September 8, 2021 • 35 mins
An era of unprecedented innovation sees an explosion in free speech, the creation of paper money and the ascendance of William Chaloner from two-bit criminal to man of influence. Has the silver-tongued man gone straight?
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
This is an I Heart original. William Shaloner arranged the
whole thing. The printers, William new Bolton Edward Butler, We're
going to meet him at the Blue Post Pub in Haymarket,
near St James's Palace in Westminster. Chaloner had asked them
(00:25):
to print forty copies of ex King James the Second's
most recent declaration proclaiming his intention to take back the throne.
New Bolton Butler showed up, pamphlets in hand and sat
down for a bit of supper Chaloner's treat cheers. But
(00:47):
suddenly Chalander gave the signal, and, as his biographer wrote,
instead of grace off the meat, he entered shamed them
with musketeas instead of suffer. The printers were arrested by
(01:10):
the Crown soldiers and packed off to await trial at
Newgate Jail. That's right. It was a set up, one
that ultimately saw two poor printers executed for treason, and
one William Chaloner made eight thousand pounds richer for I
(01:32):
Heart Radio. I'm Linda Rodriguez, McRobie and this is Newton's
Law and I heard original podcast episode four The Other
side of the Coin. You Act one the demon printers
(02:29):
of Fleet Street. So I'm standing at Ldgate Circus. It's
the corner of Fleet Street and Farringdon Street. Fleet Street
has a lot of history. Might have heard Sweeney Todd,
(02:51):
the demon barber of Fleet Street. Not a real person,
by the way, or if you're a journalism history buff
because those do actually exist and I am one of them,
you'd recognize Fleet Street as the historic heart of London's
print media industry. I'm gonna turn around and I'm gonna
walk down Fleet Street now going west. So I've heard
(03:14):
that there is a mural down here on Magpie Alley
that depicts the Fleet Street print media industry. So I'm
hoping to find that. Back in the late fourteen hundreds,
English merchant William Caxton introduced the printing press to England
and he sat up in nearby Westminster. But after his
(03:35):
death his partner winkened the word just actually his name,
set up shop on Shoe Lane, which is just a
few hundred meters from where I am now in undred
and that was really the start of what became this
area's most lasting industry. Oh here's the mural, so right
at the top is William Caxton. It's a it's a
(03:57):
painting of William Caxton showing his printing to King Edward
the fourth and below it there's etchings of the hawker
from seventeen eighties. Is a person selling newspapers on the
street corner. There's the wooden printing press from six hundred.
There's a printing office here from six nine, which depicts
(04:19):
exactly what it would have looked like. You've got the
man setting the type, and you've got the big rolling
printing press, you've got the paper, and you've got a
dog sitting on the floor, because no office is complete
without a dog. Now, that would have been right around
the time that Newton would have been working and living
(04:39):
in London, and it's also right around the time when
the print media industry is really starting to take off.
It's becoming something that can actually change and shape public policy,
public discourse. It's something that people are actually reading and
listening to. It's also something that clever p Bill were
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exploiting in a bunch of different ways, which brings us
back to William Newbolt and Edward Butler are hapless printers
at the time they made their ill fated bargain with Challenger.
They're very likely would have been employed in a workshop
like that around Fleet Street. After all, they were printers
and this neighborhood was full of them. The pamphlet that
(05:21):
new Bolton Butler printed was only paper, but it was
dangerous paper. In his declaration of former King James the
second exiled de France promised to protect the Protestant Church
of England and allow Parliament to proceed. Just come on, guys,
take me back. Thus we have sincerely declared our royal
(05:44):
intentions to regain our own right and to relieve our
people from oppression and slavery. And may God give us
success in the prosecution of the one, as we sincerely
intend the confirmation of the other. Uh. The seventeenth century
saw an increasing recognition that printing meant power, so printed
(06:08):
material was subject to licensing by the government. The government
was restrictive in some senses. Sexy stories about witches were
a okay, but printing. The intention of a deposed king
to snatch his throne out from under the people who
had taken it from him was definitely not on. More
than just not on, this was actual treason. Treason cost
(06:31):
people their heads, but other people had figured out how
to make treason pay handsomely. William Jowner knew that the
government of the relatively new monarchs William and Mary, was
offering a thousand pounds for confirmed Jacobite traders, people who
supported James. The second Jacobite, just in case you were wondering,
(06:52):
came from Jacobus, which was Latin for James. This was
an outrageous amount, nearly two d and pounds in today's money,
and Channer wanted it. Who could blame him? The only
problem was he didn't have any Jacobite traders on hand,
so he decided, true to form, to make some. He
(07:16):
approached a bunch of London printers with an offer to
pay them to print the pamphlet. Most of them said no, obviously,
but remember Chaloner had that knack of tongue padding, which
is still a gross way of saying that he could
talk just about anyone into just about anything. He assured
the luckless New Bolton Butler that the pamphlets weren't going
(07:38):
to be distributed, that they were just for a private
gentleman in the country. Plus New Bolton Butler needed the business,
so they agreed. The pamphlets were printed, and New Bolton
Butler never got to eat that dinner they were promised. Instead,
they were thrown in Newgate for four months. The prosecution
(08:00):
presented their case at the Session's House, better known as
the Old Bailey in September. Being moved and instigated by
the power of the devil, and being enemies of our
sovereign Lord and Lady, the King and Queen, they did compose,
print and publish all cause to be composed, printed and
published a most false and scandalous, malicious and traitorous libel
(08:26):
entitled His Majesty's most Gracious Declaration. Butler and new Boat
responded that they were hired men, and that the printing
press wasn't even theirs. We are but servants. It was
never known that servants did suffer for their master's quotes.
The court, of course disagree, Butler and Newbot knew what
(08:48):
they were doing. They were found guilty and sentenced to death,
and Chaloner collected his reward. What WILLIAMS. Chaloner really had
was the knack of looking at a chaotic situation and
seeing immediately how to exploit it. The country's crumbling currency,
(09:08):
the paranoia of the new government and now this new industry,
the media. Pamphlets like the ones that the printers got
done for us. We have sincerely declared our oil intake,
like the one the challenger's anonymous biographer printed after his death,
short view of the life of William, like the one
(09:28):
that Peter blonde fired off at the money are is
humble representation of Peter Blondel were huge business at the
end of the seventeenth century. Some unlucky rogues trick or other,
have you read the ideas of this challenge, and by
the abuse of the mintors of our money who have
made the coin with so little art and to do it.
