Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London (7 page)

Across the centuries, as the nation’s economy grew, so exponentially did the mint. Gradually its workshops crept around the north-west corner of the Tower. Excavations have revealed the presence of a fifteenth-century assay furnace and pots near Legge’s Mount, the Tower’s north-west bastion. By the sixteenth century, the entire area between the inner and outer curtain walls of the whole Tower was taken up either by the Royal Mint or by the Royal Ordnance Factory and their related activities. Mint Street was now a thriving industrial village within the Tower, as a map of 1701 reveals. It shows separate gold and silver melting houses; milling and assaying houses, and the homes and offices of the mint’s officials. The presence of stables suggests that the mills used to drive the mint’s machinery were powered by horses rather than by water.

But the physical labour of turning out coins remained exhausting, at least until the belated introduction of machinery in 1662 in the reign of Charles II. The inflation at the end of Henry VIII’s reign imposed particular strains on the mint, as it struggled to turn out enough coins to meet the increased demand for a rapidly debasing currency. In 1546, one William Foxley, entrusted with making the mint’s melting pots, is recorded as having fallen asleep on the job, and then slept through continuously for fourteen days and fifteen nights, waking ‘as if he had slept but one’.

The financial situation had stabilised somewhat by the reign of Henry’s daughter Mary. In 1554, as part of her deeply unpopular marriage settlement with King Philip II of Spain, twenty cartloads of Spanish silver in ninety-seven chests, mined in Spain’s Latin American colonies, were delivered to the mint. The following year the mint sealed a deal to turn old Spanish silver coins, ryals, into English coinage worth £17,600. At the same time the mint won its first ever foreign contract to mint new Spanish coinage. The coming of the English Civil War in 1642 provided an unwelcome hitch to progress when the then Master of the Mint – a convinced Royalist – absconded to join King Charles I’s court at Oxford, taking the mint’s dies with him. His flight enabled the cash-strapped Royalists to continue turning out coins without interruption, while those left behind at
the Tower mint were forced to come up with hasty substitutes for the stolen dies.

After Parliament’s triumph, the Tower mint continued to turn out coins, though obviously without King Charles I’s head, which had been lopped for real in 1649. The new ruler, Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, was happy to have his likeness stamped on coins and commemorative medals instead, but proved as tight-fisted as any king when it came to paying up. The Master of the Mint under Cromwell’s Commonwealth, Thomas Simon, found himself £1,700 out of pocket for the coins he had designed. After repeatedly applying to be reimbursed, but only receiving £700, he finally wrote to Cromwell in exasperation, ‘I beg you to consider that I and my servants have wrought five years without recompense and that the interest I have to pay for gold and silver eats up my profit.’

Unsurprisingly, Simon was only too delighted to offer his services to Charles II when the monarchy was restored in 1660. But if he was hoping that the poverty-stricken king would match his keen interest in the mint with actual money he was again to be sorely disappointed. While in Dutch exile the king had met an Antwerp goldsmith named Roettier who had loaned the ever cash-strapped monarch money in hope of future preferment. The investment paid off after the Restoration when Charles gave the old goldsmith’s three sons jobs at the mint. Charles encouraged the Roettier brothers to compete with Simon in designing the new monarchy’s coinage, and chose an elegant one submitted by John Roettier. Nettled, and clearly put on his mettle, Simon dipped into his pocket once again and paid for a coin called the Petition Crown, which he submitted to the king along with an abject note:

Thomas Simon most humbly prays Your Majesty to compare this, his trial piece, with the Dutch, and if more truly drawn and embossed, more gracefully ordered and more accurately engraven, to relieve [pay] him.

Two years later, and still unpaid, poor Simon became one of thousands of victims of the Great London Plague of 1665.

The ubiquitous Samuel Pepys accompanied King Charles to the mint to inspect new coins struck with his own likeness: ‘So we by coach to them and there went up and down all the magazines [workshops] with them; but methought it was but poor discourse and frothy that the King’s companions … had with him. We saw none of the money; but Mr Slingsby
did show the King, and I did see, the stamps of the new money … which are very neat and like the King.’ The new coinage was the work of an engraver named Blondeau, a Frenchman brought to the mint by Cromwell. Like Simon, Blondeau impartially went to work for the new royal regime and compared Cromwell’s warty likeness with the effigies he had made of the new king – doubtless to the latter’s advantage.

