Newton and the Counterfeiter (14 page)

And that's it, just about all that connects Isaac Newton to sexual desire. His accounts contain no debits for bawdy houses, although they list several for taverns and drink. His letters mention nothing of physical need. His private papers add nothing to the image of a mostly sexless creature. Whether or not the living man who woke up alone each morning and laid his solitary self down at night felt any hunger for another's touch, man or woman, he seems never to have admitted as much—to himself or to anyone else.

In any event, the question of Newton's notional sex life misses the point. His letters to Fatio, and the younger, more beautiful man's replies, portray a clear and rather sad longing for some kind of intimacy—an emotional closeness, whether or not bodies were involved. For the short span of a year or two, Newton seems to have felt such a connection.

Fatio disappeared from view soon after he dismissed Newton. He eventually turned up at Woburn Abbey, tutoring the Duke of Bedford's children. He never regained his status as a rising star in European intellectual life. He never produced any original mathematics. Ultimately he became something of a pathetic figure, prone to religious manias and sponging cash from former friends—including Newton, whom he touched for thirty pounds in 1710.

But in the immediate aftermath of Fatio's flight, Newton suffered more. No one can now discover precisely why Newton broke down. He had some history of melancholy, from his childhood plaint ("I know not what to doe") to the prolonged periods in the 1670s during which he withdrew almost completely from public scrutiny. But the sequence of events is there. Newton's crisis followed directly on the collapse of his feelings for his friend. Put that together with his recognition of alchemical failure, and May and June of 1693 become scorched earth,
the ruin of all hope. Fury, sorrow, silence—each of these are plausible reactions to such devastation, and Newton endured them all.

The summer passed. Newton gave no sign of noticing. September came, and he began to speak bitter, unhappy words—those blows flung almost at random against Pepys and Locke. Pepys did not respond, consciously choosing not to notice the disintegration of his great friend. Locke answered, hurt, but still declaring that "I truly love & esteem you &...I have the same good will for you as if noe thing of this had happened."

October turned, and Newton proceeded with the slow reorganization of his disordered mind. He apologized to Locke, and his friend forgave him. In November, Newton completed the letter he had abandoned in June. Finally, canny old Pepys reached out, with never a mention of any odd behavior on the part of his friend. Instead, he asked a technical question of great interest to gamblers: who had the best odds in a particular game of dice.

Newton understood the intent behind the message. He wrote back, "I was very glad ... to have any opportunity given me of shewing how ready I should be to serve you or your friends upon any occasion." He added that he wished he could perform some more important task, but nonetheless analyzed the issue at hand, explaining how Pepys should place his bets.

From there Newton's recovery strengthened. He resumed the company of his friends and worked closely with several younger colleagues, David Gregory and Edmond Halley especially. Fatio became a man he used to know. They did correspond infrequently—an exchange in 1707 centered on Fatio's enthusiasm for an apocalyptic religious revival being preached in London. But this was action at a distance. None of Newton's later letters to Fatio suggest a shred of pleasure in the other's company.

The winter of 1693 came, then passed. Through the spring and summer of 1694, Newton concerned himself with this and that. He wrote a long memorandum on the proper education of boys. He dealt with nettlesome tenants on the land he had inherited from his mother. He made some notes on problems in calculus. He began what would be a years-long effort to come up with a complete explanation for the motion of the moon—the notorious "three-body problem" involving the interaction of the earth, sun, and moon.

The lunar calculations were good work, though Newton ultimately concluded (correctly) that he had failed to find a solution. He remained a brilliant mathematician. His skill was put to the test in 1697, when Johann Bernoulli published a pair of problems—a challenge that aimed at the most prominent mathematicians of the day. Newton received a copy of the second of the two on January 29, at four in the afternoon. By four the next morning, he had solved both. He sent Bernoulli his calculations unsigned. Bernoulli was undeceived, recognizing the mind behind the work "
tanaquam ex ungue leonem
— "as the lion is recognized by his print."

