September 15, 2021 • 38 mins
In a time before organized police, Isaac Newton gets used to his dual role as crook catcher and prosecutor. As he locks up London’s counterfeiters one by one, Newton’s ring of informants tighten the circle around Mr. Chaloner.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
This is an I Heart original. It's August. It's a
nearly moonless night, and it's dry after a summer and
spring of wind and rain. We're in a ramshackle house
surrounded by a moat in Westminster, just to stone throw
(00:25):
away from the famous abbey. It's a quiet night. A
nameless man is inside, maybe suffering through a restless sleep,
or maybe pacing the floor nervously. There's a thud at
the door, the sound of wood wrapping on wood, agents
(00:46):
of the Warden of the Royal Mint. The Warden had
heard from his informants that this house was a center
for clipping and counterfeiting. We know they're in here. The
agents busted their way in, put past our manager. When
they start turning the place over, searching for counterfeiting tools
and clipped coin evidence. Yeah, look, look everywhere, the nine.
(01:12):
But our man's ready. He's planned for this. He quickly
scuttles out a window and crosses the rain swollen moat
on a plank of wood that's been left for precisely
this purpose. He escapes, leaving the agents empty handed, no evidence,
no suspect, nothing. Damn it well. But three days later
our man is caught and this time, he doesn't run.
(01:35):
He can't run. Instead, this nameless informant points a finger
at one Henry Atkinson and his wife Jane Henry Atkinson
who also goes by Atkins him and his wife, She's
Jane Demens the ones you want. The informant also told
the agents where to find the Atkinson's tools. They'd cleverly
(01:55):
sunk some of them in the moat by the root
of a willow tree. The Warden's agents search the house again,
this time finding the tools where the informant said they'd be,
plus more stuffed under a floorboard in the attic. The
Atkinsons were arrested and after a short stay in Newgate,
the case against them was brought to trial. The trial
(02:19):
took place at this Session's House, better known as the
Old Bailey, on the ninth of September. The Session's House
had been built adjacent to Newgate in the previous century,
specifically to hold trials. It was called the Old Bailey
because it was built in the space inside the curtain wall,
the part of a fortification called a bailey. Prisoners were
(02:39):
brought over from the jail to stand in what was
essentially an open air theater with only three walls. This
was to reduce the spread of disease. At this point,
Isaac Newton had been wardened for more than four months
and he was a quick learner. Obviously, the witness will
stay that he saw Hayden the Atkinson also known as Atkins,
(03:02):
and his wife Jane of St Marty's in the Field
Parish clipping a hundred and fifty of the crowns shillings
and falsely coining two hundred sixty shillings is not true.
The Atkinson's didn't really stand a chance. They would not
have had a lawyer to defend them, or to point
out that maybe the testimony of the guy literally found
(03:22):
at the scene of the crime wasn't terribly trustworthy. All
they would have had is their own word and other people.
Not enough people to act as character witnesses against meticulous
Isaac Newton and his army of thief takers and witnesses.
The jury found them guilty of booth indictment. According to
(03:43):
the court records the sentence. Henry was executed at the
Tyburn Tree. Jane pled her belly, meaning that she claimed
to be pregnant to escape the gallows. It worked, but
there's no record of what happened to her next. The
Atkinson's conviction demonstrated that the Newton who stood in sessions
(04:06):
house witnesses at the ready, who milked his information network
for leads on coiners and clippers who had an information network,
was not the same Newton who first walked into the
Mint back in May. This Newton knows what he's doing
for I Heart Radio. I'm Linda Rodriguez, McRobbie and this
(04:29):
is Newton's Law and I Heart original podcast, episode five,
Crime and Punishment seventeenth century style. You are making Act
(05:17):
one the oath. So I'm sitting having a point at
the Old Bell Tavern. This is a very historic pub
and it would definitely, definitely have been here during the
time that Isaac Newton was warden of the Royal Mint.
And it's very likely that a pub just like this,
(05:37):
if not this pub, would have been a place that
Isaac Newton would have met with informants. This would have
been the kind of place where Newton would have asked
prisoners to come out of the jail, be brought by guards,
and where he would have met with them to talk
about information what he could get out of them. Ferreting
(05:59):
out informants and doing deals with snitches and dirty pubs,
representing the Crown in front of judges and juries, and
prosecuting counterfeiters and clippers, sending people to the gallows. This
was not the job Isaac Newton thought he was getting.
When Charles Montague, Chancellor of the Exchequer, offered Newton the job,
(06:21):
he told him that being warden has not too much
business to require more attendance than you may spare. But
Montague hadn't reckoned on a few things, the three coinage
that Newton was sorting out, and the epidemic of counterfeiters
and clippers that Newton, as warden as the Crown's magistrate,
was contractually obligated to pursue. When Newton became Warden of
(06:44):
the Royal Mint, he took an oath to protect the
Mint's secret coining and edging machinery. I swear that I
will not reveal or discover to any person or persons
whatsoever the new invention of rounding the money and making
the edges of them with letters or grainings, or either
(07:05):
of them directly or indirectly. So help me God. He
took that oath and all it implied, very very seriously. Unfortunately,
previous wardens hadn't now clippers and counterfeiters had done serious
damage to the country's economy. But that wasn't the only
(07:25):
damage they've done. The crimes of counterfeiting and clipping weren't
just economic ones. They were socially subverting ones as well.
They undermined governmental authority. But remember, in the seventeenth century,
there's no police, no agency charged with apprehending criminals. That
wouldn't happen until eight nine with the formation of the
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Metropolitan Police Force. In fact, for most of English history
there was no dedicated police force because individuals were obligated
to report crime and pursue criminals. This was what was
called Hugh and I and it had been part of
the legal framework since twelved five. Basically, if a citizen
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saw a crime happening, they were obligated to start shouting
and yelling until the suspect was caught and put into
the custody of a constable or justice of the peace
that just stand there, do something. Oh game, game before
we escape season thief And if you heard someone shouting
thief or murder, then you are obligated to join that
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human cry and pursue the offender to come on everyone
he sent him for the alley. This is a system
of justice in which everyone more or less was deputized.
But by the time Newton is in London, the system
of individual responsibility for the greater good is showing its cracks.
(08:56):
People in this growing city are increasingly an anomous and
they're finding it easier and easier to ignore that duty.
So you had large cities like London where you didn't
know your next door neighbor, or you didn't know the
people down the street, and people could travel quite easily
from one era to the other. So when I had
(09:17):
my point at the Old Bell where Newton might have
once interrogated prisoners and paid off informants, I wasn't alone.
My name's Harry Potter, believe it or not. I'm a
criminal barrister, but I'm also historian. I've written several books
on criminal justice, history of the common law, history of prisons,
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and the history of capital punishment. London at the time
Newton was patrolling the streets, so to speak, was seeing
a rise in crime. More people, more opportunity, more crime.
