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

by Thomas Levenson

  "hath seen him coyn": Ibid.

  "no man in England could grave": "The Information of Jno Ignatius Law-son now Prisoner in Newgate 3d. Aprill 1699," Mint 17, document 165. The date is almost certainly a reference to the day when Newton collated the information Lawson provided him (see the following note), as this testimony appears in sequence with depositions taken in February, and the information it contains implies a date before the March 1 start of the Old Bailey sessions for which Newton was preparing his case.

  [>] "Tin plated over with Silver": John Ignatius Lawson, untitled report, 25 February 1698, countersigned by Newton on 3 April 1699, Mint 17, document 184.

  deceit that had enraged Elizabeth Holloway: John Ignatius Lawson, un-titled and undated report, Mint 17, document 192.

  "6 of one Jury and 8 of another": "Letter sent to Is[aac] Newton Esqr. From John Ignatius Lawson Sunday night and Munday morning," undated, Mint 17, document 132.

  [>] "the best acct I cann remember": "William Chaloner Letter to the Warden of the Mint," Mint 17, document 133.

  23. "IF I DIE I AM MURTHERED"

  [>] "Some p[e]rsons agt my desire": "William Chaloner Letter to the Warden of the Mint," Mint 17, document 133, first letter.

  [>] "I am murthered": "William Chaloner Letter to the Warden of the Mint," Mint 17, document 133, second letter.

  "suggestions of such evill persons": "A Copy of a Letter directed from Will Chaloner to Justice Railton," Mint 17, document 133, fourth letter.

  [>] "in flatt stitch": "William Chaloner Letter to the Warden of the Mint," Mint 17, document 133, third letter.

  "Coyn or paper": John Ignatius Lawson, untitled and undated report, Mint 17, document 192.

  [>] "wasted and spoiled": "William Chaloner's Letter to Isaac Newton Esq," Mint 17, document 174.

  [>] "5 times before": "John Ignatius Lawson's Letter to Is: Newton Esqr," undated, Mint 17, document 131.

  "such frightful Whimseys": Guzman Redivivus, p. 7.

  "pretend himself sick": John Ignatius Lawson, untitled report, 25 February 1698, countersigned by Newton on 3 April 1699, Mint 17, document 184.

  "counterfeiting the Madman": Guzman Redivivus, p. 7.

  24. "A PLAIN AND HONEST DEFENCE"

  [>] indiscriminately silver and gold: I take this point from, and first found the details of the indictment in, John Craig, "Isaac Newton—Crime Investigator," Nature 182 (1958), p. 151. Craig led me to the Middlesex Sessions Roll for 1699, now in the London Metropolitan Archive, from which he drew the account I repeat here.

  [>] an admission of guilt: J. M. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England, 1660–1800, p. 337.

  "a plain and honest Defence": William Hawkins, A Treatise of the Pleas of the Crown, vol. 2, quoted in J. M. Beattie, Policing and Punishment in London, 1660–1750, p. 264.

  [>] criminals yet uncaught: See "History of the Old Bailey Courthouse," The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/history/the-old-bailey/.

  judges "should be the advocat": newspaper commentary from 1783, quoted in J. M. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England, 1660–1800, p. 345.

  [>] worse judge: This account of Lovell's career and character has been drawn from Tim Wales's entry "Lovell, Sir Salathiel" in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. The history of Lovell's role in recommending pardons is slightly more complicated than the gloss above. As Wales writes, Lovell's arbitrary (and under suspicion of corruption) use of power to tip the balance toward or away from clemency embroiled him in disputes with London's aldermen at least twice, and he did not maintain a completely free hand. In 1699, however, he was between battles and retained significant power in this area.

  calling the defendant notorious: See John Craig, "Isaac Newton and the Counterfeiters," Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 18 (1963), p. 142. Unfortunately, no more vivid account of Lovell's invective exists; the surviving documents detail only the indictments, the witness list, and some of the evidence presented at trial. The records for the March 1699 quarter sessions of the witnesses' statements and other direct records of what was said at trials have been lost.