But good or great, such efforts were trivial compared with what Newton had achieved before. It is unfair to ask for two
Principias
from any man. He did still produce prodigious amounts of work, but increasingly his writing centered on history, biblical criticism, the analysis of ancient prophecy. His breakdown probably helped impel the shift in emphasis, but the simple fact is that time was passing. Very few creative scientists perform at the highest level for decades on end, and Newton had been at the leading edge of discovery since his early twenties. On Christmas Day, 1694, he turned fifty-one.

The year turned again. The academic calendar rolled on. Newton remained in residence at Trinity College, if not actually bored, then underemployed. There were whispers something might be coming his way, some plum post that would at last pry him loose from a university whose life absorbed him less and less. Nothing materialized, but in September 1695, an odd message arrived from London. It was a request on a matter completely outside his usual competence:

Would Isaac Newton kindly provide his thoughts on a matter of national importance? What should the nation do about the worsening shortage of silver coins?

W
ILLIAM LOWNDES, SECRETARY
of the Treasury, had a problem that had been growing worse for years. For at least half a decade, it had been evident to anyone paying attention that there was something wrong with England's money. Specifically, there wasn't enough of it. The silver coinage, all the denominations from half-groats (two pence) to crowns (five shillings), was evaporating. From the late 1680s to the mid-1690s, the supply of these coins—the basic units of exchange for the daily business of the country—shrank year by year. By 1695, it was almost impossible to find legal silver in circulation. Something needed to be done, and it was Lowndes's job to suggest the proper course of action.

He sought help. In September 1695, he wrote a letter asking advice of England's wise men. Some were obvious choices. John Locke had written a series of papers on money and trade in 1691. The architect and polymath Sir Christopher Wren had extensive experience with both government and budgets in his role supervising the rebuilding of London's churches and St. Paul's Cathedral after the Great Fire of 1666. Charles Davenant was one of England's leading writers in the field just beginning to be called political economy, and he had served as an excise official, administering England's tariffs. Most of the rest of the men Lowndes contacted were more such eminences: the banker Sir Josiah Child, a major shareholder in the East India Company; a lawyer, John Asgill; and Gilbert Heathcote, a governor of the newly formed Bank of England. But Newton?

The
Principia
had established Newton as the smartest man in England and thus a natural figure to be called upon at a time of national crisis. That he had no knowledge of government finance or experience of the market was hardly a handicap. The beginnings of the modern economy predate the emergence of economics as a formal discipline and of that special class, economic experts. And so it happened, without any apparent hesitation, that England's greatest natural philosopher first turned his mind to the problem of money.

The Mint and the Treasury had been wrestling with the damage done to the currency by coiners and clippers since the early 1660s. But at about the time the Stuarts fell and William rose to the throne, a new threat emerged: the trade in silver from England to Amsterdam, Paris, and beyond. The exchange was driven by a difference in the price of silver against gold in London, compared with the prices on the Continent. Simply: you could buy more gold in France with a given lump of silver than the same weight of English minted coins could purchase in London. There was no shortage of clever operators who figured out the arbitrage opportunity: collect silver coins in England, melt them down into ingots, ship them across the Channel, buy gold, and then use that gold to buy yet more silver back home. It was the nearest thing imaginable to a financial perpetual motion machine.

By 1690, within two years of the coronation of William and Mary, the outflow of silver coins became acute enough to provoke a parliamentary investigation. Several members of the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths—the guild governing dealers in precious metals—petitioned for aid to prevent what they said was the ruin of their business. In the preceding six months alone, they claimed 282,120 ounces of silver had been shipped out of London to metal dealers in France and Holland—enough to strike at least 55,000 pounds sterling of
minted money, more than ten percent of the total silver coinage struck at the Royal Mint in the previous five years. Who was responsible? Never one of their own company, to be sure! Instead, the goldsmiths implicated foreign metal dealers, especially those ubiquitous and useful villains the Jews, "who do any thing for their profit."