(09:50):
Pamphlets were basically little books, usually a longish essay. If
you wrote one, you could either pay a printer to
make and distribute them, or a printer would more or
less invest in your words and the hopes that they
could earn their money back through sales. Pamphlets weren't often
printed in quantities less than five hundred, because these were
meant to be distributed widely. They, as well as magazines, broadsheets, ballads, gazettes,
(10:16):
manuscripts of all types were sold everywhere on London streets,
and it didn't entirely matter if you could read It's
not kind of the binary thing being able to read
or not being able to read. In terms of the
political culture around print by seventeen hundred, there are all
kinds of social spaces in which the illiterate person or
(10:36):
the semi literate person can encounter the contents of print.
That's Professor Joad Raymond. He teaches and studies sixteenth and
seventeenth century news communication at Queen Mary University of London.
These are churchyards around of course churchyard, which is where
the book trade is more or less centered. They are
(10:58):
coffee houses that are as a past slightly more socially
elite institutions. That's emotionally, the coffee houses a primarily male
space where you can go sit, drink a cup of
coffee and access all of the books that have been
published this all the pamphlets, newspapers that have been published
this week. So they work as kind of our experience
(11:19):
of the library. For indeed, at Starbucks and also in
those places you might engage a conversation and debate the
contents of the newspapers. So these are spaces where this
kind of conversation could happen, where political debate happens, and
printed and written texts a part of that political debate.
(11:40):
Newspapers were growing in importance, but pamphlets, they were really
the beginning of mass media, a way of speaking directly
to the people about everything, foreign news, social and political developments,
religious rights and trade, salicious rumors and sexy biography, worries
about murderers and strange beasts, and about witches. Which is
(12:05):
which is in Essex? Please from the dead? Captured Resultants,
granddaughter Henry, the trial of Mary Blandy Spinster for the
murder of her father, The stories of our Riches of
the Sussex drakon a most terrible season, the Vindication of Christmas.
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A single piece of written material would likely be passed
on to ten or twenty other people, and that's not
including the people who heard it read aloud. So going
viral was a thing even in the late seventeenth century.
To put it another way, pamphlets were almost like Twitter,
like a physical proto Twitter. They were sometimes informed or
(12:50):
just funny or titillating, but they could also be useful
or clever, and they could sway public opinion, which was
just starting to be important. And that's why Nowble and
Butler had to die, why they had to be executed
for something as ostensibly innocuous as printing a pamphlet. Clearly,
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by the sixt sixties and sixteen seventies the public and
the views of the public are perceived as mattering, and
so there is certainly a London constituency in which the
notional and actual public can be brought to bear upon
public figures in order to influence their actions and to
persuade them that something should be done in a particular way.
(13:33):
So remember that Challoner published his own pamphlets in outlining
his proposals to fix the coinage and confound the counterfeiters.
Now England have been more grieved with clipped and counterfeit
money than any other country for want of crop. Again,
Challner knew a lot more than most people about counterfeiting,
(13:54):
given that coining was his bread and butter. But this
pamphlet scam, this was part of a much bigger, longer
con even bigger than setting up some gormless printers to
hang for treason. Chaloner was throwing his ideas out to
the public, certainly an entity that had become more important,
more accordable, if that's a word, over the last century.
(14:17):
But he was also trying to reach some very specific people,
and he could do that because these specific people were
paying attention to what was being printed and passed around,
because there was a kind of people who took note
of what was being talked about in coffee shops and
places of commerce. I guess that particular example it sounds
very much like the kind of debate that takes place
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within London, which is designed specifically to influence, not people
in the country. More broadly, it sounds very much debatement's
intended to shape the opinions of the major players who
are conscious not so much of the people who are voting,
but all the kind of the clients and the interest
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groups with whom they interact. With his pamphlet, his foray
into manipulating the media and manufacturing influence, Challenger was getting
closer than ever to what he really wanted to get
inside the mint itself. He scorned the petty rogueries of
tricking single men, but boldly aimed at imposing upon a
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whole kingdom, and whilest he was acting villainy in private,
pretended himself to be still busied for the good of
the public. Act two, A little creative accounting the media
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wasn't the only fledgling institution that Challenger was trying to manipulate. Pamphlets,
print media. These were up ending power dynamics and this
was a big shift. But the image was still a mess,
and so was the country's finances, and that required a
little ingenuity. One of the things about, you know, times
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of great change, is that we get abilities, we get
capacities whose implications we don't fully get. That's Tom Levinson,
author of Newton and the Counterfeiter and his most recent book,
Money for Nothing. And so what happens in the six
nineties is you get a whole bunch of new, weird
ideas about money. And one of the things that those
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ideas do, one of the reasons they actually get developed
is because England needs money. The cost of keeping William
and Mary on the throne and their heads on their
bodies really wasn't cheap. Money was being stiphoned off by
William's war with his Catholic art rival and the country's
longtime freenemy France and what would be called the Nine
Years War. So you've got all this money you want
(16:52):
to spend, but you don't have the money available. Um,
so what you need to do is figure out how
to get the future to pay for the things you
want to do in the present. The idea that money
currency is ultimately just an agreement that this thing, whatever
it is, has or represents value. This was an idea
that was just getting some traction in England is about
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to take that idea to the next level and build
a whole financial system around it. But first Parliament raised taxes,
which is never popular. And then it got creative and
started issuing government bonds, the first ever really, which are
basically loans to the government that are assured to yield
a return over time. And when that stopped being enough,
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a group of the country's wealthiest men clubbed together to
form a bank, not just a bank, the bank, as
in the Bank of England. The country's first national bank.
The Bank of England was founded in six four after
an Act of Parliament incorporated it. It opened with one
(17:57):
point two million pounds put up by subscribers, who became
the governor and the company of the bank. It was,
to put this in perspective, only the second such central
bank in existence, behind the Swedish reichs Bank. Private banks
had been around for centuries. If you were wealthy, you
leave your stacks of gold and silver with the goldsmiths
or someone else who had secure vaults like green gods.