  [>] "Gineas which were reputed Chaloners": "The Information of Katherine Coffee wife of Patrick Coffee Goldsmith late of Aldermanbury by Woodstr[eet] 18 day of February 1698/9," Mint 17, document 124.

  the prisoner's hammer: Taylor's role in producing both pistole and guinea dies survives in several hearsay depositions; see, for example, Katherine Carter's testimony before Isaac Newton on 21 February 1698/9, Mint 17, document 122. Newton amassed enough testimony to state with apparent certainty in his summary document "Chaloner's Case" that Taylor had produced two sets of French dies in 1690 and 1691, and one for guineas in 1692. See Mint 19/1.

  Both were almost certainly lying: John Craig, "Isaac Newton and the Counterfeiters," p. 143.

  [>] "a Treat at the 3 Tuns": "The Deposition of John Abbot of Water Lane in Fleet street Refiner 15th. day of February 1698/9," Mint 17, document 119.

  [>] "affronting Mr. Recorder": Guzman Redivivus, p. 10.

  by the midday meal break: This data comes from the December 1678 session of the Old Bailey, reported in J. M. Beattie, Policing and Punishment in London, 1660–1750, p. 262.

  [>] Lawson walked out of court: Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 11 October 1699, p. 3. Online at http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/images.jsp?doc16991011003.

  "The Evidence was plain": Ibid.

  "Guilty of High-Treason": Guzman Redivivus, p. 11.

  25. "O I HOPE GOD WILL MOVE YOR HEART"

  [>] "a Harping Ruin": Guzman Redivivus, p. 12.

  "in[no]sent he was": "Carter's Letter to Is: Newton Esq," Mint 17, document 130.

  [>] "Yo[u]r near murdered humble Servt": "William Chaloner's Letter to Isaac Newton Esq.," Mint 17, document 205.

  [>] a list of complaints: Guzman Redivivus, p. 12.

  the condemned men's pew: David Kerr Cameron, London's Pleasures, p. 144.

  "Charity and Forgiveness": Guzman Redivivus, p. 12.

  [>] "hanged by the neck": See V.A.C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree, pp. 315–16.

  [>] "a rotten Member": Guzman Redivivus, p. 13.

  EPILOGUE

  [>] under "this gentleman's care": Hopton Haynes, Brief Memoirs, quoted in G. Findlay Shirras and J. H. Craig, "Sir Isaac Newton and the Currency," Economic Journal 55, no. 218/219, p. 229.

  [>] £1,650 a year: Richard Westfall, Never at Rest, pp. 606–7. Westfall notes that early in Newton's mastership, the resumption of war with France bit into the supply of gold and silver to the Mint, and hence Newton's profit on coining operations. It was a feast-or-famine job, but Newton was able to hold on to it long enough to grow legitimately wealthy and to live precisely as he pleased.

  "To explain all nature": Cambridge Add. Ms. 3790.3, f. 479, quoted in Robert Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 643.

  [>] "Nature is very constant": Opticks, from query 31, added in the Latin edition and republished in every subsequent version. Quoted in Robert Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 644.

  "Is not infinite Space": From the Latin Optice and the second edition Opticks, query 28, with edits to the original translation from the Latin by Robert Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 647.

  [>] true nature of Christ's body: For a discussion of Newton's speculation about the body of Christ, see Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, The Janus Faces of Genius, pp. 214–15. The question of angelic prospects after the Apocalypse is discussed on p. 32 of "Newtonian Angels," a draft chapter of an upcoming book by Simon Schaffer. Newton worked on prophetic chronology for the better part of two decades, coming up with several different possible dates for the second coming. See Robert Westfall, Never at Rest, pp. 815–17.

  "strong meats for men": The phrase occurs in Newton's draft of a massive project on the history of the church from its origins in the early centuries of the Christian era, cited by Simon Schaffer on p. 33 of "Newtonian Angels."

  most of the new silver: G. Findlay Shirras and J. H. Craig, "Sir Isaac Newton and
the Currency," Economic Journal 55, no. 218/219, p. 229.

  That imbalance sucked silver: G. Findlay Shirras and J. H. Craig, "Sir Isaac Newton and the Currency," Economic Journal 55, no. 218/219, pp. 228–36.

  [>] even his old currency ally: For Newton's argument and Lowndes's reply, see ibid., pp. 230–31.

  [>] some historians have credited: See, for example, Fernand Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce, pp. 525–28.

  [>] He bought more: The sequence of Newton's involvement in the South Sea Company is detailed in Richard Westfall, Never at Rest, pp. 861–62.