When you're walking the street, you have your pocket lot,
and you have your purse or handkerchief, and it was
quite easy for people to steal those particular items and
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run away and not get caught because there was no
police force in the sense that we would understand, but
creating an official or governmentally backed police force that wasn't
even an idea at the time, because the theory was,
if there's little means of preventing crime, we need big
means of deterring it. The solution to rising crime in
(10:23):
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as it turns out, was
capital punishment. It was probably accepted by certainly by the
authorities and by quite a lot of other people that
if you had very draconian punishments for relatively minor offenses,
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that would stop people committing by and that, of course
that's why those who were executed were executed public. And
that brings us to Newton's other role as prosecutor. As
the guy getting those people to the gallows, Newton was
essentially both a cop and a prosecutor. With no police force,
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there could be no bright line between those two roles.
This meant that Newton had to be thinking about how
to make a case stick from the very beginning of
his investigations. Also, at this time, we're moving away from
medieval methods of justice. Trial by ordeal, for example, had
largely fallen out of practice by this century, except when
it came to which is don't care, and we're moving
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into something more recognizable but not totally modern. You have
a judge presiding over the case, you have a jury
that would be deciding on on on guilt or innocence,
and would be certain norms of evidence rather than rules
of references. But this was still a system that dramatically
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disadvantaged the accused. When we say that the Atkinson's didn't
really have a chance, we mean it. The jury needed
to be shown convincing evidence to convict, but the presumption
of innocence reasonable doubt. These were ideas that were only
just about now being expressed. Juries were chosen from a
very narrow pool of mostly wealthier white men of good standing,
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so that had to have an impact on who was
likely to be convicted. The defense in a very different position,
because often he doesn't even know what the charges are
um and certainly wouldn't know the names of the prosecution witnesses,
of the nature of the evidence that had been accrued
against him. So it was then very much more difficult
for the defendant to produce witnesses on his side, or
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even character witnesses. And often you didn't know the trial
date um, So you know, if you've got a witness
in Wilkeshire and the trial might be sometime in June,
and you can't really expect them to come up to
London to spend a month in London waiting for a
trial that may or may not take place. So the
defense were disadvantages, and that's of course some people were
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still acquitted. Newton had learned that the hard way when
mine alleged clippers and coiners that he had brought in
were found not guilty in July. Juries were sometimes reluctant
to convict because the punishment was so final. Some people
suggested that relatively milder punishments, such as facial disfigurement or
hard labor might induce juries to convict more often. And
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then there was that forty pound reward informers got for snitching.
The deservers had a hard time believing that people weren't
tempted to lie by what was a lot of money,
around ten thousand pounds or nearly fourteen thousand dollars. Now,
convicts could also be pardoned, and people under suspicion could
be cleared if they turned informant. But there was also
this too. The threat of death just wasn't enough to
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deter the dedicated coiners and clippers, nor was the opprobrium
of the rest of society, because really people did not
like clippers and coiners. This was not a crime that
garnered any sympathy at all. Counterfeitures were well aware of
the subrity of the punishment for the crime, and yet
went on their merry way in large number of simply
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because the prophets were so great. It's a bit like
drug dealing now in this country. Supplying Class A drums
get very heavy sentences, but the rewards are enorse. So
if Newton is going to catch and convict William Chaloner,
as well as the loads of other coiners and clippers
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nibbling away at the nation's economic strength, he was going
to have to start thinking like a scientist. A scientist
detective Act two, Isaac Newton met detective. Newton's appointment to
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Warden essentially made him a detective and a prosecutor, not
that he wanted either role. He even tried to get
out of it. After two months on the job, Newton
wrote to the Treasury to complain. I do not find
that the prosecuting of coiners was imposed upon any of
my predecessors, nor is that any reward or encouragement appointed
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for my service in these matters, Nor am I provided
with any competent assistance to enable me to grapple with
an undertaking sore, vexatious and dangerous as this. Therefore, I
humbly pray that it may not be imposed upon me
any longer. The Treasury, however, disagreed this was his job,
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so Newton once again rolled up his sleeves and got
to work. Chris Barker, historian at the Royal Mint, The
interesting thing is that despite pushing back, and continually pushing back,
and saying, don't give this to me, give this somebody
else more qualified, give this somebody else from a from
more legal perspective, he does throw himself into it. So
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this is a man that, despite loathing this your work,
is doing an awful lot of it in a way
that you might expect from a police inspector and a
judge and prosecution today. In many ways you'd think that
a man who had spent his entire adult life cloistered
behind the ivy clad walls of rural academia would have
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no idea where to start and trying to ferret out counterfeiters.
But what Newton had going for him was what made
him a weirdo at Cambridge and then a rock star mathematician,
his relentless, remorseless focus on dismantling and solving a problem.
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Just as he had approached the problem of the Great Recoinage,
Newton dove into the archives. He compiled a history of
all the cases of prosecuted coiners and clippers going back
twenty five years, and he looked for patterns. Evidence came in,
that's all and petty at the clipping trade and others.
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Divers quantities of silver melted down. George Clark, Mary Clark,
and George Clark, their son, indicted for clipping and filing
the lawful coin of this kingdom. Just as if this
was a new method for, say, distilling mercury. Newton studied
the mechanics of counterfeiting, how it worked. Daniel Decoyda and
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Catherine Decoyna, his wife, both French people, indicted for clipping
forty Elizabethan shillings. He was found guilty of the high pleason,
but as to his wife, there being no witnesses she
had a hand in the design or was assisting her
husband in his unlawful practices, she was acquitted. He saw
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how counterfeiters might escape the law, such as literally escaping
it by leaving the city, so he bought himself Justice
of the Peace appointments in seven counties that ringed London,
so we could get information, make a rest and takedown
operations outside the city without worrying about pesky legal is
use of jurisdiction. Newton also realized counterfeiting wasn't a lone
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wolf kind of crime. Making and distributing the fakes couldn't
be done alone. Two most notorious coiners and clippers of
money here were found guilty of too indictments of high
trees and apace. They were both of a gang and
confessed they had for some years been concerned in such practices.
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This was organized crime involving gangs of people. Big time
counterfeiters and Williams Challoner hid behind the buyers and utterers
who got the fakes out into trade. In the short
term This kept the identities of the counterfeiters secret, but
as Newton found out, it also created a weakness. It
meant that someone in the chain might be willing to
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turn informant. This maybe isn't as revelatory as a apple
falling on his head, but it's certainly changed the course
of Newton's work. It's way fun to picture Newton as
a big city police inspector sitting behind a metal desk
with a mug okay dish of coffee tobacco smoke swirling
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around his curly silver wig and demanding that his agents
get him the information or they can turn in their
gun and badge. Except that no one had badges because
you know, no police, and no one had guns either,
because they were all called blunderbusses or dragons and they
were just as likely to blow your hand off as
blow away the bad guy. And Newton definitely didn't smoke
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smoking a pop I'm unwilling to make to myself and
the necessities. But Newton's operations did grow bigger, more complicated
until he was running a kind of detective agency headquartered
at the Mint. Newton employed thief takers and sometimes mint
staff to go out into the streets and track down
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bad coins, and then to follow the chain back from
where the coin first appeared to whoever made it. Here's
Tom Levin's an author of Newton and the Counterfeiter. Most
of all, Newton was really relentless in doing the classic
investigative thing, you capture one person. Counterfeiting is not a
solo crime. Those involved in currency were a small group,
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including both those who were making the currency and those
who were unmaking it by various schemes. You know, their
their affairs and their concerns, and hence just their physical
routes through the day. Uh necessarily overlapped. One of his agents,
playing the role of a London coiner on the run
from the law, uncovered a nest of counterfeiters in Cambridgeshire
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who boasted a milling machine very like the one used
by the Mint. Records also show that Newton expensed the
Mint for the cost of a set of clothes one
of his agents needed to go undercover to infiltrate a
gang of coiners. Newton most certainly paid people for information
to in addition to dangling the chance to get out
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of jail or get off a charge in front of that.
