Read Online Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London by Nigel Jones - Free Book Online
Authors: Nigel Jones
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monarchy was restored in 1660. But if he was hoping that the poverty-stricken king would match his keen interest in the mint with actual money he was again to be sorely disappointed. While in Dutch exile the king had met an Antwerp goldsmith named Roettier who had loaned the ever cash-strapped monarch money in hope of future preferment. The investment paid off after the Restoration when Charles gave the old goldsmith’s three sons jobs at the mint. Charles encouraged the Roettier brothers to compete with Simon in designing the new monarchy’s coinage, and chose an elegant one submitted by John Roettier. Nettled, and clearly put on his mettle, Simon dipped into his pocket once again and paid for a coin called the Petition Crown, which he submitted to the king along with an abject note:
Thomas Simon most humbly prays Your Majesty to compare this, his trial piece, with the Dutch, and if more truly drawn and embossed, more gracefully ordered and more accurately engraven, to relieve [pay] him.
Two years later, and still unpaid, poor Simon became one of thousands of victims of the Great London Plague of 1665.
The ubiquitous Samuel Pepys accompanied King Charles to the mint to inspect new coins struck with his own likeness: ‘So we by coach to them and there went up and down all the magazines [workshops] with them; but methought it was but poor discourse and frothy that the King’s companions … had with him. We saw none of the money; but Mr Slingsbydid show the King, and I did see, the stamps of the new money … which are very neat and like the King.’ The new coinage was the work of an engraver named Blondeau, a Frenchman brought to the mint by Cromwell. Like Simon, Blondeau impartially went to work for the new royal regime and compared Cromwell’s warty likeness with the effigies he had made of the new king – doubtless to the latter’s advantage.
Pepys was so impressed with the coins and the new-fangled machinery that had struck them – ‘So pretty that I did take a note of every part of it’ – that he soon returned to the mint to commission Blondeau to engrave a seal for the Admiralty. ‘… and did see some of the finest pieces of work, in embossed work, that ever I did see in my life, for fineness and smallness of the images thereon. Here also did see bars of gold melting, which was a fine sight.’ Although Pepys often expressed his pettish disapproval of the King’s frivolity, diarist and monarch shared an eye for a pretty woman, and both were captivated by the loveliness of Frances Stewart, a court beauty, one of the few who stoutly refused to become another of Charles’s many mistresses. Instead, the king propagated Frances’s charms to his subjects by making her the model of Britannia on the country’s coins, an image that endured until decimalisation in the 1970s.
The late seventeenth century was a time of transformation for the mint. Not only was machinery – used at other mints elsewhere in Europe since the mid-sixteenth century – finally introduced to replace hand-held hammers, but the greatest scientific mind ever produced by Britain was also brought in to oversee the mint’s operations. In 1696 Sir Isaac Newton was appointed Warden of the Mint. The appointment came at a time of crisis both for the mint and for Newton. The prickly Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge University was over fifty – elderly by seventeenth-century standards – and his masterpice, Principia Mathematica , in which he had set out his theory of gravitation and his three laws of motion, was already a decade behind him. His work on the calculus was also largely complete. Never a social animal, the lonely old bachelor was essentially marking time at Cambridge while searching for a new role to occupy a mind still at its peak.
Meanwhile, the nation’s treasurer, William Lowndes, was faced with a severe shortage of silver coins – the result of a two-pronged assault on the currency. The first attack was
Thomas Simon most humbly prays Your Majesty to compare this, his trial piece, with the Dutch, and if more truly drawn and embossed, more gracefully ordered and more accurately engraven, to relieve [pay] him.
Two years later, and still unpaid, poor Simon became one of thousands of victims of the Great London Plague of 1665.
The ubiquitous Samuel Pepys accompanied King Charles to the mint to inspect new coins struck with his own likeness: ‘So we by coach to them and there went up and down all the magazines [workshops] with them; but methought it was but poor discourse and frothy that the King’s companions … had with him. We saw none of the money; but Mr Slingsbydid show the King, and I did see, the stamps of the new money … which are very neat and like the King.’ The new coinage was the work of an engraver named Blondeau, a Frenchman brought to the mint by Cromwell. Like Simon, Blondeau impartially went to work for the new royal regime and compared Cromwell’s warty likeness with the effigies he had made of the new king – doubtless to the latter’s advantage.
Pepys was so impressed with the coins and the new-fangled machinery that had struck them – ‘So pretty that I did take a note of every part of it’ – that he soon returned to the mint to commission Blondeau to engrave a seal for the Admiralty. ‘… and did see some of the finest pieces of work, in embossed work, that ever I did see in my life, for fineness and smallness of the images thereon. Here also did see bars of gold melting, which was a fine sight.’ Although Pepys often expressed his pettish disapproval of the King’s frivolity, diarist and monarch shared an eye for a pretty woman, and both were captivated by the loveliness of Frances Stewart, a court beauty, one of the few who stoutly refused to become another of Charles’s many mistresses. Instead, the king propagated Frances’s charms to his subjects by making her the model of Britannia on the country’s coins, an image that endured until decimalisation in the 1970s.
The late seventeenth century was a time of transformation for the mint. Not only was machinery – used at other mints elsewhere in Europe since the mid-sixteenth century – finally introduced to replace hand-held hammers, but the greatest scientific mind ever produced by Britain was also brought in to oversee the mint’s operations. In 1696 Sir Isaac Newton was appointed Warden of the Mint. The appointment came at a time of crisis both for the mint and for Newton. The prickly Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge University was over fifty – elderly by seventeenth-century standards – and his masterpice, Principia Mathematica , in which he had set out his theory of gravitation and his three laws of motion, was already a decade behind him. His work on the calculus was also largely complete. Never a social animal, the lonely old bachelor was essentially marking time at Cambridge while searching for a new role to occupy a mind still at its peak.
Meanwhile, the nation’s treasurer, William Lowndes, was faced with a severe shortage of silver coins – the result of a two-pronged assault on the currency. The first attack was
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