  [>] the value of his estate: Ibid., pp. 862, 870.

  "that he could not calculate": Reported in Joseph Spence, Anecdotes, Observations, and Characters, of Books and Men, p. 368, cited in Robert Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 862. The classic account of the South Sea Bubble remains Charles Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, pp. 55–104. Harvard Business School houses a major collection of material on the bubble, and its website offers a good brief introduction to that remarkable year: http://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/ssb/index.html. he lived moderately: Robert Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 850.

  "He generally made a present": William Stukeley, Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton's Life, pp. 68–69, cited in Richard Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 856. The original recollection comes in a letter Stukeley wrote to Richard Mead shortly after Newton's death, on 15 July 1727, in Keynes Ms. 136, part 3, p. 11, and online at the Newton Project, http://www.newtonproject .sussex.ac.uk/texts/viewtext.php?id=THEM00158&mode=normalized.

  active interest in the Royal Society: See Richard Westfall, Never at Rest, pp. 863–64.

  [>] "a little way of in the country": The recollection of James Stirling, cited in ibid., p. 866.

  a visitor came to call: See Zachary Pearce's recollection of his visit with Newton in ibid., p. 869.

  The illness persisted: For a fuller account of Newton's last days, see ibid., pp. 863–70.

  "only like a boy playing": Reported in Joseph Spence, Anecdotes, Observations, and Characters, of books and Men, p. 54. It has been repeated throughout the Newton literature and is, inter alia, reprinted in Never at Rest, p. 863.

  [>] "If you doubt there was such a man": The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century view of Newton as an angelic figure, an intermediary between God and the created universe, is beautifully analyzed in Simon Schaffer's draft chapter "Newtonian Angels"—in its entirety for the larger question, pp. 8–9 for the Fatio-Conduitt communication.

  * * *

  Bibliography

  NEWTON'S CORRESPONDENCE AND MANUSCRIPTS

  Almost all of the known letters to and from Isaac Newton have been collected in The Correspondence of Isaac Newton. Seven volumes, edited by H. W. Turnbull, J. F. Scott, A. R. Hall, and Laura Tilling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Society, 1959–1977. (A few letters still turn up, including, recently, a handful between Newton and Fatio exchanged long after the break in their relationship in 1693.)

  Newton's manuscripts are widely scattered. For this book the most important archive is held at the National Archives, in Kew, England. Newton's holograph Mint records are in six folios, Mint 19/1–6. The depositions taken in his presence are collected in Mint 17.

  Other important locations for Newton documents include Kings College, Cambridge; the Cambridge University Library; the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem (home of many of Newton's theological papers); the Bodleian Library and the Burndy Library collection, now housed at the Huntington Library in Pasadena. I tracked these collections bibliographically and online, and consulted the documents housed in them as needed for this book through two main off-site routes.

  The first was through the work of the Newton Project, which can be found at http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/prism.php?id=1. The project has published a wide-ranging selection of Newton's original writings, adding translations as necessary. Of special value to me were the transcriptions of all of Newton's surviving early notebooks. The collection also offers a very valuable set of accounts of Newton by contemporary or nearcontemporary observers. Several of Newton's reports as Master of the Mint of significance to the conversion from a silver to a gold standard are available online at http://www.pierre-marteau.com/editions/1701-25-mint-reports.html#masters.

  Last, the Harvard University Library holds a copy of the hard-to-find Chadwyck Healy microfilm edition of Sir Isaac Newton, 1642–1727: Manuscripts and Papers, edited with a finding aid written by Peter Jones: Sir Isaac Newton: A Catalogue of Manuscripts and Papers. The edition contains photographs of the bulk of Newton's manuscript output from 1660 on. It is not quite complete, but it is the nearest thing to a comprehensive collection in existence. It is not what you would call easy to use, as the quality of the photographs varies enormously, but I found it an invaluable resource.

  NEWTON'S PUBLISHED BOOKS

  The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. Translated by

  I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman, assisted by Julia Budenz.

  Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

  Opticks. New York: Dover, 1952 (preface by I. B. Cohen, c. 1979).

