced more than one hundred coins, both false gold and false silver, of five different sizes and designs, all in a single day, Newton's witnesses took the jury on an extended tour of the previous eight years of Chaloner's career.

  So Thomas Taylor and Katherine Coffee repeated their story of Chaloner's early misdeeds. Coffee's story revealed that Chaloner had mastered the use of stamps and a hammer to make French pistoles by 1691. Carefully parsing her evidence, she reported that she had seen "Gineas which were reputed Chaloners but never saw him coyn any."

  Taylor's information buttressed Coffee's. As Chaloner knew, staring across at his old supplier, Taylor could tell the court that he had provided two sets of stamps or dies—one for the pistoles Mrs. Coffee had just placed under the prisoner's hammer, and the other for English guineas. Never mind that the events in question took place seven years before the date of the crime for which Chaloner was supposed to be standing trial. Here he was in memory, caught red-handed committing treason.