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

satisfaction in the knowledge that his theoretical mind had grappled with and conquered a supremely practical problem. As a result, the kingdom had a shiny new currency; economic crisis and social disorder were averted; new money clinked in plump purses once more; the king was able to pay his armies; and production at the mint – which had hit 50,000 coins a day – subsided to less frenetic levels.
    Freed from the immediate problem of keeping the kingdom afloat financially, Newton was left with the time and energy to pursue a combined role of detective, magistrate and chief security officer for the mint. Investigating the mysterious disappearance of a set of coining dies from the Tower, instruments which in the hands of William Chaloner could pose a deadly threat to the mint’s monopoly of making money, Newton once again embarked on the pursuit of his arch-enemy. To catch his thief, Newton set a gang of lesser criminals on the trail. Starting with two convicted coiners, Peter Cooke and Thomas White, lying under sentence of death in the noisome Newgate jail, Newton began to build a case againstChaloner. Dangling the possibility of a reprieve before their eyes, the theoretical-physicist-turned-unlikely-criminal-investigator persuaded the coiners to betray their former companion in crime. They admitted that the dies had been stolen from the Tower mint and sold to Chaloner to enable him to make near perfect replicas.
    Newton stepped up his inquiry – which was now taking up half his working time and a large part of the mint’s budget. The physicist took like a duck to water to the unfamiliar milieu of stinking jails, dung-encrusted back alleys and the dingy inns where coiners gathered. He employed a small army of informers, narks and snoops to gather information about Chaloner and his associates. As a magistrate, he hauled suspects within the intimidating walls of the Tower and interrogated them closely, threatening them with the harsher penalties associated with the grim fortress unless they divulged all they knew.
    The scholarly Cambridge scientist had turned into something closely resembling a police state persecutor, pursuing wrongdoers with righteous zeal. Newton’s biographer Frank Manuel comments, ‘There was an inexhaustible fount of rage in the man, but he appears to have found some release from its burden in these tirades in the Tower. At the mint he could hurt and kill without doing damage to his Puritan conscience. The blood of coiners and clippers nourished him.’ Although this goes too far – Newton killed no one, and there is no evidence that he injured them – he later burned the records of his interrogations, and the suspicion remains that he enjoyed the power he wielded over his terrified prisoners.
    Apparently unaware of the snares that Newton was patiently setting for him, Chaloner continued his campaign to infiltrate the mint, appearing at the bar of the House of Commons in 1697 to denounce the fraud and forgery he claimed was rife at the Tower, and again brazenly proposing himself as the Hercules who could clear out the Augean Stables in Mint Street if only he were to be given access to it. So impressed with his ‘tongue pudding’ were the members of the Commons committee investigating the alleged abuses at the mint, that they ordered Newton to arrange an experiment in the Tower at which Chaloner could demonstrate his methods for foiling the coiners. Newton refused. Instead, he appeared before the committee himself, his pockets heavy with coins grooved according to Chaloner’s suggestions, to show up the flaws in the master forger’s schemes. Chaloner had been rebuffed – but it had been a close-run thing and Newton would not forget it.
    The warden’s investigation into the dies filched from the mint had run into the sand. But when Chaloner openly accused Newton of incompetence at best, and himself of embezzling from the mint at worst, he made an error that would prove fatal, reviving