(18:20):
The goldsmiths charged a fee to people who used the service,
but this meant that there was a lot of money
just sort of lying around collecting dust. Some folks realize
that this money could be put to better use, like
being used to loan to other people, or being invested
in new colonization schemes, and the whatnot better is definitely arguable.
Fast forward to sixteen ninety four and as it turns out,
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it's not just private citizens who need loans, but the
government the country too. Here's Tom Levinson. Basically, what happens
is the English Parliament invents the national debt in se
when for the first time authorizes borrowing a million pounds.
That are not a call on the notional person of
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the king. You know, it's not the monarch's treasury, it's
not the monarchs resources that pay for it, as is
notionally ultimately the case in an absolute monarchy. In this case,
the million pounds is sought by Parliament and guaranteed as
an obligation that the taxing authority in Britain Parliament has
undertaken and this works, and just like that we have
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the national debt, and politicians have been arguing about it
ever since now. It worked because private bank customers left
their money in the bank, which was then lent to
the government on the understanding that not everyone was going
to withdraw their money at the same time. This incidentally
becomes the foundation of modern capitalism, the national financial system
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and what is properly called fractional reserve banking. This system
also had the effect of doubling the power of the
money that the bank held, and this is where they
get super tricky and where the biggest innovation comes in
and where challenger sees a weakness. So say you deposit
a hundred pounds, That money would be used to finance
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the government's war in Europe. But you're a high roller.
You're a person who's moving lots of money around all
the time. You're not just some dude trying to buy
a dish of coffee with a busted penny. The bank
wanted to make sure that it's customers still had access
to and could in a sense use their money, so
it created what we're called running cash notes. These were
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bank issued pieces of paper that the bank was obligated
to turn into coin on demand. Paper that had value,
paper that could itself be traded for goods and services,
paper that was money. If I could make a believable
explosion sound here, I would, but I can't, so boom.
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Using paper to represent value had actually been part of
the landscape for a while. There were deeds to property,
for example, or promissory notes, which were essentially proto checks
or their bills of exchange or any record of value
being passed on. But this was on a much larger,
more regular, more organized scale. What's called in the profession
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of the English and then British financial revolution of the
sixteen nineties into the first half of the eighteenth century
really is a major and rapid development of these ideas.
That this notion of money as an abstract idea has
been building for a long time. But then you know,
very quickly the implications of that get realized in London
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and Amsterdam and Paris, but especially in London, where where
a number of these events, you know, just sort of
blow up in a big way. Isaac Newton, for one,
really got this. He got the idea that money doesn't
strictly have to be a physical material thing. Other people
got it too, of course, but they worried in coffee
shops and in banks and on the proto stock exchanges
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in London and on the continent about the implications of
money being a kind of abstraction. Newton once wrote a
defense of quote paper credit, as he termed it does
mere opinion that sets a value upon money. We value
it because with it we can purchase all sorts of commodities.
The same opinion sets alike value upon paper security. Money
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could be what everyone agrees it is, and it could
exist in an abstract or future state, but still be
used in the present. This was a big step. Once
we got used to the notion of paper money, other
shifts were easier to make, such as to what we
have now what's called fiat currency, which does not derive
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its value from the material from which it's made or
even representing it has value you because the government and
authorities agree that it does and guarantee that it does.
Another fun and Bonker's way to think about this is
how much money there is in the world right now?
According to data from January, there's about thirty seven trillion
(23:17):
in US dollars in circulation. That's the money that you
can immediately pay to someone or convert into actual cash.
It's the most liquid but the amount of money, and
this is the essence of money, as in like a
pure number in investments and cryptocurrencies and derivatives and products
that have value but aren't like a real physical thing
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that's more than one point to quadrillion with a quaw,
and without this conceptual shift about what money could be
in the seventeenth century, that quadrillion wouldn't exist. But you
can probably already see the problem with this because William
(24:01):
Chaloner certainly did counterfeiting coins that took effort, raw materials tools,
counterfeiting bank notes while all that really took was a
bit of paper and a good artist. The Bank of
England realized the danger it was in, so it took precautions.
The notes were printed on marbled paper and they were
most often issued in a hundred pound denominations, a huge
(24:24):
sum of money for your average person. This offered some
protection because it's not like you could move a fake
hundred pound note by paying your butcher with him. But
within a year of the Bank of England's opening, Chaloner
was counterfeiting hundred pound Bank of England notes. In fact,
it's probably less than a year because first fakes weren't
noticed until August, a year after the bank started. Chaloner
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was a skilled man with a graving plate that was
what the copper engraving plate he etched the bank's notes
on two was called. He had a steady hand and
a good eye for d tail. He would sit at
a table and his rented lodgings in a less salubrious
part of town, not wanting to do his dirty work
and his fine lodgings and Knightsbridge carefully. Over a period
(25:11):
of weeks, he scratched the bank seal at the corner
Britannia herself framed by two fronds of foliage, and he
would shine up the plate using a cloth. Once he
had the plate done, all he needed was the fancy paper.
What he did with the notes he printed up is unclear.
He might have tried to sell them on to other
London criminals, but Bank of England officials eventually traced a
(25:35):
counterfeit note back to the printer who had done the
marbled paper. The printer snitched on Chalder. Chaloner was arrested
and tossed into Newgate Jail Act three. All that glitters
(25:58):
is not gold. Chaloner was caught, so he did the
only thing he could. He immediately clapped in with the bank,
delivered up the false notes he had, and became an
impeacher of his fellows. We had upon the governor and
directors of the bank generously forbad prosecution. Chalder gave up
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some names other criminals who were trying to hoodwink the bank.
The bank had recently lost about a thousand pounds when
it cash some bad promisory notes, so Chaloner told them
who'd done it and where to find them, and neglected
to mention that he might have had a role in
that scam. Not only did the bank officials generously forbear
prosecution and spring him from Newgate, but they also, and
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I find this actually hard to believe, but it was
printed right there in that biographical pamphlet, so it's got
to be true, gave him a reward of two hundred pounds.
That's more than thirty eight thousand pounds in today's money,
or nearly fifty three thou dollars, which is just insane.