According to Tom Levinson, between sixteen ninety six and six,
the Mint reimbursed Newton's six hundred and twenty six pounds,
five shillings and ninepence for all the expenses he incurred
in catching coiners. That's around a hundred and twenty one
thousand pounds in today's money. August paid the keeper of
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the Savoy Prison for sending his man into Lewis in
Sussex to apprehend Emiray, a coiner. September nine paid Taylor,
an engraver in Holborn, for charges and pains in discovering
Williamson and other coiners of several gangs. November one paid
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Duglas towards the charges of himself and two others and
the horses in going on hundred and fifty miles to
apprehend coiners. Some of Newton's agents were more trustworthy than others,
but many took advantage of their position. Several ended up
in Newgate themselves after turning counterfeit or trafficking and stolen goods. Still,
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others were known to blackmail people that they were after,
or run protection rackets. Not that thief takers even needed
to resort to criminal behavior to make the whole enterprise
dubiously unjust. They got paid for their arrests based on
whether or not the individual was convicted, so they often
testified and brought evidence against the people they arrested. The
potential for abuse of this was obviously enormous. Newton was
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also fairly hands on himself. He interviewed informants and suspects
when his agents brought them in, though many of the
depositions were later burned. Exactly why is an open question,
but it was at Newton's order. There's evidence that he
took down fifty eight different depositions in just two months alone.
And it wasn't just the depositions. A man who in
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his former life rarely went to the pub, Newton was
suddenly spending time in taverns across London, taverns like the
Old Bell, the Magpie and Stump or the Dog, buying
drinks and information. He also stopped by the prisons, sometimes
rewarding good information with the chance to avoid the gallows.
There's evidence that he had informant prisoners moved from jail
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to jail for their safety and for their ability to
gather more information. Information say on what happened to the
Tower Mints missing dies. William Challoner had lobbed his little
bomb that the mint's own officers had sold the dies
to counterfeiters. In Newton's first days on the job, Newton,
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though still not convinced that policing the coin should be
his job, scrambled to get information, mostly from coiners already
in jail. Thomas White was one of them. White was
a convicted counterfeiter awaiting execution in Newgate. He'd been found
guilty of coining forty guineas. But White had also been
part of a bigger network, one of more of the
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Tripeman's gang. According to the old Bailey records, what's a tripeman,
you ask, It's a man who sells stripe. So White,
facing death, started to spill all he could about the
vast network of counterfeiters operating in the city, and he
agreed with Challenger that the corruption was deep in the
Mint itself. He pointed a finger at a money or servant,
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a man called Hunter, claiming that it was this Hunter
guy who sold the Mint dies out of the tower.
But who did he sell them too? Well, said White?
William Chaloner's gang, another convicted counterfeiter, A quote gentleman called
Peter Cook testified that the dies weren't sold. They were
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stolen also by William Chaloner's gang. But just before you
start thinking that things were looking a bit grim for
our friend, Mr Challenger, there's more. Mint officials naturally began
interviewing the Mint staff, people who had actual access to
the dies. An engraver called scotch Robin told them that
the dies had been stolen, but not by Challenger, by
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Thomas White, the original informant. Then Robin high tailed it
to Scotland, escaping further embroilment in the whole situation. Honestly,
the laws of physics were easier to pin down than
whatever happened to those dyes. Newton kept White in jail,
squeezing as much information out of him as he could.
After every interview in which White gave up more names,
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names of people he'd helped set up a coining press,
for example, or names of criminals who weren't even involved
in counterfeiting, Newton would stay White's execution by two weeks.
More than twenty six weeks later, White was still alive,
although barely. Newgate was rough, really rough. More people died
from disease. Than the Hangman's news, for sure. Newton finally
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arranged for his pardon in May, a full year after
White had been convicted and sentenced to death in the
first place. But Newton still wasn't any closer to pinning
the die theft on Challenger. He pulled in more and
more people off the street, interviewing dozens of people in
August alone. Some leads pointed to Chaloner, but Newton still
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couldn't get a fix on him. The most he could
get was that Channer was somehow involved, and that wasn't
enough to get a conviction in court. No one could
say that they had actually seen Chaloner with the dies.
Chaloner meanwhile continued to deny to anyone who had asked,
but he had had anything to do with the missing dies. Instead,
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he just kept doubling down on his claim that the
rot started in the mint itself. Again, Chaloner was not
so wrong about that part. Challoner offered up his own accomplices,
Thomas Holloway in particular, to help with the investigation, claiming
that the Mint needed an outside assistant. Challoner was making
these suggestions through his contacts in Parliament and the Treasury,
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and he had enough clout that Parliament's Committee on the
Mint encouraged Newton to allow Challenger in Newton, gritting his teeth,
rebuffed challengers advances he was not fooled by Challengers posturing criminals,
like dogs, always returned to their own vomit. And what's more,
he had taken that oath I swear that I will
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not reveal or he refused to allow Chaloner or Holloway
anywhere near the mint. Newton and Chaloner were like two
planetary bodies moving in elliptical orbits, sometimes away from each other,
sometimes approaching, and each time their paths crossed, they learned
a little bit more about each other, filed away for
future use. But Newton had other counterfeiters to deal with,
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not to mention the ongoing recoinage itself, So Newton continued
in his orbit and Challenger followed his Act three arrest.
That man chill Oder decided that if the men wasn't
going to let him use his talents, mostly legally, why
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then he'd go back to using them illegally. He'd had
a bit of money set aside from his Bank of
England scam, both what he'd earned through the actual counterfeiting
and from his truly audacious reward of two hundred pounds,
enough to get all the materials and equipment he'd need
to set himself up again as a master coin counterfeiter.
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In the spring of Challender got Thomas Holloway to find
a house outside London, in the country convenient for coining.
He said, a place where a lot of noise, a
lot of people coming and going, a lot of heat
would go unnoticed. Coining, especially on the scale that Challenger
wanted to do, took a lot of energy, a lot
of doing. Holloway found a perfect place, a respectable cottage
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in Egham, Surrey. Egham was a coaching stop town near
the banks of the River Thames. It was about twenty
miles southwest of the Tower of London and the Mint
and it was far enough away from the city to
be out of the warden's site, but close enough to
get the goods back in when the time was right.
