Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London (8 page)

Chaloner charged the moneyers at the mint with a host of crimes: ranging from adulterating the coins they struck, to smuggling dies out of the Tower and selling them to counterfeiters. And Chaloner’s campaign got him a long way towards attaining his objective – in fact, into the chamber of the Privy Council, the very heart of government itself. Chaloner was aided by an embittered political patron, Charles Mordaunt, Earl of Monmouth, out of office and keen to supplant the current chancellor, Charles Montague, Earl of Halifax – who was Newton’s patron. With Mordaunt’s help, Chaloner received a hearing for his accusations against the mint – and his remedies for beating forgers and coiners like himself. The ministers heard him out, but though they did not, as he had hoped, give Chaloner his coveted job in the mint, his ‘tongue pudding’ was convincing enough for them to order an investigation into security there.

Frustrated, Chaloner upped his game yet again. This time he set his sights on the newly founded Bank of England – he would become the country’s first ever master forger of the new-fangled banknote. To a champion counterfeiter like Chaloner, the world’s first banknotes – lacking such precautions as today’s inbuilt metal strip and complex cross-grained printing – presented few problems. He printed a stock of forged notes, and was ready to pass them into circulation when the bank, alerted by a dud note they had spotted, pounced on Chaloner’s printer, who promptly shopped him. Completely undaunted, Chaloner once again played the poacher turning gamekeeper: with barefaced gall he claimed that he had
only printed the notes to show up their flaws and how easily they could be forged and duplicated. He helpfully betrayed his own counterfeiting confederates into the bargain. Astonishingly, not only did the bank believe him, but they even gave him a £200 reward for his useful information. Once again, Chaloner had made a monkey of authority.

But one man was determined not to be fooled: Isaac Newton. The new Warden of the Mint had begun his work at the Tower as he meant to go on: in a hurricane of activity. Previously the post had been a sinecure, but Newton was determined to be a hands-on boss. Elbowing aside the mint’s incompetent master (or production manager), Thomas Neale, he threw himself into every detail of the production process, from scanning its costs with the gimlet eye of the greatest calculator in the land, to ordering up new furnaces, rolling mills and coining presses to boost the mint’s coin-striking capacity from 15,000 to 40,000 coins a day. Under Newton’s command, 500 workers laboured for shifts of twenty hours a day – except on the Sabbath – on the re-coining of a total of £7 million.

The mint became a continuous production line, with a river of silver flowing in at one end of Mint Street in the south-west corner of the fortress, and newly minted coins jingling out of the other end near Newton’s house in the north-east corner, all overseen with obsessive interest by the warden himself. By the summer of 1698 the great re-coinage was complete. A triumphant Newton took satisfaction in the knowledge that his theoretical mind had grappled with and conquered a supremely practical problem. As a result, the kingdom had a shiny new currency; economic crisis and social disorder were averted; new money clinked in plump purses once more; the king was able to pay his armies; and production at the mint – which had hit 50,000 coins a day – subsided to less frenetic levels.

Freed from the immediate problem of keeping the kingdom afloat financially, Newton was left with the time and energy to pursue a combined role of detective, magistrate and chief security officer for the mint. Investigating the mysterious disappearance of a set of coining dies from the Tower, instruments which in the hands of William Chaloner could pose a deadly threat to the mint’s monopoly of making money, Newton once again embarked on the pursuit of his arch-enemy. To catch his thief, Newton set a gang of lesser criminals on the trail. Starting with two convicted coiners, Peter Cooke and Thomas White, lying under sentence of death in the noisome Newgate jail, Newton began to build a case against
Chaloner. Dangling the possibility of a reprieve before their eyes, the theoretical-physicist-turned-unlikely-criminal-investigator persuaded the coiners to betray their former companion in crime. They admitted that the dies had been stolen from the Tower mint and sold to Chaloner to enable him to make near perfect replicas.

Newton stepped up his inquiry – which was now taking up half his working time and a large part of the mint’s budget. The physicist took like a duck to water to the unfamiliar milieu of stinking jails, dung-encrusted back alleys and the dingy inns where coiners gathered. He employed a small army of informers, narks and snoops to gather information about Chaloner and his associates. As a magistrate, he hauled suspects within the intimidating walls of the Tower and interrogated them closely, threatening them with the harsher penalties associated with the grim fortress unless they divulged all they knew.