(27:06):
Like how good of a con man was Challenger that
the bank governors were like, yes, this checks out, Thank
you very much, here's a boatload of money. In November,
emboldened by his success, he even sent a list of
suggestions to the bank governors on how to deal with
counterfeit notes. It's almost impossible not to admire Challenger, his
(27:29):
anonymous biographer for all the pearl grasping certainly seemed to
But this was a dangerous jig our Challenger was dancing.
His efforts to get himself noticed had worked. Charles Morten,
the Earl of Monmouth and former Lord of the Treasury,
was a political player who was on the ounce. He
had once been King William's buddy, but that had gone
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south somehow. He was looking for ways to prove his
worth and to get one over on his rival, Charles Montague,
the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the man who would
later give Isaac Newton the Warden job. Morden saw an
opportunity in William Chaloner, specifically in Challenger's ideas that he
put into his sixteen ninety four pamphlet on how to
(28:12):
Fix the Coinage. Obviously, it had found its way to
the right people. Morden was impressed, so impressed that he
got Challenger and audience with the Privy Council, perhaps the
most powerful men in the country, the advisors to the Sovereign,
now just William after Mary's death in December, Finally challengers
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long game was paying off. He the son of a
country we were, a man who used to pedal dildo
watches and quack medicines in the streets, had the confidence
of men like Charles Mordent and the governors of the
Bank of England, and now he was about to make
his play for the Mint itself. He does actually get
(28:54):
the Ear of Government. That's Chris Barker, historian at the
modern Royal Mint. You end up with the situation whereby
he's sort of really selling himself to the various committees
that have been tasked with investigating sort of miscarriages at
the raw Mint, and he's standing before a governmental committee,
or at least going before it in various ways. That's
(29:14):
That's something that's an incredible thing about Challoner is that
he's actually getting officials to believe what he's saying. He's
selling his car at the highest levels. Challoner walked into
his meeting with the Council at the Palace of Whitehall,
the enormous complex on the banks of the Thames in
the spring of and there, in the presence of some
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of the country's most influential men, he unleashed a horrant
of well aimed criticism at the Mint, describing an institution
that was either incompetent or corrupt, or both. The Mint
is either incompetent or corrupt, or both, and he, he
(29:54):
told the counselors, was just the man to help clean
it up. We don't have a really good record of
exactly what Challenger said or exactly who was there to
hear it, but we do know that Challenger wasn't suddenly
made head of the Mint and running his scams from there.
The challengers allegations did lead to an investigation of the
(30:16):
Mince practices. Challenger wasn't the only person raising the concern
that the Mince moneyers were taking advantage of their proximity
to all that gold and silver, and as you can imagine,
the Mint employees weren't too pleased with that. They already
suspected that maybe there was a not so above board
reason that this Mr Challenger knew so much about counterfeiting.
(30:37):
The Mint's higher ups hired private thief takers were basically
bounty hunters. To bring in a load of witnesses, mostly
fellow coiners and criminals, to testify against Challender. They didn't
have to look far. Some of Challenger's acquaintances included part
time thief takers and full time extortionists, not to mention
a motley crew of petty criminals who had seen the
(30:58):
inside of various jails for various reasons. When they had
enough witnesses willing to rat on Challenger, they snapped him
up and threw him in Newgate again. Early in six
just days before Parliament ordered the recoinage, Challenger wrote to
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Charles Montague, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. He declared that
he was in jail on trumped up charges, that he
was actually a whistleblower who dared to call out the
Mint officials and got arrested for it. Now you think
that Montague would be a little suspicious of Challenger, after all,
(31:38):
he was writing from jail. But even if Montague did
want to check up on Challenger's past, there wouldn't really
have been any place to do so. After all, there's
no police force, no crime bureau, no winter Pole, no
one sharing information and he knows that Challenger had testified
in front of the Privy Council. That's got to me,
(31:59):
and he had some kind political cloud. Montague, fearing a
scandal that could taint the recoinage, had Shaloner released in May,
not long after Newton accepted the job as Warden, Challenger
testified before the Investigative Committee of the Lord's Justices of Appeal.
Newton wasn't there, But wow, did Chaloner put on a show.
(32:24):
This wasn't just a reprise of his performance for the
Privy Council. He had never made a false coin in
his life, he claimed, but he knew who did. The
Mint is staffed by corrupt money is who are cheating
the nation by making the coins too light, not the
full weight, and putting the difference into their own pockets.
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And even worse, they are using the Mint's own machinery
to make counterfeit guineas out of base metals. And worst
of all, those excellent, nearly indistinguishable from the real deal
counterfeit coins making the rounds in the street, well, they
were so good because they were made using the Mint's
own dies. The Mint's own engraver has sold the official
(33:10):
Mint dies to counterfeits, which counterfeiters. Chander knew that too,
Patrick Coffee, his own former accomplice coffee, had maybe become inconvenient.
And who else the mysterious figure called William Chandler. Spoiler alert,
(33:33):
it was him. William Chalder was William Chandler. It was
his name that he used on the streets. But okay,
the lords Justices of Appeal don't know that William Chandler
is William Chalder. But even so, why would anyone believe
William Chaloner powerful friends? Notwithstanding he had just been in Newgate.
(33:55):
The thing was some of the dies had actually gone missing,
and whether he liked it or not, as the Mince
new Warden, Isaac Newton had to find out who took them.
Coming up on Newton's Law, criminals, like dogs always returned
(34:17):
to the oral vomit I saw in William Challoner's brother
in law's house. Cutters and tools instruments properly for coining.
Newton's Law is a production of I Heart Radio. It's
written and hosted by me Linda Rodriguez mccrabbie. Our senior
producer is Ryan Murdoch. Our producer is Emily Marina. Our
Executive producer is Jason English. Original music by Alice McCoy
(34:42):
with editing help from Mary Do, Sound design and mixing
by Jeremy Thal, Research and fact checking by Me and
Jocelyn Sears. Voice acting by Keith Fleming, Mark McDonald, Robert
Jack and Austin Rodriguez McRobie Special thanks to Professor Joe
Ed Raymond, Chris Barker and Tom Levinson. Special thanks to
(35:02):
mangesh Hati Kudur and Fineflex Sound Studios. Our show logo
is designed by Lucy Quintinilla. Thanks for listening, Bye checks,
See you tomorrow on Austin's Weekly. I am here to
your Thursday Falls
This is an I Heart original. William Shaloner arranged the
whole thing. The printers, William new Bolton Edward Butler, We're
going to meet him at the Blue Post Pub in Haymarket,
near St James's Palace in Westminster. Chaloner had asked them
(00:25):
to print forty copies of ex King James the Second's
most recent declaration proclaiming his intention to take back the throne.