Chaloner's business model was a little different this time. He
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wanted to instruct Thomas Holloway and his brother John on
the particulars they had split the majority of the profits
between the three of them. Challoner figured if he could
teach them how to do it. He could eventually afford
to be more hands off. He'd be a kind of fixer,
taking a cut off the top without exposing himself to
the danger of real prosecution for actually making the coins.
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At the Eggam House, Challenger refined his process. First, he
decided to make only shillings. Smaller coins meant smaller molds
that might be hidden anywhere, he said. Then he realized
good fakes relied on the quality of the molds that
stamped the image onto both sides of the coin. Less
attentive counterfeiters used molds that opened like clamshells to allow
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the molten metal to be poured in and then closed
around in it are These often left marks on the
surfaces of the coin because the metal couldn't be sufficiently pressed.
So Chaloner had made molds that allowed him to essentially
inject hot metal into the mold through a channel, more
efficiently filling the space. Challenger was a clever man, too
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bad about the whole life crime thing. He then enlisted
a new member of his gang, John Pierce, to file
and polish the molds. The coins that these molds produced
were almost indistinguishable from the real thing. Now all Chaloner
needed was to tap into his network of utterers to
get the coins sold on the street and they'd be set.
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But that's not quite how it went down. On May seven,
John Pierce was arrested. The charges weren't even related to
coining or counterfeiting, or at least not this coining scam,
but Piers got spoo. Facing Newgate, Pierce told the magistrate
everything he knew in the hopes that informing would keep
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him out of jail. I saw in William Challoner's brother
in law's house cutters and tools, instruments proper for coining,
with which I saw Charlon As brother in law, Jack
Gravina actually counterfeit a mill chilling at his house about
five or six weeks ago. Pierce said that one of
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Challenger's London gang, a Joyce Hanbury, had asked Pierce to
make an edging tool like the ones used at the mint,
and that Challenger himself promised him a great deal of
money if he got involved. Challenger, he implied, wasn't someone
to mess with. Pierce said that Challenger had threatened to
turn the law and Gravener his own family if Gravener
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didn't deliver the tools they needed for the Eggam operation.
In two weeks. Pierce added, I have heard this charleon
often say, and particularly within these three weeks, that he
had fund the lords of the Treasury and the King
out of one thousand pounds, and that he would not
leave the Parliament alone till he had fund them likewise,
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at which I understood to be deceiving them. This was
incredible news. A witness ready to squeal on Challenger. This
would be gold to Newton. But remember there's no sort
of organized system keeping track of suspects and criminals. No
one actually shared this information with Newton until August, well
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after Pierce had been released. In fact, Newton only heard
about Pierce's testimony by complete chance. He happened to be
in the Secretary of States offices when someone mentioned that
this Pierce guy had information on William Chaloner. Newton had
Piers picked up and brought straight to his offices in
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the Tower Mint in the hopes of shaking more concrete,
actually damning information out of him. Because well, what Pierce
had is good, it wasn't enough for Newton to move
against Challenger. Newton needed Pierce to get more, so he
sent him back out on the street. Then another stroke
of luck, Thomas Holloway, Challenger's closest mate, was arrested. This
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is a bit like al Capones arrest for tax evasion.
Holloway got done for an unpaid debt. Newton saw his chance.
He sent Pierce to Holloway, still in debtor's prison, with
a mission tell him anything that will get you into
Challenger's operation at Egham. Halloway fell for it. Halloway sent
Pierce down to Eggham with his blessings, and Pierce was
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brought even further into Challenger's inner circle. In Egham, Pierce
counterfeited twenty shillings or so to prove his worth to
the gang, and then he went back to Newton to
tell all. And that was enough. Newton had Holloway, still
in jail and unpaid debt, charged with counterfeiting, and suddenly
he had two witnesses who had good reason to add
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out William Challenger. Newton still hadn't found or connected Challenger
with the missing dies, but it didn't matter. He had witnesses.
For weeks, Holloway refused to talk. Pierce was kept on
ice and jail, where he was, of course miserable, he
wrote to a friend, I'm afraid it will go very
hard with me. This place is very dismal to me.
(34:24):
He was terrified too. He knew that others and Challengers gang,
including John Holloway, we're going to give evidence against him.
I hope you will go to the warden and entreat
him for to consider of my misfortunes at this time,
and I hope if I can get out once more,
I shall be more serviceable to the government. Newton was
(34:46):
now pulling together the threads out of the Missing Dies
debacle and Challengers claims that the mint itself was corrupt rotten.
He had learned how to get information, how to play
members of the same gang off each other. Chowder, meanwhile,
was unaware of just what was stacked against him. After all,
no one's getting smartphones airlifted by drone into Newgate Jail
(35:09):
in s, so it's not like Holloway or peers could
get word to him what was up. Whatever he had heard,
he wasn't worried. Momentarily pausing his coining operation, Challenger decided
to work on yet another scheme. Hubrists thy name be Challenger,
(35:30):
remembering the successful scam with the Jacobite printers. He and
a man named Aubrey Price came up with a plot
to present some trumped up evidence to the Lord's Justice
of a Jacobite conspiracy to mount an attack on Dover Castle.
Then the plan went, they'd offer themselves as undercover agents
to infiltrate the conspirators for a steep reward, of course,
(35:54):
respecting the danger they were putting themselves in. Whatever the
merits of that particular plan, Chalder and Price made the
mistake of waltzing into the halls of the Lord's Justice
at the wrong time, the very wrongest time, actually, because
right at that moment, Isaac Newton was also at the
Lord's Justice giving evidence in the case of another counterfeiter,
(36:18):
and he just spent several weeks getting information out of
peers and others about what Chalder was up to during
his summer vacation. Newton finished his testimony, left the room.
He passed a man in the hall, a very familiar man,
a man who he knew to be running a counterfeiting
operation down in Surrey, a man he spent the last
(36:40):
month building a case against a rest mug And on
September four, Challenger found himself in Newgate jail once again,
Only this time there were no earls, no highly placed
government officials, no Bay governors willing to spring him. Isaac
(37:03):
Newton finally had his man, or did he? Coming up
on Newton's Law classic sort of mafia what we now
think of as mafia, organized crime, techniques of systematically dismantling
(37:24):
the case that's about to be presented against you until
there was nothing left. Newton's Law is a production of
I Heart Radio. It's written and hosted by Me Linda
Rodriguez McRobie. Our senior producer is Ryan Murdoch. Our producer
is Emily Marina. Our executive producer is Jason English. Original
(37:45):
music by Alice McCoy 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,
Robbie Jack and Ruthie Stevens. Special thanks to Harry Potter,
Chris Barker and Tom Levinson. Special thanks to Mangesh Hatikudur
(38:06):
and Beneflex Sound Studios. Our show logo is designed by
Lucy Condonia. Thanks for listening. Stole Pass
This is an I Heart original. It's August. It's a
nearly moonless night, and it's dry after a summer and
spring of wind and rain. We're in a ramshackle house
surrounded by a moat in Westminster, just to stone throw
(00:25):
away from the famous abbey. It's a quiet night. A
nameless man is inside, maybe suffering through a restless sleep,
or maybe pacing the floor nervously. There's a thud at
the door, the sound of wood wrapping on wood, agents
(00:46):
of the Warden of the Royal Mint. The Warden had
heard from his informants that this house was a center
for clipping and counterfeiting. We know they're in here. The
agents busted their way in, put past our manager. When
they start turning the place over, searching for counterfeiting tools
and clipped coin evidence. Yeah, look, look everywhere, the nine.