Pepys was so impressed with the coins and the new-fangled machinery that had struck them – ‘So pretty that I did take a note of every part of it’ – that he soon returned to the mint to commission Blondeau to engrave a seal for the Admiralty. ‘… and did see some of the finest pieces of work, in embossed work, that ever I did see in my life, for fineness and smallness of the images thereon. Here also did see bars of gold melting, which was a fine sight.’ Although Pepys often expressed his pettish disapproval of the King’s frivolity, diarist and monarch shared an eye for a pretty woman, and both were captivated by the loveliness of Frances Stewart, a court beauty, one of the few who stoutly refused to become another of Charles’s many mistresses. Instead, the king propagated Frances’s charms to his subjects by making her the model of Britannia on the country’s coins, an image that endured until decimalisation in the 1970s.

The late seventeenth century was a time of transformation for the mint. Not only was machinery – used at other mints elsewhere in Europe since the mid-sixteenth century – finally introduced to replace hand-held hammers, but the greatest scientific mind ever produced by Britain was also brought in to oversee the mint’s operations. In 1696 Sir Isaac Newton was appointed Warden of the Mint. The appointment came at a time of crisis both for the mint and for Newton. The prickly Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge University was over fifty – elderly by seventeenth-century standards – and his masterpice,
Principia Mathematica
, in which he had set out his theory of gravitation and his three laws of motion, was already a decade behind him. His work on the calculus was also largely complete. Never a social animal, the lonely old bachelor was essentially marking time at Cambridge while searching for a new role to occupy a mind still at its peak.

Meanwhile, the nation’s treasurer, William Lowndes, was faced with a severe shortage of silver coins – the result of a two-pronged assault on the currency. The first attack was mounted by coin clippers who shaved
the old unmilled coins minted before the introduction of machinery. The second prong of the economic assault came from bullion dealers who melted down silver coins into ingots, shipped them abroad where they fetched higher prices than in England, and sold them to buy gold. In September 1695 Lowndes asked the curmudgeonly genius Newton to suggest a solution to the silver shortage.

The economic crisis caused by the silver shortage was acute. The great historian Lord Macaulay suggests that it was more grevious in its effects on ordinary citizens than even the recent political ructions of the Glorious Revolution which had ousted the Catholic King James II and brought his Protestant daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange to the throne in 1689. For, wrote Macaulay, ‘when the great instrument of exchange became thoroughly deranged, all trade, all industry were smitten as with a palsy. The evil was felt daily and hourly in almost every place and by almost every class.’ The crisis came to a head in 1695, when King William III found that the shortage of ready money – despite the foundation of the Bank of England in 1694 which lent the poverty-stricken government £1.2 million in its first year – was hampering his war against Louis XIV’s expansionist, Catholic France.

It did not take Newton’s logical mind long to grasp the cause of the crisis – and its cure. Since drastic penalties had not stopped the coin clippers, and the traders who exported silver were only obeying the iron dictates of the market, the practical solution was to make coin clipping unviable and the trade in silver unprofitable. Newton suggested a two-stage remedy. Step one: to recall the entire currency still in circulation. Since silver coins were rapidly disappearing thanks to the activities of the bullion traders this would not be such a gargantuan undertaking as it sounds. The recalled money would then be melted down at the mint and reissued as new machine-made money with milled edges to prevent clipping.

Step two was to deal with the export of silver, and for this Newton proposed changing the intrinsic value of the coins. As the dealers were only exporting the silver because it brought more gold abroad than in England, reducing the amount of silver in each shilling would make foreign gold more expensive when counted in English silver money. Correctly calculated, such a devaluation would make the cross-continental trade in English silver unprofitable at a stroke. Newton’s solution was the product of a modern, rational mind. At the dawn of the eighteenth century, the
Age of the Enlightenment, he was weighing and assaying money not according to some mystic value lent by the monarch’s head on the coins, but by logic and common sense. Money was worth just what the metal making it up was worth in the marketplace – no more, no less.

In the event, only half of Newton’s radical scheme was put into effect. Parliament approved the recall and re-minting of the coinage, but baulked at the proposed devaluation. As a reward for his suggestions, however, a grateful government offered Newton the prestigious – and lucrative – post of Warden, or boss, of the Mint. With almost indecent haste, an equally grateful Newton accepted, packed his bags and books, left his lodgings at Trinity College, Cambridge, in April 1696, and moved into the Warden’s House in Mint Street near the Brass Mount bastion at the north-east corner of the Tower.

