Newton and the Counterfeiter by Thomas Levenson

Author:Thomas Levenson [Levenson, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2014-12-26T16:00:00+00:00

While talkative fools like Ball and Whitfield presented little difficulty to Newton, William Chaloner remained at large, a wholly different species of problem. He was vastly more ambitious than the usual optimists Newton confronted. "He scorn'd the petty Rogueries of Tricking single Men," aiming instead at "imposing up on a whole Kingdom"—as his biographer rather proudly put it. Although true-crime writers tend to inflate the importance of their subjects, Chaloner did in fact aim to play on the national stage—and unlike any other coiner Newton encountered, Chaloner had the wit to take a genuinely long view. The scheme he set in motion in the spring of 1697 had its start in the moves he had made over the previous three years to gain some authority over the Mint itself.

Chaloner, like Newton, understood that counterfeiting carried with it the certainty of betrayal. The coiner, forced to rely on others to get his product into circulation, knew that some of his confederates would be vulnerable to arrest and then to the need to save their own skins. Chaloner had already grasped that there was one sure way to get coins into the marketplace without openly passing them: do so from within the Mint.

He had tried to get inside that magic circle already, but Newton had not fallen for his trick. His next attempt to insert himself was better prepared. In February 1697 Chaloner appeared before a special committee of the House of Commons investigating alleged abuses at the Mint. He provided the committee with what seemed to be a compelling account of Mint errors and his own plausible remedies. He began by arguing that the Mint's officers were incapable of detecting counterfeiting, or were even party to a sophisticated version of clipping taking place right in front of them on the coin production line. Chaloner told Parliament's investigators and then argued in a brief pamphlet that the Mint's chief employees were so specialized that they could not check each other's work for fraud. "None of the said Officers of Work-men," he wrote, "know whether the Essay-Master hath made the Bullion standard," nor if "the Melter doth Mould and Temper the Bullion so fit [i.e., to make it suitable] for the Impression" (the stamping of coin faces), and so on, until, Chaloner declared, "Now everyone doing his business as may be most for his own advantage."

The result of such carefully maintained specialization? According to Chaloner, it had already been proved that "there hath been a great quantity of Counterfeit Mony Coyned in the Mint"; that Mint staff were selling dies out of the Tower; and that "our present Money is so disengenously Coyned that it may be easily Debased, Diminished and Counterfeited."

The worst of it was that at least some of what Chaloner alleged was true. Dies had been spirited out of the Mint. Counterfeiters were producing false coin. Individual Mint officers did execute their duties, as Chaloner put it, "as may be most for his own advantage." The rot started at the

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