(01:12):
But our man's ready. He's planned for this. He quickly
scuttles out a window and crosses the rain swollen moat
on a plank of wood that's been left for precisely
this purpose. He escapes, leaving the agents empty handed, no evidence,
no suspect, nothing. Damn it well. But three days later
our man is caught and this time, he doesn't run.
(01:35):
He can't run. Instead, this nameless informant points a finger
at one Henry Atkinson and his wife Jane Henry Atkinson
who also goes by Atkins him and his wife, She's
Jane Demens the ones you want. The informant also told
the agents where to find the Atkinson's tools. They'd cleverly
(01:55):
sunk some of them in the moat by the root
of a willow tree. The Warden's agents search the house again,
this time finding the tools where the informant said they'd be,
plus more stuffed under a floorboard in the attic. The
Atkinsons were arrested and after a short stay in Newgate,
the case against them was brought to trial. The trial
(02:19):
took place at this Session's House, better known as the
Old Bailey, on the ninth of September. The Session's House
had been built adjacent to Newgate in the previous century,
specifically to hold trials. It was called the Old Bailey
because it was built in the space inside the curtain wall,
the part of a fortification called a bailey. Prisoners were
(02:39):
brought over from the jail to stand in what was
essentially an open air theater with only three walls. This
was to reduce the spread of disease. At this point,
Isaac Newton had been wardened for more than four months
and he was a quick learner. Obviously, the witness will
stay that he saw Hayden the Atkinson also known as Atkins,
(03:02):
and his wife Jane of St Marty's in the Field
Parish clipping a hundred and fifty of the crowns shillings
and falsely coining two hundred sixty shillings is not true.
The Atkinson's didn't really stand a chance. They would not
have had a lawyer to defend them, or to point
out that maybe the testimony of the guy literally found
(03:22):
at the scene of the crime wasn't terribly trustworthy. All
they would have had is their own word and other people.
Not enough people to act as character witnesses against meticulous
Isaac Newton and his army of thief takers and witnesses.
The jury found them guilty of booth indictment. According to
(03:43):
the court records the sentence. Henry was executed at the
Tyburn Tree. Jane pled her belly, meaning that she claimed
to be pregnant to escape the gallows. It worked, but
there's no record of what happened to her next. The
Atkinson's conviction demonstrated that the Newton who stood in sessions
(04:06):
house witnesses at the ready, who milked his information network
for leads on coiners and clippers who had an information network,
was not the same Newton who first walked into the
Mint back in May. This Newton knows what he's doing
for I Heart Radio. I'm Linda Rodriguez, McRobbie and this
(04:29):
is Newton's Law and I Heart original podcast, episode five,
Crime and Punishment seventeenth century style. You are making Act
(05:17):
one the oath. So I'm sitting having a point at
the Old Bell Tavern. This is a very historic pub
and it would definitely, definitely have been here during the
time that Isaac Newton was warden of the Royal Mint.
And it's very likely that a pub just like this,
(05:37):
if not this pub, would have been a place that
Isaac Newton would have met with informants. This would have
been the kind of place where Newton would have asked
prisoners to come out of the jail, be brought by guards,
and where he would have met with them to talk
about information what he could get out of them. Ferreting
(05:59):
out informants and doing deals with snitches and dirty pubs,
representing the Crown in front of judges and juries, and
prosecuting counterfeiters and clippers, sending people to the gallows. This
was not the job Isaac Newton thought he was getting.
When Charles Montague, Chancellor of the Exchequer, offered Newton the job,
(06:21):
he told him that being warden has not too much
business to require more attendance than you may spare. But
Montague hadn't reckoned on a few things, the three coinage
that Newton was sorting out, and the epidemic of counterfeiters
and clippers that Newton, as warden as the Crown's magistrate,
was contractually obligated to pursue. When Newton became Warden of
(06:44):
the Royal Mint, he took an oath to protect the
Mint's secret coining and edging machinery. I swear that I
will not reveal or discover to any person or persons
whatsoever the new invention of rounding the money and making
the edges of them with letters or grainings, or either
(07:05):
of them directly or indirectly. So help me God. He
took that oath and all it implied, very very seriously. Unfortunately,
previous wardens hadn't now clippers and counterfeiters had done serious
damage to the country's economy. But that wasn't the only
(07:25):
damage they've done. The crimes of counterfeiting and clipping weren't
just economic ones. They were socially subverting ones as well.
They undermined governmental authority. But remember, in the seventeenth century,
there's no police, no agency charged with apprehending criminals. That
wouldn't happen until eight nine with the formation of the
(07:47):
Metropolitan Police Force. In fact, for most of English history
there was no dedicated police force because individuals were obligated
to report crime and pursue criminals. This was what was
called Hugh and I and it had been part of
the legal framework since twelved five. Basically, if a citizen
(08:11):
saw a crime happening, they were obligated to start shouting
and yelling until the suspect was caught and put into
the custody of a constable or justice of the peace
that just stand there, do something. Oh game, game before
we escape season thief And if you heard someone shouting
thief or murder, then you are obligated to join that
(08:34):
human cry and pursue the offender to come on everyone
he sent him for the alley. This is a system
of justice in which everyone more or less was deputized.
But by the time Newton is in London, the system
of individual responsibility for the greater good is showing its cracks.
(08:56):
People in this growing city are increasingly an anomous and
they're finding it easier and easier to ignore that duty.
So you had large cities like London where you didn't
know your next door neighbor, or you didn't know the
people down the street, and people could travel quite easily
from one era to the other. So when I had
(09:17):
my point at the Old Bell where Newton might have
once interrogated prisoners and paid off informants, I wasn't alone.
My name's Harry Potter, believe it or not. I'm a
criminal barrister, but I'm also historian. I've written several books
on criminal justice, history of the common law, history of prisons,
(09:38):
and the history of capital punishment. London at the time
Newton was patrolling the streets, so to speak, was seeing
a rise in crime. More people, more opportunity, more crime.
When you're walking the street, you have your pocket lot,
and you have your purse or handkerchief, and it was
quite easy for people to steal those particular items and
(09:59):
run away and not get caught because there was no
police force in the sense that we would understand, but
creating an official or governmentally backed police force that wasn't
even an idea at the time, because the theory was,
if there's little means of preventing crime, we need big
means of deterring it. The solution to rising crime in
(10:23):
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as it turns out, was
capital punishment. It was probably accepted by certainly by the
authorities and by quite a lot of other people that
if you had very draconian punishments for relatively minor offenses,
(10:43):
that would stop people committing by and that, of course
that's why those who were executed were executed public. And
that brings us to Newton's other role as prosecutor. As
the guy getting those people to the gallows, Newton was
essentially both a cop and a prosecutor. With no police force,
(11:03):
there could be no bright line between those two roles.