New Bolton Butler showed up, pamphlets in hand and sat
down for a bit of supper Chaloner's treat cheers. But
(00:47):
suddenly Chalander gave the signal, and, as his biographer wrote,
instead of grace off the meat, he entered shamed them
with musketeas instead of suffer. The printers were arrested by
(01:10):
the Crown soldiers and packed off to await trial at
Newgate Jail. That's right. It was a set up, one
that ultimately saw two poor printers executed for treason, and
one William Chaloner made eight thousand pounds richer for I
(01:32):
Heart Radio. I'm Linda Rodriguez, McRobie and this is Newton's
Law and I heard original podcast episode four The Other
side of the Coin. You Act one the demon printers
(02:29):
of Fleet Street. So I'm standing at Ldgate Circus. It's
the corner of Fleet Street and Farringdon Street. Fleet Street
has a lot of history. Might have heard Sweeney Todd,
(02:51):
the demon barber of Fleet Street. Not a real person,
by the way, or if you're a journalism history buff
because those do actually exist and I am one of them,
you'd recognize Fleet Street as the historic heart of London's
print media industry. I'm gonna turn around and I'm gonna
walk down Fleet Street now going west. So I've heard
(03:14):
that there is a mural down here on Magpie Alley
that depicts the Fleet Street print media industry. So I'm
hoping to find that. Back in the late fourteen hundreds,
English merchant William Caxton introduced the printing press to England
and he sat up in nearby Westminster. But after his
(03:35):
death his partner winkened the word just actually his name,
set up shop on Shoe Lane, which is just a
few hundred meters from where I am now in undred
and that was really the start of what became this
area's most lasting industry. Oh here's the mural, so right
at the top is William Caxton. It's a it's a
(03:57):
painting of William Caxton showing his printing to King Edward
the fourth and below it there's etchings of the hawker
from seventeen eighties. Is a person selling newspapers on the
street corner. There's the wooden printing press from six hundred.
There's a printing office here from six nine, which depicts
(04:19):
exactly what it would have looked like. You've got the
man setting the type, and you've got the big rolling
printing press, you've got the paper, and you've got a
dog sitting on the floor, because no office is complete
without a dog. Now, that would have been right around
the time that Newton would have been working and living
(04:39):
in London, and it's also right around the time when
the print media industry is really starting to take off.
It's becoming something that can actually change and shape public policy,
public discourse. It's something that people are actually reading and
listening to. It's also something that clever p Bill were
(05:00):
exploiting in a bunch of different ways, which brings us
back to William Newbolt and Edward Butler are hapless printers
at the time they made their ill fated bargain with Challenger.
They're very likely would have been employed in a workshop
like that around Fleet Street. After all, they were printers
and this neighborhood was full of them. The pamphlet that
(05:21):
new Bolton Butler printed was only paper, but it was
dangerous paper. In his declaration of former King James the
second exiled de France promised to protect the Protestant Church
of England and allow Parliament to proceed. Just come on, guys,
take me back. Thus we have sincerely declared our royal
(05:44):
intentions to regain our own right and to relieve our
people from oppression and slavery. And may God give us
success in the prosecution of the one, as we sincerely
intend the confirmation of the other. Uh. The seventeenth century
saw an increasing recognition that printing meant power, so printed
(06:08):
material was subject to licensing by the government. The government
was restrictive in some senses. Sexy stories about witches were
a okay, but printing. The intention of a deposed king
to snatch his throne out from under the people who
had taken it from him was definitely not on. More
than just not on, this was actual treason. Treason cost
(06:31):
people their heads, but other people had figured out how
to make treason pay handsomely. William Jowner knew that the
government of the relatively new monarchs William and Mary, was
offering a thousand pounds for confirmed Jacobite traders, people who
supported James. The second Jacobite, just in case you were wondering,
(06:52):
came from Jacobus, which was Latin for James. This was
an outrageous amount, nearly two d and pounds in today's money,
and Channer wanted it. Who could blame him? The only
problem was he didn't have any Jacobite traders on hand,
so he decided, true to form, to make some. He
(07:16):
approached a bunch of London printers with an offer to
pay them to print the pamphlet. Most of them said no, obviously,
but remember Chaloner had that knack of tongue padding, which
is still a gross way of saying that he could
talk just about anyone into just about anything. He assured
the luckless New Bolton Butler that the pamphlets weren't going
(07:38):
to be distributed, that they were just for a private
gentleman in the country. Plus New Bolton Butler needed the business,
so they agreed. The pamphlets were printed, and New Bolton
Butler never got to eat that dinner they were promised. Instead,
they were thrown in Newgate for four months. The prosecution
(08:00):
presented their case at the Session's House, better known as
the Old Bailey in September. Being moved and instigated by
the power of the devil, and being enemies of our
sovereign Lord and Lady, the King and Queen, they did compose,
print and publish all cause to be composed, printed and
published a most false and scandalous, malicious and traitorous libel
(08:26):
entitled His Majesty's most Gracious Declaration. Butler and new Boat
responded that they were hired men, and that the printing
press wasn't even theirs. We are but servants. It was
never known that servants did suffer for their master's quotes.
The court, of course disagree, Butler and Newbot knew what
(08:48):
they were doing. They were found guilty and sentenced to death,
and Chaloner collected his reward. What WILLIAMS. Chaloner really had
was the knack of looking at a chaotic situation and
seeing immediately how to exploit it. The country's crumbling currency,
(09:08):
the paranoia of the new government and now this new industry,
the media. Pamphlets like the ones that the printers got
done for us. We have sincerely declared our oil intake,
like the one the challenger's anonymous biographer printed after his death,
short view of the life of William, like the one
(09:28):
that Peter blonde fired off at the money are is
humble representation of Peter Blondel were huge business at the
end of the seventeenth century. Some unlucky rogues trick or other,
have you read the ideas of this challenge, and by
the abuse of the mintors of our money who have
made the coin with so little art and to do it.
