“Upon my arrival at the Mint last April, I lived there for a while myself before coming here to Jermyn Street, in August. The truth is the Mint is mighty noisy, having the rolling mills going all night, and after the peace and tranquillity of Cambridge, I could not bear with it. But you are a young fellow and it has been my experience that the young have a stronger toleration of noise than their elders. Besides, I have great expectation that my niece will come to live with me in December, and the Mint is a dirty, unwholesome place, with many roguish fellows and where the air is ill, so that I am confirmed not to live there. Come, sir, what do you say? It is a good little house, with a garden.”
A whole house, with a garden. This was too much. And yet still I was moved to ask for more. I have mentioned how I had begun to feel the weight of my own ignorance; and it suddenly occurred to me that there was something in Newton’s demeanour and conducting of himself that made me believe that I could learn much from him. And I thought to make a condition of it. For I was possessed of the notion that to know the mind of such a man who had penetrated so many scientific and philosophical mysteries would be to know the mind of God. Which would make a change from the minds of whores and gamesters.
“Aye, sir,” said I. “I will work for you. But on one condition.”
“Name it, Mister Ellis.”
“That you will always correct my ignorance of something, for I know you are a learned man. I would wish that you will show me something of the world as you understand it, and to discourse with me on the nature of things in furtherance of my own self-improvement. For I must confess that a university degree got me an understanding of the classics and Sanderson’s Logic and not much else. I will work for you, sir. But what in me is dark, I would ask you to illumine. And what is low and base, I would that you might raise and support.”
“Well said, sir. It takes an intelligent man to admit his ignorance, especially one with a university degree. But be warned. I was never much of a tutor. In all my time at Cambridge, Trinity College assigned but three fellow commoners to my tuition, and those I took for the fees rather than some desire to be the centre of a modern Lyceum. It is hard for any of us to know how we may appear to the world, but, in truth, I consider myself to have learned only as much as to confirm how little of the world I know. I’ve a mind that it’s this which vexes those rabbinical parts I might possess. But I agree to your condition. I know not what but I’ll trepan something into that young head of yours. So, give me your hand on the bargain.”
I took Newton’s cold thin hand in my own and indeed, I did kiss it, for it now belonged to the master to whom I owed some return of my fortune and prospects.
“Thank you, sir,” I said. “I will endeavour to do my best for you.”
“I shall write to the Treasury today,” said Newton. “They will have to sanction your appointment. But I do not doubt that they will approve my choice. After which you will have to take an oath to keep secret Mister Blondeau’s method of edge-marking the coin, although I think it can be no great secret since, I am told, the same machine is shown openly to visitors in the Paris Mint.
“But first let’s have some cider, after which I’ll write that letter and then we’ll take my coach to the Tower where I’ll swear you in and show you around the Mint.”
And so I was employed at the Royal Mint.
The Mint was within the Tower since 1299, and by 1696 it was as big as many a sizeable town. Two rows of aged wooden buildings, pinned together with clamps of iron, lay between the inner and outer rampires, beginning at the Byward and Bell Towers, extended some five hundred yards along and around the foot of eachwall to finish up at the Salt Tower. A narrow cobbled road, illuminated by lanterns and patrolled by sentries, led between the timber-shored buildings which, some of them, were several jetties high and accommodated houses, offices, barracks, stables, wash-houses, melting-houses, smithies, mill rooms, storehouses, taverns and a sutters selling all kinds of victuals.
As Newton had told me, the noise of metalworking was enough to box a man’s ears, and walking about the Mint we had to shout to each other to make ourselves heard; but to this must be added the cannons that from time to time were fired, the sound of horses and iron wheels on the cobbles, the bellman cries and voices of the soldiers who were stationed there and who cursed as freely as Templars, the dogs that barked, the ravens that cried out like the throat-rattles of dying men, the fires that roared, the cats that howled, the doors and gates that slammed, the keys that jangled, and the wooden signs that creaked in the high wind, for it had been exceedingly stormy of late. Bedlam could not have seemed more noisy than the Royal Mint. My first impression was of some infernal place such as Virgil might have described when Aeneas visits the underworld and, standing between the Bell and Byward Towers, where I could hear the low moaning of wild beasts in the nearby Lion Tower, which stood outside the westward entrance, I almost thought myself before the very forecourt and in the opening of the jaws of hell. Yet the Tower was an exciting place and I was pleased to be there, for I always had a great appetite for history; and visiting the Tower as a boy I little thought I should ever have worked there.
We walked north, up Mint Street, with Newton all the while acquainting me with the work of the moneyers who operated the coinage presses, and the assayers who checked the fineness of the bullion, and the melters and the engravers.
“Of course,” he said, “many of them are villains up to their necks in illegal coining and fit to be hanged. Blank coins are often stolen, as are dies and guinea stamps. At least two men who were in the service of the Mint have been hanged. And another two who were in the service of the Mint are in Newgate Prison, under sentence of death.
“My advice is to trust none of them, from the highest to the lowest. The scoundrel who is Master of the Mint is Mister Neale, although he is so seldom here you would think he would blush to hold the office. But I doubt that you will have sufficient opportunity to know him well enough to recognise his many failings.”
At this point Newton bowed stiffly to a man who came out of one of the offices—a small and consumptive fellow who whooped like a trumpet when he spoke; and as soon as he was gone out of earshot my master enjoined me not to trust him either.
“He is mighty friendly with the Tower Ordnance—the garrison of soldiers with whom we are constantly at odds for the privileges of the Mint. For they regard us as interlopers, although in truth we have been here almost as long as they. But this Tower has too many people in it, and there’s the crux of the problem.
“Until recently the Ordnance had occupied the Irish Mint, which is near the Salt Tower, at the far end of this road we are on. They had seized the Porter’s house and some clerks’ dwellings, and built a barracks on a vacant site. But this Great Recoinage has enabled us to get them out of the Mint again, and back within the inner rampire of the Tower, where the common soldiers now take turns to sleep in a bed, so that they now hate us most bitterly. Trust none of them, nor their officers, for they wish us all ill.”
Newton caught sight of a haughty-looking man who stood watching us from the top of the Beauchamp Tower.
“And there is the great architect of their resentment. Lord Lucas himself. He is the Lord Lieutenant of the Tower, a position that enjoys many ancient and peculiar privileges and, but for the office exercised by myself, he might call himself the most powerful man in this castle. Above all other men, do not trust him. He is a drunken Borachio and so arrogant I do believe he must wipe his arse with gilt paper.”
A little farther on, around the corner of Devereaux Tower, we came abreast of the Smithy, wherein as stern and nasty-looking a rogue as ever I saw, left off shoeing a horse for a moment to fix a most unforgiving eye on Doctor Newton and, by association, myself.
“Upon my soul,” said I, when we had walked past, “if that fellow doesn’t have the most disinheriting countenance.”
“He is a most inveterate knave and no friend to the Mint either. But put him out of your mind for now, as here is the King’s Clerk’s house, and next to it the Master’s house, and next to that the Deputy Warden, Monsieur Fauquier’s house.”
“Fauquier? He sounds like a Frenchman.”
“He is one of those Huguenots,” explained Newton, “so lately expelled from his own country by the French King, Lewis. I think that there are several such refugees here in the Tower. The French Church, which is the centre of their community, is but a short walk from the Tower, in Threadneedle Street. Fauquier is a man of considerable substance and, I believe, a diligent one. But do not think to find him in this house—him, or any of these others I have mentioned. It is one of the perquisites of preferment in the Mint that officers may sublet their official residences to whomsoever they wish and for their own personal gain.”