This meant that Newton had to be thinking about how
to make a case stick from the very beginning of
his investigations. Also, at this time, we're moving away from
medieval methods of justice. Trial by ordeal, for example, had
largely fallen out of practice by this century, except when
it came to which is don't care, and we're moving
(11:28):
into something more recognizable but not totally modern. You have
a judge presiding over the case, you have a jury
that would be deciding on on on guilt or innocence,
and would be certain norms of evidence rather than rules
of references. But this was still a system that dramatically
(11:51):
disadvantaged the accused. When we say that the Atkinson's didn't
really have a chance, we mean it. The jury needed
to be shown convincing evidence to convict, but the presumption
of innocence reasonable doubt. These were ideas that were only
just about now being expressed. Juries were chosen from a
very narrow pool of mostly wealthier white men of good standing,
(12:12):
so that had to have an impact on who was
likely to be convicted. The defense in a very different position,
because often he doesn't even know what the charges are
um and certainly wouldn't know the names of the prosecution witnesses,
of the nature of the evidence that had been accrued
against him. So it was then very much more difficult
for the defendant to produce witnesses on his side, or
(12:35):
even character witnesses. And often you didn't know the trial
date um, So you know, if you've got a witness
in Wilkeshire and the trial might be sometime in June,
and you can't really expect them to come up to
London to spend a month in London waiting for a
trial that may or may not take place. So the
defense were disadvantages, and that's of course some people were
(12:57):
still acquitted. Newton had learned that the hard way when
mine alleged clippers and coiners that he had brought in
were found not guilty in July. Juries were sometimes reluctant
to convict because the punishment was so final. Some people
suggested that relatively milder punishments, such as facial disfigurement or
hard labor might induce juries to convict more often. And
(13:20):
then there was that forty pound reward informers got for snitching.
The deservers had a hard time believing that people weren't
tempted to lie by what was a lot of money,
around ten thousand pounds or nearly fourteen thousand dollars. Now,
convicts could also be pardoned, and people under suspicion could
be cleared if they turned informant. But there was also
this too. The threat of death just wasn't enough to
(13:44):
deter the dedicated coiners and clippers, nor was the opprobrium
of the rest of society, because really people did not
like clippers and coiners. This was not a crime that
garnered any sympathy at all. Counterfeitures were well aware of
the subrity of the punishment for the crime, and yet
went on their merry way in large number of simply
(14:05):
because the prophets were so great. It's a bit like
drug dealing now in this country. Supplying Class A drums
get very heavy sentences, but the rewards are enorse. So
if Newton is going to catch and convict William Chaloner,
as well as the loads of other coiners and clippers
(14:26):
nibbling away at the nation's economic strength, he was going
to have to start thinking like a scientist. A scientist
detective Act two, Isaac Newton met detective. Newton's appointment to
(14:53):
Warden essentially made him a detective and a prosecutor, not
that he wanted either role. He even tried to get
out of it. After two months on the job, Newton
wrote to the Treasury to complain. I do not find
that the prosecuting of coiners was imposed upon any of
my predecessors, nor is that any reward or encouragement appointed
(15:14):
for my service in these matters, Nor am I provided
with any competent assistance to enable me to grapple with
an undertaking sore, vexatious and dangerous as this. Therefore, I
humbly pray that it may not be imposed upon me
any longer. The Treasury, however, disagreed this was his job,
(15:36):
so Newton once again rolled up his sleeves and got
to work. Chris Barker, historian at the Royal Mint, The
interesting thing is that despite pushing back, and continually pushing back,
and saying, don't give this to me, give this somebody
else more qualified, give this somebody else from a from
more legal perspective, he does throw himself into it. So
(15:56):
this is a man that, despite loathing this your work,
is doing an awful lot of it in a way
that you might expect from a police inspector and a
judge and prosecution today. In many ways you'd think that
a man who had spent his entire adult life cloistered
behind the ivy clad walls of rural academia would have
(16:17):
no idea where to start and trying to ferret out counterfeiters.
But what Newton had going for him was what made
him a weirdo at Cambridge and then a rock star mathematician,
his relentless, remorseless focus on dismantling and solving a problem.
(16:37):
Just as he had approached the problem of the Great Recoinage,
Newton dove into the archives. He compiled a history of
all the cases of prosecuted coiners and clippers going back
twenty five years, and he looked for patterns. Evidence came in,
that's all and petty at the clipping trade and others.
(17:00):
Divers quantities of silver melted down. George Clark, Mary Clark,
and George Clark, their son, indicted for clipping and filing
the lawful coin of this kingdom. Just as if this
was a new method for, say, distilling mercury. Newton studied
the mechanics of counterfeiting, how it worked. Daniel Decoyda and
(17:21):
Catherine Decoyna, his wife, both French people, indicted for clipping
forty Elizabethan shillings. He was found guilty of the high pleason,
but as to his wife, there being no witnesses she
had a hand in the design or was assisting her
husband in his unlawful practices, she was acquitted. He saw
(17:43):
how counterfeiters might escape the law, such as literally escaping
it by leaving the city, so he bought himself Justice
of the Peace appointments in seven counties that ringed London,
so we could get information, make a rest and takedown
operations outside the city without worrying about pesky legal is
use of jurisdiction. Newton also realized counterfeiting wasn't a lone
(18:05):
wolf kind of crime. Making and distributing the fakes couldn't
be done alone. Two most notorious coiners and clippers of
money here were found guilty of too indictments of high
trees and apace. They were both of a gang and
confessed they had for some years been concerned in such practices.
(18:26):
This was organized crime involving gangs of people. Big time
counterfeiters and Williams Challoner hid behind the buyers and utterers
who got the fakes out into trade. In the short
term This kept the identities of the counterfeiters secret, but
as Newton found out, it also created a weakness. It
meant that someone in the chain might be willing to
(18:47):
turn informant. This maybe isn't as revelatory as a apple
falling on his head, but it's certainly changed the course
of Newton's work. It's way fun to picture Newton as
a big city police inspector sitting behind a metal desk
with a mug okay dish of coffee tobacco smoke swirling
(19:10):
around his curly silver wig and demanding that his agents
get him the information or they can turn in their
gun and badge. Except that no one had badges because
you know, no police, and no one had guns either,
because they were all called blunderbusses or dragons and they
were just as likely to blow your hand off as
blow away the bad guy. And Newton definitely didn't smoke
(19:30):
smoking a pop I'm unwilling to make to myself and
the necessities. But Newton's operations did grow bigger, more complicated
until he was running a kind of detective agency headquartered
at the Mint. Newton employed thief takers and sometimes mint
staff to go out into the streets and track down
(19:52):
bad coins, and then to follow the chain back from
where the coin first appeared to whoever made it. Here's
Tom Levin's an author of Newton and the Counterfeiter. Most
of all, Newton was really relentless in doing the classic
investigative thing, you capture one person. Counterfeiting is not a
solo crime. Those involved in currency were a small group,
(20:14):
including both those who were making the currency and those
who were unmaking it by various schemes. You know, their
their affairs and their concerns, and hence just their physical
routes through the day. Uh necessarily overlapped. One of his agents,
playing the role of a London coiner on the run
from the law, uncovered a nest of counterfeiters in Cambridgeshire
(20:37):
who boasted a milling machine very like the one used
by the Mint. Records also show that Newton expensed the
Mint for the cost of a set of clothes one
of his agents needed to go undercover to infiltrate a
gang of coiners. Newton most certainly paid people for information
to in addition to dangling the chance to get out
(20:57):
of jail or get off a charge in front of that.
