Free Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London by Nigel Jones

pamphlets on monetary policy, and recommending restricting the specialised tools of the coiners’ trade to curb their activities. Cheekily, Chaloner was advising the government on how to extricate itself from the financial morass he himself had helped create. It was chutzpah on a grand scale. As historian Thomas Levenson remarks, ‘William Chaloner writing on tax policy is a bit like John Gotti weighing in on Social Security, or the Kray brothers offering their thoughts on the National Health Service.’ Chaloner’s ultimate objective was even bolder: his pamphlets were just the opening shots in a campaign to get himself – crook and jailbird though he was – appointed overseer of the Royal Mint itself by smearing the mint’s existing staff – from Newton down – as the real criminals and larceners.
    Chaloner charged the moneyers at the mint with a host of crimes: ranging from adulterating the coins they struck, to smuggling dies out of the Tower and selling them to counterfeiters. And Chaloner’s campaign got him a long way towards attaining his objective – in fact, into the chamber of the Privy Council, the very heart of government itself. Chaloner was aided by an embittered political patron, Charles Mordaunt, Earl of Monmouth, out of office and keen to supplant the current chancellor, Charles Montague, Earl of Halifax – who was Newton’s patron. With Mordaunt’s help, Chaloner received a hearing for his accusations against the mint – and his remedies for beating forgers and coiners like himself. The ministers heard him out, but though they did not, as he had hoped, give Chaloner his coveted job in the mint, his ‘tongue pudding’ was convincing enough for them to order an investigation into security there.
    Frustrated, Chaloner upped his game yet again. This time he set his sights on the newly founded Bank of England – he would become the country’s first ever master forger of the new-fangled banknote. To a champion counterfeiter like Chaloner, the world’s first banknotes – lacking such precautions as today’s inbuilt metal strip and complex cross-grained printing – presented few problems. He printed a stock of forged notes, and was ready to pass them into circulation when the bank, alerted by a dud note they had spotted, pounced on Chaloner’s printer, who promptly shopped him. Completely undaunted, Chaloner once again played the poacher turning gamekeeper: with barefaced gall he claimed that he hadonly printed the notes to show up their flaws and how easily they could be forged and duplicated. He helpfully betrayed his own counterfeiting confederates into the bargain. Astonishingly, not only did the bank believe him, but they even gave him a £200 reward for his useful information. Once again, Chaloner had made a monkey of authority.
    But one man was determined not to be fooled: Isaac Newton. The new Warden of the Mint had begun his work at the Tower as he meant to go on: in a hurricane of activity. Previously the post had been a sinecure, but Newton was determined to be a hands-on boss. Elbowing aside the mint’s incompetent master (or production manager), Thomas Neale, he threw himself into every detail of the production process, from scanning its costs with the gimlet eye of the greatest calculator in the land, to ordering up new furnaces, rolling mills and coining presses to boost the mint’s coin-striking capacity from 15,000 to 40,000 coins a day. Under Newton’s command, 500 workers laboured for shifts of twenty hours a day – except on the Sabbath – on the re-coining of a total of £7 million.
    The mint became a continuous production line, with a river of silver flowing in at one end of Mint Street in the south-west corner of the fortress, and newly minted coins jingling out of the other end near Newton’s house in the north-east corner, all overseen with obsessive interest by the warden himself. By the summer of 1698 the great re-coinage was complete. A triumphant Newton took