Newton and the Counterfeiter by Thomas Levenson

wisdom. His "servant" must have been equally as efficient in coaxing cash out the marks' hands, for Chaloner was soon able to rent a house on the proceeds. He married and sired several children (though it is not known how many, if any, survived). As the years passed, he expanded his repertoire from quack medical advice to a kind of divination, "pretending to tell sill' Wenches what sort of Husbands they should have, discovering Stol'n Goods &c."
    This last proved his undoing. There was an obvious trick to recovering stolen property: steal it yourself in the first place. But it took a skilled and careful operator to pull off the scam repeatedly. A few years later, Jonathan Wild would establish control of the London underworld by organizing both sides of criminal undertakings on a citywide scale. He avoided direct participation in the robberies he stage-managed, profiting instead from his roles as restorer of lost property and "thief-taker"—betraying those who robbed out of turn, who competed with him, or who merely had begun to represent a risk to his liberty.
    Wild managed this balancing act well enough to dominate the interface of respectable London and its underside for fifteen years. Chaloner, less cautious, blundered. Around 1690, his name surfaced as a direct suspect in a theft. He ran, ending up in the slums of Hatton Garden, anonymous and broke, with nothing better than "some Old Garret to repose his Carcase."

6. "Every Thing Seem'd to Favour His Undertakings"
    D ESPERATION NOW DROVE William Chaloner to his last apprenticeship. In his Hatton Garden tenement he met a japanner. The term first described those who varnished or finished surfaces, in imitation of the fine Japanese lacquer work that had reached Europe in increasing quantities over the previous century. From that original sense, it had broadened to include any refinishing involving a hard or opaque coating. Chaloner's neighbor specialized in blacking old clothes with a coating that could restore a degree of respectability to them—if you did not examine them too closely. Selling old clothes to the wretched was a poor man's trade, but Chaloner paid the man to teach him his craft. Then, as Isaac Newton himself would later note in the first entry in his dossier, Chaloner turned himself into a trader in "cloaths thredbare ragged + daubed with colours."
    Newton would also later snipe that if Chaloner had remained content in this modest station, he could have avoided his later troubles. But Chaloner had never tolerated mere subsistence, and he had undertaken his new training with a specific end in view. Gilding—the art of coating surfaces with a thin, uniform coat—was a skill that could be applied to more than leather or cloth. In fact, the trade as a kind of archetype of deceit had deep roots. Almost a century earlier, in
The Winter's Tale,
Shakespeare's delusional, jealous Leontes gave voice to suspicions that his beloved son is a bastard, even though the boy looks like him—or rather: "women say so, / That will say anything. But were they false / As o'er-dy'd blacks."
    Painting clothes was hard work for little profit. But metal? That was where money could be made. Although there is no record that Chaloner planned out his counterfeiting career, the sequence of his actions strongly suggests that he had figured out the opportunity, probably before his overeagerness as a stolen-goods man got him into trouble. Certainly, he took to his new enterprise quickly, applying his newly acquired technique to silver pieces with which "he thought it Probable to Counterfeit Guinea's, Pistoles [French currency], &c, which being Gilded well [with gold] and Edg'd, might pass for Current throughout the Kingdom."
    Adding to the sense that this was a planned rather than an opportunistic move was Chaloner's timing. He saw his chance at the very moment that England was, literally, running out of money in what was a nationwide demonstration of Gresham's law—the