The scholarly Cambridge scientist had turned into something closely resembling a police state persecutor, pursuing wrongdoers with righteous zeal. Newton’s biographer Frank Manuel comments, ‘There was an inexhaustible fount of rage in the man, but he appears to have found some release from its burden in these tirades in the Tower. At the mint he could hurt and kill without doing damage to his Puritan conscience. The blood of coiners and clippers nourished him.’ Although this goes too far – Newton killed no one, and there is no evidence that he injured them – he later burned the records of his interrogations, and the suspicion remains that he enjoyed the power he wielded over his terrified prisoners.

Apparently unaware of the snares that Newton was patiently setting for him, Chaloner continued his campaign to infiltrate the mint, appearing at the bar of the House of Commons in 1697 to denounce the fraud and forgery he claimed was rife at the Tower, and again brazenly proposing himself as the Hercules who could clear out the Augean Stables in Mint Street if only he were to be given access to it. So impressed with his ‘tongue pudding’ were the members of the Commons committee investigating the alleged abuses at the mint, that they ordered Newton to arrange an experiment in the Tower at which Chaloner could demonstrate his methods for foiling the coiners. Newton refused. Instead, he appeared before the committee himself, his pockets heavy with coins grooved according to Chaloner’s suggestions, to show up the flaws in the master forger’s schemes. Chaloner had been rebuffed – but it had been a close-run thing and Newton would not forget it.

The warden’s investigation into the dies filched from the mint had run into the sand. But when Chaloner openly accused Newton of incompetence at best, and himself of embezzling from the mint at worst, he made an error that would prove fatal, reviving Newton’s dormant enmity against him. Smarting under the public slight that Chaloner’s charges of malpractice had inflicted on him personally – he called them ‘calumny’ and ‘libel’ – and the idea that MPs would prefer the word of a common criminal to that of the nation’s finest mind, Newton plotted his revenge.

A year after he had last been there, in February 1698 a desperate Chaloner – flat broke after the failure of his Egham coining venture – was back before Parliament, this time as a petitioner, pleading that the mint was conspiring against him. He failed, and by that spring was reduced to penury. In an effort to restore his fortunes Chaloner attempted a fresh scam: forging the tickets for a newly established money-raising venture by the treasury, a national lottery. Chaloner was discovered, arrested and confined in the familiar Newgate jail. An implacable Newton took over the prosecution of his case. With a cold, single-minded fury, the warden set about weaving a noose around the neck of the man who had maligned him and his mint. In one non-stop, ten-day session at his house in the Tower Newton took no fewer than 140 witness statements on the case. He left nothing to chance, even inserting stool pigeons – compromised coiners – into Newgate to wheedle incriminating statements from Chaloner. A steady flow of their reports went straight from Newgate to the Tower to join Newton’s ever fattening case file.

Feeling the meshes of Newton’s net tightening inexorably about him, Chaloner went to pieces. His letters to Newton deteriorated from arrogance, to anxiety, to desperation, to blind panic. One of Newton’s spies reported to him that the coiner had gone mad, ‘pulling his shirt to pieces and running stark naked at midnight abot. the Ward for half an hour together’. As the shadow of the gallows loomed larger, Chaloner was ‘continually raving that the Devil was come for him and such frightful Whimseys’. Newton would have none of it. Suspecting that Chaloner’s ‘Lunacy’ was as genuine as the coins he had turned out, he pressed ahead with constructing a cast-iron case against him.

When the case came to trial at the Old Bailey in March 1699, the court was merciless. After hearing the half-dozen former confederates of Chaloner assembled by Newton testify that he was a master coiner – and had used the missing Tower dies for his work – he was convicted of high
treason and sentenced to die on the gallows at Tyburn. Newton studiously ignored a last plea sent from Newgate whose desperation echoes down the years:

My offending you has brought this upon me … Dear Sr. do this mercifull deed O for God’s sake if not mine keep me from being murdered. O dear Sr. nobody can save me but you O God my God I shall be murdered unless you save me O I hope God will move your heart with mercy and pitty to do this thing for me.

Newton remained unmoved, and was promoted from warden to the lucrative post of Master of the Mint at the end of the year – presumably as a reward for bringing Chaloner to the gallows.