(09:50):
Pamphlets were basically little books, usually a longish essay. If
you wrote one, you could either pay a printer to
make and distribute them, or a printer would more or
less invest in your words and the hopes that they
could earn their money back through sales. Pamphlets weren't often
printed in quantities less than five hundred, because these were
meant to be distributed widely. They, as well as magazines, broadsheets, ballads, gazettes,
(10:16):
manuscripts of all types were sold everywhere on London streets,
and it didn't entirely matter if you could read It's
not kind of the binary thing being able to read
or not being able to read. In terms of the
political culture around print by seventeen hundred, there are all
kinds of social spaces in which the illiterate person or
(10:36):
the semi literate person can encounter the contents of print.
That's Professor Joad Raymond. He teaches and studies sixteenth and
seventeenth century news communication at Queen Mary University of London.
These are churchyards around of course churchyard, which is where
the book trade is more or less centered. They are
(10:58):
coffee houses that are as a past slightly more socially
elite institutions. That's emotionally, the coffee houses a primarily male
space where you can go sit, drink a cup of
coffee and access all of the books that have been
published this all the pamphlets, newspapers that have been published
this week. So they work as kind of our experience
(11:19):
of the library. For indeed, at Starbucks and also in
those places you might engage a conversation and debate the
contents of the newspapers. So these are spaces where this
kind of conversation could happen, where political debate happens, and
printed and written texts a part of that political debate.
(11:40):
Newspapers were growing in importance, but pamphlets, they were really
the beginning of mass media, a way of speaking directly
to the people about everything, foreign news, social and political developments,
religious rights and trade, salicious rumors and sexy biography, worries
about murderers and strange beasts, and about witches. Which is
(12:05):
which is in Essex? Please from the dead? Captured Resultants,
granddaughter Henry, the trial of Mary Blandy Spinster for the
murder of her father, The stories of our Riches of
the Sussex drakon a most terrible season, the Vindication of Christmas.
(12:28):
A single piece of written material would likely be passed
on to ten or twenty other people, and that's not
including the people who heard it read aloud. So going
viral was a thing even in the late seventeenth century.
To put it another way, pamphlets were almost like Twitter,
like a physical proto Twitter. They were sometimes informed or
(12:50):
just funny or titillating, but they could also be useful
or clever, and they could sway public opinion, which was
just starting to be important. And that's why Nowble and
Butler had to die, why they had to be executed
for something as ostensibly innocuous as printing a pamphlet. Clearly,
(13:12):
by the sixt sixties and sixteen seventies the public and
the views of the public are perceived as mattering, and
so there is certainly a London constituency in which the
notional and actual public can be brought to bear upon
public figures in order to influence their actions and to
persuade them that something should be done in a particular way.
(13:33):
So remember that Challoner published his own pamphlets in outlining
his proposals to fix the coinage and confound the counterfeiters.
Now England have been more grieved with clipped and counterfeit
money than any other country for want of crop. Again,
Challner knew a lot more than most people about counterfeiting,
(13:54):
given that coining was his bread and butter. But this
pamphlet scam, this was part of a much bigger, longer
con even bigger than setting up some gormless printers to
hang for treason. Chaloner was throwing his ideas out to
the public, certainly an entity that had become more important,
more accordable, if that's a word, over the last century.
(14:17):
But he was also trying to reach some very specific people,
and he could do that because these specific people were
paying attention to what was being printed and passed around,
because there was a kind of people who took note
of what was being talked about in coffee shops and
places of commerce. I guess that particular example it sounds
very much like the kind of debate that takes place
(14:40):
within London, which is designed specifically to influence, not people
in the country. More broadly, it sounds very much debatement's
intended to shape the opinions of the major players who
are conscious not so much of the people who are voting,
but all the kind of the clients and the interest
(15:03):
groups with whom they interact. With his pamphlet, his foray
into manipulating the media and manufacturing influence, Challenger was getting
closer than ever to what he really wanted to get
inside the mint itself. He scorned the petty rogueries of
tricking single men, but boldly aimed at imposing upon a
(15:27):
whole kingdom, and whilest he was acting villainy in private,
pretended himself to be still busied for the good of
the public. Act two, A little creative accounting the media
(15:49):
wasn't the only fledgling institution that Challenger was trying to manipulate. Pamphlets,
print media. These were up ending power dynamics and this
was a big shift. But the image was still a mess,
and so was the country's finances, and that required a
little ingenuity. One of the things about, you know, times
(16:09):
of great change, is that we get abilities, we get
capacities whose implications we don't fully get. That's Tom Levinson,
author of Newton and the Counterfeiter and his most recent book,
Money for Nothing. And so what happens in the six
nineties is you get a whole bunch of new, weird
ideas about money. And one of the things that those
(16:31):
ideas do, one of the reasons they actually get developed
is because England needs money. The cost of keeping William
and Mary on the throne and their heads on their
bodies really wasn't cheap. Money was being stiphoned off by
William's war with his Catholic art rival and the country's
longtime freenemy France and what would be called the Nine
Years War. So you've got all this money you want
(16:52):
to spend, but you don't have the money available. Um,
so what you need to do is figure out how
to get the future to pay for the things you
want to do in the present. The idea that money
currency is ultimately just an agreement that this thing, whatever
it is, has or represents value. This was an idea
that was just getting some traction in England is about
(17:15):
to take that idea to the next level and build
a whole financial system around it. But first Parliament raised taxes,
which is never popular. And then it got creative and
started issuing government bonds, the first ever really, which are
basically loans to the government that are assured to yield
a return over time. And when that stopped being enough,
(17:36):
a group of the country's wealthiest men clubbed together to
form a bank, not just a bank, the bank, as
in the Bank of England. The country's first national bank.
The Bank of England was founded in six four after
an Act of Parliament incorporated it. It opened with one
(17:57):
point two million pounds put up by subscribers, who became
the governor and the company of the bank. It was,
to put this in perspective, only the second such central
bank in existence, behind the Swedish reichs Bank. Private banks
had been around for centuries. If you were wealthy, you
leave your stacks of gold and silver with the goldsmiths
or someone else who had secure vaults like green gods.
(18:20):
The goldsmiths charged a fee to people who used the service,
but this meant that there was a lot of money
just sort of lying around collecting dust. Some folks realize
that this money could be put to better use, like
being used to loan to other people, or being invested
in new colonization schemes, and the whatnot better is definitely arguable.