According to Tom Levinson, between sixteen ninety six and six,
the Mint reimbursed Newton's six hundred and twenty six pounds,
five shillings and ninepence for all the expenses he incurred
in catching coiners. That's around a hundred and twenty one
thousand pounds in today's money. August paid the keeper of
(21:22):
the Savoy Prison for sending his man into Lewis in
Sussex to apprehend Emiray, a coiner. September nine paid Taylor,
an engraver in Holborn, for charges and pains in discovering
Williamson and other coiners of several gangs. November one paid
(21:42):
Duglas towards the charges of himself and two others and
the horses in going on hundred and fifty miles to
apprehend coiners. Some of Newton's agents were more trustworthy than others,
but many took advantage of their position. Several ended up
in Newgate themselves after turning counterfeit or trafficking and stolen goods. Still,
(22:03):
others were known to blackmail people that they were after,
or run protection rackets. Not that thief takers even needed
to resort to criminal behavior to make the whole enterprise
dubiously unjust. They got paid for their arrests based on
whether or not the individual was convicted, so they often
testified and brought evidence against the people they arrested. The
potential for abuse of this was obviously enormous. Newton was
(22:29):
also fairly hands on himself. He interviewed informants and suspects
when his agents brought them in, though many of the
depositions were later burned. Exactly why is an open question,
but it was at Newton's order. There's evidence that he
took down fifty eight different depositions in just two months alone.
And it wasn't just the depositions. A man who in
(22:50):
his former life rarely went to the pub, Newton was
suddenly spending time in taverns across London, taverns like the
Old Bell, the Magpie and Stump or the Dog, buying
drinks and information. He also stopped by the prisons, sometimes
rewarding good information with the chance to avoid the gallows.
There's evidence that he had informant prisoners moved from jail
(23:12):
to jail for their safety and for their ability to
gather more information. Information say on what happened to the
Tower Mints missing dies. William Challoner had lobbed his little
bomb that the mint's own officers had sold the dies
to counterfeiters. In Newton's first days on the job, Newton,
(23:35):
though still not convinced that policing the coin should be
his job, scrambled to get information, mostly from coiners already
in jail. Thomas White was one of them. White was
a convicted counterfeiter awaiting execution in Newgate. He'd been found
guilty of coining forty guineas. But White had also been
part of a bigger network, one of more of the
(23:55):
Tripeman's gang. According to the old Bailey records, what's a tripeman,
you ask, It's a man who sells stripe. So White,
facing death, started to spill all he could about the
vast network of counterfeiters operating in the city, and he
agreed with Challenger that the corruption was deep in the
Mint itself. He pointed a finger at a money or servant,
(24:17):
a man called Hunter, claiming that it was this Hunter
guy who sold the Mint dies out of the tower.
But who did he sell them too? Well, said White?
William Chaloner's gang, another convicted counterfeiter, A quote gentleman called
Peter Cook testified that the dies weren't sold. They were
(24:37):
stolen also by William Chaloner's gang. But just before you
start thinking that things were looking a bit grim for
our friend, Mr Challenger, there's more. Mint officials naturally began
interviewing the Mint staff, people who had actual access to
the dies. An engraver called scotch Robin told them that
the dies had been stolen, but not by Challenger, by
(25:01):
Thomas White, the original informant. Then Robin high tailed it
to Scotland, escaping further embroilment in the whole situation. Honestly,
the laws of physics were easier to pin down than
whatever happened to those dyes. Newton kept White in jail,
squeezing as much information out of him as he could.
After every interview in which White gave up more names,
(25:24):
names of people he'd helped set up a coining press,
for example, or names of criminals who weren't even involved
in counterfeiting, Newton would stay White's execution by two weeks.
More than twenty six weeks later, White was still alive,
although barely. Newgate was rough, really rough. More people died
from disease. Than the Hangman's news, for sure. Newton finally
(25:49):
arranged for his pardon in May, a full year after
White had been convicted and sentenced to death in the
first place. But Newton still wasn't any closer to pinning
the die theft on Challenger. He pulled in more and
more people off the street, interviewing dozens of people in
August alone. Some leads pointed to Chaloner, but Newton still
(26:14):
couldn't get a fix on him. The most he could
get was that Channer was somehow involved, and that wasn't
enough to get a conviction in court. No one could
say that they had actually seen Chaloner with the dies.
Chaloner meanwhile continued to deny to anyone who had asked,
but he had had anything to do with the missing dies. Instead,
(26:35):
he just kept doubling down on his claim that the
rot started in the mint itself. Again, Chaloner was not
so wrong about that part. Challoner offered up his own accomplices,
Thomas Holloway in particular, to help with the investigation, claiming
that the Mint needed an outside assistant. Challoner was making
these suggestions through his contacts in Parliament and the Treasury,
(26:57):
and he had enough clout that Parliament's Committee on the
Mint encouraged Newton to allow Challenger in Newton, gritting his teeth,
rebuffed challengers advances he was not fooled by Challengers posturing criminals,
like dogs, always returned to their own vomit. And what's more,
he had taken that oath I swear that I will
(27:19):
not reveal or he refused to allow Chaloner or Holloway
anywhere near the mint. Newton and Chaloner were like two
planetary bodies moving in elliptical orbits, sometimes away from each other,
sometimes approaching, and each time their paths crossed, they learned
a little bit more about each other, filed away for
future use. But Newton had other counterfeiters to deal with,
(27:43):
not to mention the ongoing recoinage itself, So Newton continued
in his orbit and Challenger followed his Act three arrest.
That man chill Oder decided that if the men wasn't
going to let him use his talents, mostly legally, why
(28:05):
then he'd go back to using them illegally. He'd had
a bit of money set aside from his Bank of
England scam, both what he'd earned through the actual counterfeiting
and from his truly audacious reward of two hundred pounds,
enough to get all the materials and equipment he'd need
to set himself up again as a master coin counterfeiter.
(28:26):
In the spring of Challender got Thomas Holloway to find
a house outside London, in the country convenient for coining.
He said, a place where a lot of noise, a
lot of people coming and going, a lot of heat
would go unnoticed. Coining, especially on the scale that Challenger
wanted to do, took a lot of energy, a lot
of doing. Holloway found a perfect place, a respectable cottage
(28:50):
in Egham, Surrey. Egham was a coaching stop town near
the banks of the River Thames. It was about twenty
miles southwest of the Tower of London and the Mint
and it was far enough away from the city to
be out of the warden's site, but close enough to
get the goods back in when the time was right.