In reforming the currency, and curbing the coin clippers, Newton found himself up against a mind almost as daring and unorthodox as his own. But that mind belonged to a master criminal. It was a duel of wits as dramatic in its way as the fictional clash between Sherlock Holmes and his arch-enemy Professor Moriarty, the ‘Napoleon of crime’, and like that titanic struggle, could only end with the death of one of the protagonists. William Chaloner, Newton’s adversary, was, like the great scientist, a son of provincial England. Indeed, had he been born a few notches further up the social scale, his talents might have brought him fame and wealth, instead of infamy and an ignominious death on Tyburn tree.

The son of a Warwickshire weaver, born around 1660, the delinquent boy Chaloner was apprenticed by his parents to a Birmingham nail maker. It was here that young William got his first taste of coin counterfeiting by making fake Birmingham groats. But Chaloner had his eye on bigger prizes than mere groats, and around 1680 he walked to London to make his fortune. At the height of the rumbustious reign of the licentious Charles II, Chaloner used the metalworking skills he had picked up in Birmingham to make and sell such items as cheap tin watches for gentlemen and dildoes for the ladies, before graduating to becoming a quack physician and clairvoyant.

Chaloner’s quick wits and plausible patter – in vivid contemporary slang his ‘tongue pudding’ – were deployed to prescribe aphrodisiacs and other love potions for his female clients. In 1684 Chaloner had his first encounter with the Tower when he married a Katharine Atkinson, at the
church of St Katharine by the Tower. He continued coining, producing fake French pistoles and English guineas and making an enormous profit in the process. Chaloner’s skill as a literal moneymaker was so great that he was soon acknowledged as the ‘most accomplished counterfeiter in the kingdom’, buying a house in fashionable Knightsbridge and a lifestyle to go with it. He rode around in a carriage with footmen and behaved like a born gentleman about town. Even his future mortal enemy Newton would be impressed, describing Chaloner’s transformation from a humble craftsman ‘in clothes threadbare, ragged and daubed with colours, turned coiner and in a short time put on the habit of a gentleman’.

In 1696, the year Newton became Warden of the Mint, Chaloner moved up a gear. He bought a house in the quiet Surrey village of Egham and moved in machinery to forge the sophisticated machine-struck coins now being turned out in the mint. The isolated house was deliberately chosen so that the noise of the forging would not attract suspicion, but the new warden was already hot on Chaloner’s trail. When he took over at the mint, Newton had conducted a tally of the coinage in circulation. The tally revealed that a staggering one in ten English coins was a fake. If the mass production of forged coins continued at such a rate, the realm’s legal tender would be debauched and the nation would face ruin. As the most talented and productive coiner in the kingdom, Chaloner had to be stopped.

It was now that Newton showed a dedication and ruthlessness that surprised anyone who imagined that the shy scientist who had spent most of his life among Cambridge’s ivory towers would be lost in the worldly atmosphere of the Tower mint and its sleazy environs. The unworldly scholar began to haunt the beery, smoky inns and sawdust-floored taverns surrounding the Tower – the Dogge was a particular favourite – hunting for clues, witnesses and evidence to nail Chaloner and his counterfeiting gang. By these means, Newton met and successfully suborned John Peers, one of the coiners working with Chaloner at the Egham factory. Newton persuaded Peers to turn king’s evidence – and although ‘the most accomplished counterfeiter in the kingdom’ got away with a short spell in Newgate prison, Thomas Holloway, Chaloner’s right-hand man, was convicted and hanged.

Banged up in Newgate prison, Chaloner blamed Newton personally for his plight. ‘The Warden of the Mint is a Rogue,’ he would tell anyone who listened. It was his turn now to up the ante and challenge Newton on his own ground. Chaloner’s method showed a boldness and ingenuity
worthy of a higher calling than counterfeiting. In Newgate, Chaloner put his expert knowledge of coins and cash to work, writing a series of pamphlets on monetary policy, and recommending restricting the specialised tools of the coiners’ trade to curb their activities. Cheekily, Chaloner was advising the government on how to extricate itself from the financial morass he himself had helped create. It was chutzpah on a grand scale. As historian Thomas Levenson remarks, ‘William Chaloner writing on tax policy is a bit like John Gotti weighing in on Social Security, or the Kray brothers offering their thoughts on the National Health Service.’ Chaloner’s ultimate objective was even bolder: his pamphlets were just the opening shots in a campaign to get himself – crook and jailbird though he was – appointed overseer of the Royal Mint itself by smearing the mint’s existing staff – from Newton down – as the real criminals and larceners.