  The Cohen and Whitman edition of the Principia remains the definitive choice for readers of English for three reasons. The translation itself is admirably clear and transparent to Newton's argument; the design of the edition does everything it can to make this dense material as easy to follow as possible; and above all, Cohen's guide to Newton's text, a book-length work in its own right, is invaluable. Other editions have come out since, but accept no substitutes. My copy of Opticks is the one with Albert Einstein's charming, brief tribute to Newton.

  BIOGRAPHIES

  Brewster, Sir David. The Life of Sir Isaac Newton, revised and edited by W. T. Lynn. London: Gall & Inglis, 1875.

  Craig, Sir John. Newton at the Mint. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1946.

  Fara, Patricia. Newton: The Making of a Genius. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.

  Gleick, James. Isaac Newton. New York: Pantheon Books, 2003.

  Hall, A. Rupert. Isaac Newton: Adventurer in Thought. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992.

  Manuel, Frank. A Portrait of Isaac Newton. Washington, D.C.: New Republic Books, 1979.

  Westfall, Richard S. Never at Rest. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.

  White, Michael. Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer. New York: Basic Books, 1999.

  At different times in the course of this project I consulted a wide range of biographies. Like most writers on Newton since 1980, I am most deeply indebted to Richard Westfall's scholarly, accessible, and comprehensive biography. Westfall is one of the giants without whom this book could not have been written. The best short introduction to Newton's life and work is James Gleick's brief life. It is beautifully written and provides a very clear account of what it was that Newton did that makes him still so important; Gleick also manages to convey the context of Newton's life and times in an extremely concise package. Frank Manuel's Portrait was the book that got me started on this project; in it he quotes Chaloner's last letter to Newton, and when I first read it, almost twenty years ago, it left a question—What on earth was Newton doing in contact with a condemned coiner?—that this book attempts to answer. Craig's Newton at the Mint is the only book-length study of that period of Newton's life; it touches on Newton's tenure as Warden only briefly, but still, it's all there was. Fara's and Hall's works are aimed more at a professional audience than the lay public; both are full of valuable insights. Brewster's massive account is as much a historical document—an illustration of Victorian priorities—as it is a currently useful account of Newton. I don't always agree with Michael White's emphases, but it was the first popular Newton biography that I'm aware of to focus on what has been of scholarly interest for some time—the connection between the long-ignored history of Newton's alchemical work and his more "respectable" interests in what we now call science.

  OTH
ER SOURCES

  Abrahamson, Daniel M. Building the Bank of England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.

  Anderson, Michael, ed. British Population History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

  Anonymous. Guzman Redivivus: A Short View of the Life of Will. Chaloner. London: printed for J. Hayns, 1699.

  Appleby, Joyce Oldham. "Locke, Liberalism and the Natural Law of Money." Past and Present, no. 71 (May 1976), pp. 43–69.

  Axtell, James I. "Locke's Review of the Principia" Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 20, no. 2 (1965), pp. 152–61.

  Barter, Sarah. "The Mint." In John Charlton, ed., The Tower of London. London: HMSO, 1978.

  Beattie, J. M. Crime and the Courts in England, 1660–1800. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986.

  ———. Policing and Punishment in London, 1660–1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

  ———. "The Cabinet and the Management of Death at Tyburn after the Revolution of 1688–1689." In Lois G. Schwoerer, ed., The Revolution of 1688–1689. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

  Braudel, Fernand. Civilization and Capitalism. Volume 2: The Wheels of Commerce. New York: Harper and Row, 1982.

  Bricker, Phillip, and R.I.G. Hughes. Philosophical Perspectives on Newtonian Science. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990.

  Brown, E. H. Phelps, and Sheila V. Hopkins. "Seven Centuries of the Prices of Consumables Compared with Builders' Wage-Rates." Economica 23, no. 92, new series (November 1956), pp. 296–314.

  Byrne, Richard. The London Dungeon Book of Crime and Punishment. London: Little, Brown, 1993.

  Cameron, David Kerr. London's Pleasures. Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 2001.

  Challis, C. E., ed. A New History of the Royal Mint. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

  Chaloner, William. Proposals Humbly offered, for Passing an Act to prevent Clipping and counterfeiting of Mony. London, 1694.

  ———. "The Defects in the present Constitution of the Mint." London, 1697; British Library ascription, 1693.

  Chandrasekhar, S. Newton's Principia for the Common Reader. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995.