Fast forward to sixteen ninety four and as it turns out,
(18:42):
it's not just private citizens who need loans, but the
government the country too. Here's Tom Levinson. Basically, what happens
is the English Parliament invents the national debt in se
when for the first time authorizes borrowing a million pounds.
That are not a call on the notional person of
(19:04):
the king. You know, it's not the monarch's treasury, it's
not the monarchs resources that pay for it, as is
notionally ultimately the case in an absolute monarchy. In this case,
the million pounds is sought by Parliament and guaranteed as
an obligation that the taxing authority in Britain Parliament has
undertaken and this works, and just like that we have
(19:27):
the national debt, and politicians have been arguing about it
ever since now. It worked because private bank customers left
their money in the bank, which was then lent to
the government on the understanding that not everyone was going
to withdraw their money at the same time. This incidentally
becomes the foundation of modern capitalism, the national financial system
(19:49):
and what is properly called fractional reserve banking. This system
also had the effect of doubling the power of the
money that the bank held, and this is where they
get super tricky and where the biggest innovation comes in
and where challenger sees a weakness. So say you deposit
a hundred pounds, That money would be used to finance
(20:10):
the government's war in Europe. But you're a high roller.
You're a person who's moving lots of money around all
the time. You're not just some dude trying to buy
a dish of coffee with a busted penny. The bank
wanted to make sure that it's customers still had access
to and could in a sense use their money, so
it created what we're called running cash notes. These were
(20:34):
bank issued pieces of paper that the bank was obligated
to turn into coin on demand. Paper that had value,
paper that could itself be traded for goods and services,
paper that was money. If I could make a believable
explosion sound here, I would, but I can't, so boom.
(21:02):
Using paper to represent value had actually been part of
the landscape for a while. There were deeds to property,
for example, or promissory notes, which were essentially proto checks
or their bills of exchange or any record of value
being passed on. But this was on a much larger,
more regular, more organized scale. What's called in the profession
(21:25):
of the English and then British financial revolution of the
sixteen nineties into the first half of the eighteenth century
really is a major and rapid development of these ideas.
That this notion of money as an abstract idea has
been building for a long time. But then you know,
very quickly the implications of that get realized in London
(21:47):
and Amsterdam and Paris, but especially in London, where where
a number of these events, you know, just sort of
blow up in a big way. Isaac Newton, for one,
really got this. He got the idea that money doesn't
strictly have to be a physical material thing. Other people
got it too, of course, but they worried in coffee
shops and in banks and on the proto stock exchanges
(22:10):
in London and on the continent about the implications of
money being a kind of abstraction. Newton once wrote a
defense of quote paper credit, as he termed it does
mere opinion that sets a value upon money. We value
it because with it we can purchase all sorts of commodities.
The same opinion sets alike value upon paper security. Money
(22:33):
could be what everyone agrees it is, and it could
exist in an abstract or future state, but still be
used in the present. This was a big step. Once
we got used to the notion of paper money, other
shifts were easier to make, such as to what we
have now what's called fiat currency, which does not derive
(22:54):
its value from the material from which it's made or
even representing it has value you because the government and
authorities agree that it does and guarantee that it does.
Another fun and Bonker's way to think about this is
how much money there is in the world right now?
According to data from January, there's about thirty seven trillion
(23:17):
in US dollars in circulation. That's the money that you
can immediately pay to someone or convert into actual cash.
It's the most liquid but the amount of money, and
this is the essence of money, as in like a
pure number in investments and cryptocurrencies and derivatives and products
that have value but aren't like a real physical thing
(23:39):
that's more than one point to quadrillion with a quaw,
and without this conceptual shift about what money could be
in the seventeenth century, that quadrillion wouldn't exist. But you
can probably already see the problem with this because William
(24:01):
Chaloner certainly did counterfeiting coins that took effort, raw materials tools,
counterfeiting bank notes while all that really took was a
bit of paper and a good artist. The Bank of
England realized the danger it was in, so it took precautions.
The notes were printed on marbled paper and they were
most often issued in a hundred pound denominations, a huge
(24:24):
sum of money for your average person. This offered some
protection because it's not like you could move a fake
hundred pound note by paying your butcher with him. But
within a year of the Bank of England's opening, Chaloner
was counterfeiting hundred pound Bank of England notes. In fact,
it's probably less than a year because first fakes weren't
noticed until August, a year after the bank started. Chaloner
(24:50):
was a skilled man with a graving plate that was
what the copper engraving plate he etched the bank's notes
on two was called. He had a steady hand and
a good eye for d tail. He would sit at
a table and his rented lodgings in a less salubrious
part of town, not wanting to do his dirty work
and his fine lodgings and Knightsbridge carefully. Over a period
(25:11):
of weeks, he scratched the bank seal at the corner
Britannia herself framed by two fronds of foliage, and he
would shine up the plate using a cloth. Once he
had the plate done, all he needed was the fancy paper.
What he did with the notes he printed up is unclear.
He might have tried to sell them on to other
London criminals, but Bank of England officials eventually traced a
(25:35):
counterfeit note back to the printer who had done the
marbled paper. The printer snitched on Chalder. Chaloner was arrested
and tossed into Newgate Jail Act three. All that glitters
(25:58):
is not gold. Chaloner was caught, so he did the
only thing he could. He immediately clapped in with the bank,
delivered up the false notes he had, and became an
impeacher of his fellows. We had upon the governor and
directors of the bank generously forbad prosecution. Chalder gave up
(26:21):
some names other criminals who were trying to hoodwink the bank.
The bank had recently lost about a thousand pounds when
it cash some bad promisory notes, so Chaloner told them
who'd done it and where to find them, and neglected
to mention that he might have had a role in
that scam. Not only did the bank officials generously forbear
prosecution and spring him from Newgate, but they also, and
(26:45):
I find this actually hard to believe, but it was
printed right there in that biographical pamphlet, so it's got
to be true, gave him a reward of two hundred pounds.
That's more than thirty eight thousand pounds in today's money,
or nearly fifty three thou dollars, which is just insane.
