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mounted by coin clippers who shavedthe old unmilled coins minted before the introduction of machinery. The second prong of the economic assault came from bullion dealers who melted down silver coins into ingots, shipped them abroad where they fetched higher prices than in England, and sold them to buy gold. In September 1695 Lowndes asked the curmudgeonly genius Newton to suggest a solution to the silver shortage.
    The economic crisis caused by the silver shortage was acute. The great historian Lord Macaulay suggests that it was more grevious in its effects on ordinary citizens than even the recent political ructions of the Glorious Revolution which had ousted the Catholic King James II and brought his Protestant daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange to the throne in 1689. For, wrote Macaulay, ‘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.’ The crisis came to a head in 1695, when King William III found that the shortage of ready money – despite the foundation of the Bank of England in 1694 which lent the poverty-stricken government £1.2 million in its first year – was hampering his war against Louis XIV’s expansionist, Catholic France.
    It did not take Newton’s logical mind long to grasp the cause of the crisis – and its cure. Since drastic penalties had not stopped the coin clippers, and the traders who exported silver were only obeying the iron dictates of the market, the practical solution was to make coin clipping unviable and the trade in silver unprofitable. Newton suggested a two-stage remedy. Step one: to recall the entire currency still in circulation. Since silver coins were rapidly disappearing thanks to the activities of the bullion traders this would not be such a gargantuan undertaking as it sounds. The recalled money would then be melted down at the mint and reissued as new machine-made money with milled edges to prevent clipping.
    Step two was to deal with the export of silver, and for this Newton proposed changing the intrinsic value of the coins. As the dealers were only exporting the silver because it brought more gold abroad than in England, reducing the amount of silver in each shilling would make foreign gold more expensive when counted in English silver money. Correctly calculated, such a devaluation would make the cross-continental trade in English silver unprofitable at a stroke. Newton’s solution was the product of a modern, rational mind. At the dawn of the eighteenth century, theAge of the Enlightenment, he was weighing and assaying money not according to some mystic value lent by the monarch’s head on the coins, but by logic and common sense. Money was worth just what the metal making it up was worth in the marketplace – no more, no less.
    In the event, only half of Newton’s radical scheme was put into effect. Parliament approved the recall and re-minting of the coinage, but baulked at the proposed devaluation. As a reward for his suggestions, however, a grateful government offered Newton the prestigious – and lucrative – post of Warden, or boss, of the Mint. With almost indecent haste, an equally grateful Newton accepted, packed his bags and books, left his lodgings at Trinity College, Cambridge, in April 1696, and moved into the Warden’s House in Mint Street near the Brass Mount bastion at the north-east corner of the Tower.
    In reforming the currency, and curbing the coin clippers, Newton found himself up against a mind almost as daring and unorthodox as his own. But that mind belonged to a master criminal. It was a duel of wits as dramatic in its way as the fictional clash between Sherlock Holmes and his arch-enemy Professor Moriarty, the ‘Napoleon of crime’, and like that titanic struggle, could only end with the death of one of the protagonists. William Chaloner, Newton’s adversary, was, like