Chaloner's business model was a little different this time. He
(29:13):
wanted to instruct Thomas Holloway and his brother John on
the particulars they had split the majority of the profits
between the three of them. Challoner figured if he could
teach them how to do it. He could eventually afford
to be more hands off. He'd be a kind of fixer,
taking a cut off the top without exposing himself to
the danger of real prosecution for actually making the coins.
(29:34):
At the Eggam House, Challenger refined his process. First, he
decided to make only shillings. Smaller coins meant smaller molds
that might be hidden anywhere, he said. Then he realized
good fakes relied on the quality of the molds that
stamped the image onto both sides of the coin. Less
attentive counterfeiters used molds that opened like clamshells to allow
(29:57):
the molten metal to be poured in and then closed
around in it are These often left marks on the
surfaces of the coin because the metal couldn't be sufficiently pressed.
So Chaloner had made molds that allowed him to essentially
inject hot metal into the mold through a channel, more
efficiently filling the space. Challenger was a clever man, too
(30:19):
bad about the whole life crime thing. He then enlisted
a new member of his gang, John Pierce, to file
and polish the molds. The coins that these molds produced
were almost indistinguishable from the real thing. Now all Chaloner
needed was to tap into his network of utterers to
get the coins sold on the street and they'd be set.
(30:43):
But that's not quite how it went down. On May seven,
John Pierce was arrested. The charges weren't even related to
coining or counterfeiting, or at least not this coining scam,
but Piers got spoo. Facing Newgate, Pierce told the magistrate
everything he knew in the hopes that informing would keep
(31:06):
him out of jail. I saw in William Challoner's brother
in law's house cutters and tools, instruments proper for coining,
with which I saw Charlon As brother in law, Jack
Gravina actually counterfeit a mill chilling at his house about
five or six weeks ago. Pierce said that one of
(31:26):
Challenger's London gang, a Joyce Hanbury, had asked Pierce to
make an edging tool like the ones used at the mint,
and that Challenger himself promised him a great deal of
money if he got involved. Challenger, he implied, wasn't someone
to mess with. Pierce said that Challenger had threatened to
turn the law and Gravener his own family if Gravener
(31:48):
didn't deliver the tools they needed for the Eggam operation.
In two weeks. Pierce added, I have heard this charleon
often say, and particularly within these three weeks, that he
had fund the lords of the Treasury and the King
out of one thousand pounds, and that he would not
leave the Parliament alone till he had fund them likewise,
(32:10):
at which I understood to be deceiving them. This was
incredible news. A witness ready to squeal on Challenger. This
would be gold to Newton. But remember there's no sort
of organized system keeping track of suspects and criminals. No
one actually shared this information with Newton until August, well
(32:31):
after Pierce had been released. In fact, Newton only heard
about Pierce's testimony by complete chance. He happened to be
in the Secretary of States offices when someone mentioned that
this Pierce guy had information on William Chaloner. Newton had
Piers picked up and brought straight to his offices in
(32:53):
the Tower Mint in the hopes of shaking more concrete,
actually damning information out of him. Because well, what Pierce
had is good, it wasn't enough for Newton to move
against Challenger. Newton needed Pierce to get more, so he
sent him back out on the street. Then another stroke
of luck, Thomas Holloway, Challenger's closest mate, was arrested. This
(33:16):
is a bit like al Capones arrest for tax evasion.
Holloway got done for an unpaid debt. Newton saw his chance.
He sent Pierce to Holloway, still in debtor's prison, with
a mission tell him anything that will get you into
Challenger's operation at Egham. Halloway fell for it. Halloway sent
Pierce down to Eggham with his blessings, and Pierce was
(33:38):
brought even further into Challenger's inner circle. In Egham, Pierce
counterfeited twenty shillings or so to prove his worth to
the gang, and then he went back to Newton to
tell all. And that was enough. Newton had Holloway, still
in jail and unpaid debt, charged with counterfeiting, and suddenly
he had two witnesses who had good reason to add
(34:00):
out William Challenger. Newton still hadn't found or connected Challenger
with the missing dies, but it didn't matter. He had witnesses.
For weeks, Holloway refused to talk. Pierce was kept on
ice and jail, where he was, of course miserable, he
wrote to a friend, I'm afraid it will go very
hard with me. This place is very dismal to me.
(34:24):
He was terrified too. He knew that others and Challengers gang,
including John Holloway, we're going to give evidence against him.
I hope you will go to the warden and entreat
him for to consider of my misfortunes at this time,
and I hope if I can get out once more,
I shall be more serviceable to the government. Newton was
(34:46):
now pulling together the threads out of the Missing Dies
debacle and Challengers claims that the mint itself was corrupt rotten.
He had learned how to get information, how to play
members of the same gang off each other. Chowder, meanwhile,
was unaware of just what was stacked against him. After all,
no one's getting smartphones airlifted by drone into Newgate Jail
(35:09):
in s, so it's not like Holloway or peers could
get word to him what was up. Whatever he had heard,
he wasn't worried. Momentarily pausing his coining operation, Challenger decided
to work on yet another scheme. Hubrists thy name be Challenger,
(35:30):
remembering the successful scam with the Jacobite printers. He and
a man named Aubrey Price came up with a plot
to present some trumped up evidence to the Lord's Justice
of a Jacobite conspiracy to mount an attack on Dover Castle.
Then the plan went, they'd offer themselves as undercover agents
to infiltrate the conspirators for a steep reward, of course,
(35:54):
respecting the danger they were putting themselves in. Whatever the
merits of that particular plan, Chalder and Price made the
mistake of waltzing into the halls of the Lord's Justice
at the wrong time, the very wrongest time, actually, because
right at that moment, Isaac Newton was also at the
Lord's Justice giving evidence in the case of another counterfeiter,
(36:18):
and he just spent several weeks getting information out of
peers and others about what Chalder was up to during
his summer vacation. Newton finished his testimony, left the room.
He passed a man in the hall, a very familiar man,
a man who he knew to be running a counterfeiting
operation down in Surrey, a man he spent the last
(36:40):
month building a case against a rest mug And on
September four, Challenger found himself in Newgate jail once again,
Only this time there were no earls, no highly placed
government officials, no Bay governors willing to spring him. Isaac
(37:03):
Newton finally had his man, or did he? Coming up
on Newton's Law classic sort of mafia what we now
think of as mafia, organized crime, techniques of systematically dismantling
(37:24):
the case that's about to be presented against you until
there was nothing left. Newton's Law is a production of
I Heart Radio. It's written and hosted by Me Linda
Rodriguez McRobie. Our senior producer is Ryan Murdoch. Our producer
is Emily Marina. Our executive producer is Jason English. Original
(37:45):
music by Alice McCoy 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,
Robbie Jack and Ruthie Stevens. Special thanks to Harry Potter,
Chris Barker and Tom Levinson. Special thanks to Mangesh Hatikudur
(38:06):
and Beneflex Sound Studios. Our show logo is designed by
Lucy Condonia. Thanks for listening. Stole Pass
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