(27:06):
Like how good of a con man was Challenger that
the bank governors were like, yes, this checks out, Thank
you very much, here's a boatload of money. In November,
emboldened by his success, he even sent a list of
suggestions to the bank governors on how to deal with
counterfeit notes. It's almost impossible not to admire Challenger, his
(27:29):
anonymous biographer for all the pearl grasping certainly seemed to
But this was a dangerous jig our Challenger was dancing.
His efforts to get himself noticed had worked. Charles Morten,
the Earl of Monmouth and former Lord of the Treasury,
was a political player who was on the ounce. He
had once been King William's buddy, but that had gone
(27:50):
south somehow. He was looking for ways to prove his
worth and to get one over on his rival, Charles Montague,
the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the man who would
later give Isaac Newton the Warden job. Morden saw an
opportunity in William Chaloner, specifically in Challenger's ideas that he
put into his sixteen ninety four pamphlet on how to
(28:12):
Fix the Coinage. Obviously, it had found its way to
the right people. Morden was impressed, so impressed that he
got Challenger and audience with the Privy Council, perhaps the
most powerful men in the country, the advisors to the Sovereign,
now just William after Mary's death in December, Finally challengers
(28:33):
long game was paying off. He the son of a
country we were, a man who used to pedal dildo
watches and quack medicines in the streets, had the confidence
of men like Charles Mordent and the governors of the
Bank of England, and now he was about to make
his play for the Mint itself. He does actually get
(28:54):
the Ear of Government. That's Chris Barker, historian at the
modern Royal Mint. You end up with the situation whereby
he's sort of really selling himself to the various committees
that have been tasked with investigating sort of miscarriages at
the raw Mint, and he's standing before a governmental committee,
or at least going before it in various ways. That's
(29:14):
That's something that's an incredible thing about Challoner is that
he's actually getting officials to believe what he's saying. He's
selling his car at the highest levels. Challoner walked into
his meeting with the Council at the Palace of Whitehall,
the enormous complex on the banks of the Thames in
the spring of and there, in the presence of some
(29:34):
of the country's most influential men, he unleashed a horrant
of well aimed criticism at the Mint, describing an institution
that was either incompetent or corrupt, or both. The Mint
is either incompetent or corrupt, or both, and he, he
(29:54):
told the counselors, was just the man to help clean
it up. We don't have a really good record of
exactly what Challenger said or exactly who was there to
hear it, but we do know that Challenger wasn't suddenly
made head of the Mint and running his scams from there.
The challengers allegations did lead to an investigation of the
(30:16):
Mince practices. Challenger wasn't the only person raising the concern
that the Mince moneyers were taking advantage of their proximity
to all that gold and silver, and as you can imagine,
the Mint employees weren't too pleased with that. They already
suspected that maybe there was a not so above board
reason that this Mr Challenger knew so much about counterfeiting.
(30:37):
The Mint's higher ups hired private thief takers were basically
bounty hunters. To bring in a load of witnesses, mostly
fellow coiners and criminals, to testify against Challender. They didn't
have to look far. Some of Challenger's acquaintances included part
time thief takers and full time extortionists, not to mention
a motley crew of petty criminals who had seen the
(30:58):
inside of various jails for various reasons. When they had
enough witnesses willing to rat on Challenger, they snapped him
up and threw him in Newgate again. Early in six
just days before Parliament ordered the recoinage, Challenger wrote to
(31:18):
Charles Montague, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. He declared that
he was in jail on trumped up charges, that he
was actually a whistleblower who dared to call out the
Mint officials and got arrested for it. Now you think
that Montague would be a little suspicious of Challenger, after all,
(31:38):
he was writing from jail. But even if Montague did
want to check up on Challenger's past, there wouldn't really
have been any place to do so. After all, there's
no police force, no crime bureau, no winter Pole, no
one sharing information and he knows that Challenger had testified
in front of the Privy Council. That's got to me,
(31:59):
and he had some kind political cloud. Montague, fearing a
scandal that could taint the recoinage, had Shaloner released in May,
not long after Newton accepted the job as Warden, Challenger
testified before the Investigative Committee of the Lord's Justices of Appeal.
Newton wasn't there, But wow, did Chaloner put on a show.
(32:24):
This wasn't just a reprise of his performance for the
Privy Council. He had never made a false coin in
his life, he claimed, but he knew who did. The
Mint is staffed by corrupt money is who are cheating
the nation by making the coins too light, not the
full weight, and putting the difference into their own pockets.
(32:46):
And even worse, they are using the Mint's own machinery
to make counterfeit guineas out of base metals. And worst
of all, those excellent, nearly indistinguishable from the real deal
counterfeit coins making the rounds in the street, well, they
were so good because they were made using the Mint's
own dies. The Mint's own engraver has sold the official
(33:10):
Mint dies to counterfeits, which counterfeiters. Chander knew that too,
Patrick Coffee, his own former accomplice coffee, had maybe become inconvenient.
And who else the mysterious figure called William Chandler. Spoiler alert,
(33:33):
it was him. William Chalder was William Chandler. It was
his name that he used on the streets. But okay,
the lords Justices of Appeal don't know that William Chandler
is William Chalder. But even so, why would anyone believe
William Chaloner powerful friends? Notwithstanding he had just been in Newgate.
(33:55):
The thing was some of the dies had actually gone missing,
and whether he liked it or not, as the Mince
new Warden, Isaac Newton had to find out who took them.
Coming up on Newton's Law, criminals, like dogs always returned
(34:17):
to the oral vomit I saw in William Challoner's brother
in law's house. Cutters and tools instruments properly for coining.
Newton's Law is a production of I Heart Radio. It's
written and hosted by me Linda Rodriguez mccrabbie. Our senior
producer is Ryan Murdoch. Our producer is Emily Marina. Our
Executive producer is Jason English. Original music by Alice McCoy
(34:42):
with editing help from Mary Do, Sound design and mixing
by Jeremy Thal, Research and fact checking by Me and
Jocelyn Sears. Voice acting by Keith Fleming, Mark McDonald, Robert
Jack and Austin Rodriguez McRobie Special thanks to Professor Joe
Ed Raymond, Chris Barker and Tom Levinson. Special thanks to
(35:02):
mangesh Hati Kudur and Fineflex Sound Studios. Our show logo
is designed by Lucy Quintinilla. Thanks for listening, Bye checks,
See you tomorrow on Austin's Weekly. I am here to
your Thursday Falls
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I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com