Part VI
FREE CHALONER MIGHT have been, but he was a deeply worried man. By December 1697, he was virtually destitute. Keeping up the appearance of respectability before Parliament had left him short of cash. Pile on a seven-week stay in Newgate, and the cupboard was bare.
With winter approaching, trying to live on what his jailers had left him goaded Chaloner to the point of recklessness. Had not an English judge refused even to present the trumped-up case against him to an English jury? Had he not suffered the shackles, the squalor, the naked corruption of Newgate? Should not someone compensate this guiltless man for all the wrongs done to him?
On February 19, 1698, Chaloner laid his portrait of abused virtue before Parliament in a document he also had printed for public distribution. "Your Petitioner," he wrote, "did in the last sessions of Parliamt discover several abuses committed in the Mint." And what was his reward for such service to the Crown? "Some of the Mint threatned by some means to prosecute him & take away his life before the next sessions of Parliament." His accusers had gone so far as to conspire with the worst kind of scum to suborn the crime that would bring him to his death: "some of the Mint have imployed & given Privilege to several persons to coyn false money ... all of which was done with an intent to draw him [Chaloner] into coyning to take his life away."
This attempt at judicial murder failed, defeated by Chaloner's determined virtue: he was concerned only "to find out the Treasons & Conspiracies against the King & Kingdome" and then "this year writing a book of the present state of the Mint & the defects thereof ... wch he hoped would have been of service to the Publick." That the Mint would not abide, of course, and so, Chaloner charged, "they committed him to Prison & so prevented him from doing it."
The miseries of the cells had brought him "great sufferings & ruined condition," and left him "incapable of providing himself & family." There must be someone to make him whole, or as Chaloner humbly put it, should give him "such redress as shall seem best in your Honours great Wisdom & Justice."
There could be no doubt whom Chaloner really meant by that careful phrase "some of the Mint." Isaac Newton was the only man who had both means and motive to use the power of the state to kill a man for private revenge. Newton himself certainly understood. He copied out Chaloner's petition in his own hand, and four versions of his reply survive in his papers. Bitter anger runs through all of them, along with a healthy dose of disdain: "If he would be let the money & Government alone & return to his trade of Jappaning," Newton wrote in his first attempt at an answer, "he is not so far ruined but that he may still live as well as he did seven years ago when he left of that trade & raised himself by coyning."
Yet an odd, pleading tone also pervades each of the drafts. The problem was that Chaloner was telling the truth, more or less. Witnesses had failed to appear. No link had been shown between the coining den in Egham and Chaloner himself. The case—as Newton had feared—was laughably weak. His complaint that Chaloner had "laboured to accuse and vilify the Mint" looked like confirmation that Chaloner's arrest was ordered out of injured pride. His declaration that there were "divers witnesses that Mr Chaloner last spring & Summer was forward to Coyn" was true but beside the point, given that none of those witnesses proved willing to show up in open court. And when he complained without proof that the defendant was guilty of the kind of witness tampering that "gravells prosecutions & renders it dangerous for any man to prosecute," he simply sounded weak in the face of an opponent who had bested him.
It got worse. Newton added: "I do not know or beleive that any privilege or direction was given by any of the Mint to draw him or his confederates in." That phrasing sounds just a bit too careful a dodge—and it was, for of course it was Newton himself who had given John Peers money and sent him off to infiltrate the Egham gang—even bailing Peers out of Newgate to do so. Here he seemed to be looking for plausible deniability if Peers or any of his other agents should turn up to confirm Chaloner's tale.
Chaloner's petition sparked yet another official investigation, and for the moment roles were reversed: Isaac Newton was standing in the dock, defending himself against the charge of framing an innocent man. A panel of senior government figures was assembled to look into the matter, and though the group was stacked with Newton's friends—Charles Montague and such reliable allies as Lowndes and James Vernon, then serving as Secretary of State—initially the evidence heard by the group, including Chaloner's own testimony, tended to favor Chaloner's claim. The panel persisted, however, and as other witnesses testified, more and more gaps turned up in the plaintiff's story. In the end, the investigators produced a report that dismissed Chaloner's claims—but quickly, in a bald rejection that did not satisfy Newton's hunger for a full exoneration.
But if Newton felt aggrieved at this perceived slight—the more so, perhaps, for having been so nearly caught out—he knew who had truly caused him such vexation. He was certain that Chaloner had committed crimes against the King, and that was bad enough. And now he had formed "a confederacy against the Warden."
This was new: Chaloner had been just one more anonymous offender, against whom equally interchangeable officials would take the steps needed to cut short a criminal career. But no longer. This one criminal had targeted a single, specific officer, the Warden. Alone of all those he sent to Newgate and the gallows in his years as the coiners' scourge, the Warden of the Mint did William Chaloner the honor of treating him as an individual antagonist—someone not merely to be stopped, but crushed.
The ruthlessness to come in the pursuit of Chaloner had deeper roots than mere anger over the humiliation of having to defend himself in public. Newton had already proved willing to pursue ends over means when he acquiesced in the Lords Justices' suggestion to so prejudice the jury as to extract a felony conviction for misdemeanor offenses. But the ferocity he showed through the next phase of his campaign against Chaloner suggests that there may have been more than mere raisons d'état driving him. Chaloner could not have known that there was a hidden thrust concealed within his challenge to the Warden, one that touched Newton's most private faith.
Faith indeed, for any counterfeit had religious significance. The magic that transformed a disc of metal into legal tender came from the image of the King's head on the face of a coin. The King ruled by the grace of God. To steal that likeness was an act of lèse majesté, an offense against the sacred person of the monarch. Coining was a capital crime because of the danger it presented to the state; it ascended to the odium of treason because of its insult to the Crown.
But while that was true for any counterfeiter, Chaloner had mocked not just King William III but also Isaac Newton, and on very specific ground. By 1698, Newton was no longer a practicing alchemist. Still, Chaloner's counterfeiting was, in effect, a blasphemous parody of the alchemist's dream to multiply gold without limit—the equivalent of a black mass, in which a toad or turnip takes the place of the consecrated Host. The same would have held true for any forger, of course. Yet none but Chaloner ever set himself up as a direct rival to Newton's mastery over metal.
Did that trespass matter? Did Newton pursue Chaloner more intensely than he would have absent his own alchemical history? It is impossible to know. Clearly, Newton's motives for hounding his quarry were overdetermined: duty and personal offense as well as any secret defense of faith all fed into the mix.
It is important to remember, however, that while many of his biographers have drawn portraits of a swarm of different Newtons—the magician, the mathematician, the experimental genius, the young Newton as a cloistered professor, the older man in charge of the Royal Society, conducting the running war with intellectual enemies on the Continent—the real Isaac Newton was one man living one life, whose parts as he lived them were thoroughly conformable to the whole. Within each role, every job he did, each problem he set himself, that one Newton remained—and the constant theme of that singular life was his hunger for contact with the Godhead.
That same man understood the disquieting fact that the new science, in the wrong hands, had the potential not to prepare men for "beliefe in the Deity," but to undermine their faith. Into that knowledge enter Chaloner, whose every action reeks of a kind of practical atheism: what need for God to act in the world when a smooth enough operator can produce passable imitations of His works?
Whatever its precise root, the fact is that following Chaloner's release in February, Newton's anger was never more intense. From that moment, the Warden of the Mint pursued single-mindedly and relentlessly the man who had managed to offend him in every conceivable way.