He remained at the Tower for another quarter of a century, raking in an average of £1,650 a year, considerably more than the scholarly stipend of £100 a year he had earned as a professor at Cambridge. However, the great genius lost an estimated £20,000 of his new-earned wealth in the bursting of the South Sea Bubble in 1720. Even a mind as astute as his, it seems, could not resist the common human frailties of greed and folly. After the crash, Newton, old, disheartened and in failing health, arranged for his niece’s husband, William Conduitt, to succeed him as Master of the Mint, and retired from the close confines of the Tower where he had spent so many weary years. Two years later, nearly thirty years after Chaloner had choked his life out on the gallows, Newton followed him into the shades.

CHAPTER THREE

THE CAPTIVES AND THE KINGS

WITH HIS EYE
fixed on his expensive ecclesiastical aesthetics, and his favour lavished on his foreign courtiers, Henry III unsurprisingly became as unpopular with his barons as his father John had been. So long as administration remained in the able hands of his experienced justiciar Hubert de Burgh, the constable of the Tower, a lid was kept on the simmering baronial discontent. But in 1232, a whispering campaign against the ageing chief councillor mounted by envious foreign-born courtiers climaxed in Hubert’s sudden dismissal. He was accused of embezzlement, maladministration and other trumped-up offences, was stripped of his lands and offices, and was lucky to escape with his life. Considering Hubert’s exemplary service to Henry’s father and himself, the king’s brutal treatment of his mentor is eloquent testimony to his mean, weak and capricious character.

Blatantly ignoring the sacred rule of holy sanctuary, Henry had Hubert dragged from a chapel in Brentwood, Essex, where he had taken refuge. The fallen nobleman was placed on a ‘miserable jade’ with his legs tied under the nag’s belly and ‘ignominiously conveyed to the Tower’. Here, where the constable had so recently commanded, Hubert was clapped in chains and thrown into a dungeon. The old man – he was in his sixties – stayed until pressure from the Church made Henry change tactics. He returned Hubert to the chapel, but placed guards around the building to ensure no food was brought in. Hubert was literally starved out, and a blacksmith summoned to clamp the old warrior back in irons.

The farrier was, however, made of hard metal himself, and refused the cruel job. According to chronicler Matthew Paris he indignantly told Hubert’s captors to do their worst: ‘Inflict whatever judgment you will on me, for as the Lord liveth I will sooner die any kind of death than put fetters on him. Is not this the faithful and valiant Hubert who hath often
preserved England from ruin by foreigners and hath restored England to the English?’ Despite the blacksmith’s bravery, Hubert was returned to his Tower cell and held in solitary confinement for several months more before Henry relented, pardoned the old man and partially restored him to favour in 1234. However, Hubert never regained his old offices, and died in 1243. Deprived of his wise advice, Henry’s reign went rapidly downhill.

Henry’s next victim was the Welsh prince, Gruffydd ap Llywelyn. Gruffydd was the eldest son of the mighty Llywelyn ap Iorwerth – Llywelyn the Great – a warrior prince who had wrested control of Gwynedd and Powys (roughly north and mid-Wales) from his uncles. Llywelyn had married Joan, an illegitimate daughter of King John. Unfortunately for Gruffydd, the product of an earlier union, his father disinherited him in favour of his younger half-brother Dafydd, Llywelyn’s eldest son by Joan. A discontened Gruffydd was repeatedly imprisoned by his father, spurring him to outright revolt. After Llywelyn’s death in 1240, Gruffydd was captured by Dafydd and handed over to Henry III in 1241 as a hostage for the good behaviour of the Welsh.

Lodged in the top storey of the White Tower with his young son Owain, by 1244 Gruffydd could endure his imprisonment no longer. He tried to climb down from his ninety-foot-high prison via a rope of knotted sheets, choosing the feast day of Wales’s patron saint, St David, on 1 March, for the escape. He squeezed his considerable bulk on to the White Tower’s roof and started descending the sheer south side. But his weight proved too much for his home-made ladder, which broke, flinging him to his doom. The impact drove his head into his chest. Henry punished Gruffydd’s warder and ordered his son Owain to be detained ‘more straitly’. Gruffydd had two other sons, Dafydd and Llywelyn, who continued the family feud. The winner, Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, would avenge his father by causing Henry’s son, King Edward I, more trouble than any other man – with the exceptions of the Scottish warriors William Wallace and Robert the Bruce.