A committee led by Sir Richard Reynell was formed to pursue the goldsmiths' charges, and on May 7, Reynell rose in the House of Commons to report the results of the inquiry. The petitioners' claim was a fact: silver was indeed abandoning the kingdom. There was no mystery about the reason. The difference in value of English silver bullion on the continent of Europe, compared with the face value of the full-weight legal shillings coined out of each ounce, was not much—about one and a half pennies per ounce of silver. But that was profit enough, according to the parliamentary investigators, to make it worthwhile for traders to turn English money into ingots to be sold across the Channel.

Reynell was a little more temperate than the petitioners in his assignment of blame. While "the Jews, for their Profit, exported [silver] in very great quantities ... to the utter Ruin of the working Goldsmiths," Reynell admitted that there lived "English, as well as Jew, who for their Advantages, would doubtless melt down our Crown Pieces, &c and sell for Foreign Silver to the Undoing of the whole Nation for want of Money, unless a present Remedy were found to prevent Exportation of any Silver or Gold."

Making matters worse was the other half of England's currency debacle: the existence of those two parallel coinages—the old, hand-struck, pre-1662 money and the newer, heavier, machine-made pieces. Bad money was driving out good. The machine-made money, precisely weighed and secure, would never circulate so long as debased coins passed for the same face value. The great Victorian historian Lord Macaulay later reported that as the crisis reached its climax, the Exchequer took in no more than ten good shillings in a hundred pounds of revenue—one out of every two thousand coins. Macaulay wrote, "Great masses were melted down; great masses exported; great masses hoarded; but scarcely one new piece was to be found in the till of a shop or in the leathern bag which the farmer carried home after the cattle fair." The resulting crisis was, he wrote, much more serious than the misgovernment of Charles and James. "It may well be doubted that all the misery which had been inflicted on the English nation in a quarter of a century by bad Kings, bad Ministers, bad Parliaments and bad Judges was equal to the misery caused in a single year by bad crowns and bad shillings." It did not matter to most Englishmen who ruled in London "whether Whigs or Tories, Protestants or Jesuits were uppermost, the grazier drove his beasts to market; the grocer weighed out his currants; the draper measured out his broadcloth; the hum of buyers and sellers was as loud as ever in the towns." But when "the great instrument of exchange became thoroughly deranged, all trade, all industry were smitten as with a palsy. The evil was felt daily and hourly in almost every place and by almost every class."

Gold guineas could still be found, costing about thirty shillings at a goldsmith's bank. But a pound of beef at Spitalfields market went for about three pennies in the spring of 1696. A gallon of beer ran a shilling or less. A laborer's daily wage was thirteen pence or so. As the small silver coinage that was the engine of daily life disappeared, trade suffered, and then almost stopped. "Nothing could be purchased without a dispute," Macaulay wrote, and "the simple and the careless were pillaged without mercy." The Mint had produced nearly half a million pounds' worth of silver currency between 1686 and 1690. But so much silver poured out of England in the next five years that the Mint could find almost none to coin, producing just over seventeen thousand pounds between 1691 and 1695.

Reynell and his colleagues confirmed the facts of the crisis, but "though the Committee found the complaint of the Petitions very just and the Inconveniences to the Kingdom very great, they could not agree of a way for preventing the same." A law on the books prohibited the melting of minted coin, but as long as English silver was worth more as bars of metal than the Mint said it was as crowns or shillings, England's hard cash would continue to vanish down the Thames.

Nothing was done in that session of Parliament, or in the next, or the next. All the while, as Macaulay put it, "the coins went on dwindling and the cry of distress from every county in the realm become louder and more piercing." For five years, arguments about the crisis raged across London. Finally, the one man with the power to demand action found himself personally in danger for lack of good silver coin. In July 1695, King William commanded a mixed army of English and Dutch soldiers besieging the French in the fortress city of Namur, in present-day Belgium. The campaign was part of William's grand strategic attempt to check Louis XIV's power in Europe and beyond. The two sides had already been fighting for seven years and would continue for more than a century, in what Winston Churchill would correctly term a world war. But at this particular moment, William faced the prospect of being defeated not by force of arms but by lack of cash to keep his army in the field.