Small, thin and tarnished, the silver sixpence doesn鈥檛 look like the cause of so much trouble. But the clues are there. Its impressions of the bejewelled Queen Elizabeth I and of the English and French coats of arms are clear-cut. Its edge is sharp and almost perfectly round. For, unlike its predecessors, this coin was not crudely beaten into shape with hammers. It was made much more neatly at the Tower of London in 1562 by Britain鈥檚 first mechanised mint. Now in the Hunterian Museum at the University of Glasgow, the coin bears the queen鈥檚 Latin motto: 鈥淚 have made God my helper.鈥� Its maker, a Frenchman called Eloy Mestrelle, couldn鈥檛 rely on such divine assistance. Perhaps as a result, both he and his machine came to a very sticky end.
ELOY MESTRELLE had a shady past. Born in Paris, he learnt how to make coins at the Moulin de Monnais, the French mint at Versailles. But a job at the mint must have offered irresistible temptations, for by the time he arrived in London in 1559 Mestrelle had acquired a criminal record. Whatever he had done, it wasn鈥檛 enough to put off the newly crowned Queen Elizabeth. After appointing him to assemble and operate Britain鈥檚 first machine for making coins, she granted him a pardon 鈥渇or all treasons, felonies and offences committed before 1 March 1559 in respect of clipping or counterfeiting coin鈥�.
The Queen was keen to employ Mestrelle and the technology he brought from the Continent because she wanted to issue a new set of coins. She had been on the throne for less than a year, and was trying to overcome a financial crisis caused by the circulation of too many fake silver coins. Mestrelle鈥檚 鈥渟crew press鈥� seemed the answer to her prayers.
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His technique was to mould ingots of silver and punch out rough, fat blanks. These were flattened with rollers and a second, thinner blank the right size and weight was punched out from the first. Mestrelle then stamped the design simultaneously on both sides by placing the blank between two moulded dies and slamming them together with a large, threaded, 23-kilogram ram driven down by rapidly rotating a large cross-shaped handle attached to its top. His mint, which started operation in the Tower of London in 1560, employed up to a dozen men.
The result was the handsomest set of coins of the Elizabethan age. They certainly pleased the Queen, because she awarded Mestrelle a modest royal pension of 拢25 a year. He was less popular with the manual coin hammerers, who feared he might put them out of work. Nor was he helped by the arrival of the plague in London in 1563. The mint had to be closed for the best part of a year as people fled the city.
Nevertheless, Mestrelle worked at his mint on and off over eight years, turning out thousands of fine coins of the realm. His coins were the best, but the number he made was small compared with those that were hammered by hand. Then, in September 1568, things started to go wrong. A member of his family, Philip Mestrelle, who had come across the Channel with him from France, was arrested for making four counterfeit crowns-and Eloy was implicated.
In January the following year, Philip was convicted by the City of London magistrates and hanged at Tyburn gallows. Eloy was luckier. He won a second pardon from the Queen and by 1570 was again minting coins in the Tower, although the evidence suggests that some of his equipment had been confiscated. His coins were never as smart as before-there was the odd reversed letter and a much poorer impression of the Queen. The loss of some of his tools irritated him, as a little medal he struck at the time makes clear.
Hard times
Made in gold and silver to commemorate the defence of the realm, on one side the medal has a bust of the Queen alongside the words 鈥淲hat are we without thee?鈥� On the other side there is a picture of the Tower with the plea 鈥淲hat is this without tools?鈥� Compared to the earlier coins, the medal is of poor quality.
Then, to make matters worse, Mestrelle鈥檚 boss died, and a new management keen to save money was installed at the mint. In an early time and motion study, Mestrelle was forced to justify the existence of his machinery by pitting it against the hand hammerers in a trial. The terms of the contest were simple: which technology could turn out blanks the fastest? In the hour it took two men using Mestrelle鈥檚 equipment to make 22 blank sixpences, the hammerers produced 280.
It seems Mestrelle may have fallen victim to a stitch-up. Why was the comparison made using blanks rather than the finished coins? The hammerers could not have competed on quality. And how many hammerers were competing against his machine? But in any case, Mestrelle鈥檚 career as a coin manufacturer was finished. Although he was allowed to continue living in the Tower, in 1572 he was barred access to the mint, which took the patent for his machinery. In a letter to the Lord Treasurer, his manager alleged that Mestrelle was unable to repay his debts.
Others occasionally used his machinery because it still produced the best-looking coins of the time. But after a few years it fell into disuse and was lost. It took almost another hundred years before the monopoly of the hand hammerers was finally broken and Mestrelle鈥檚 methods vindicated. From 1663 all English coins were manufactured by upgraded versions of his original screw press.
Mestrelle鈥檚 silver sixpences stayed in circulation for 130 years and became valuable as gaming counters. Shakespeare refers to them in the opening scene of The Merry Wives of Windsor, written between 1598 and 1600. Mestrelle, however, did not see his technology triumph. Increasingly short of money, he returned to one of the few trades open to an unemployed moneyer: counterfeiting. Almost inevitably, he got caught.
In October 1577, he was arrested in London and charged at the Norfolk Assizes. His goods were seized, his house shut up and his widowed mother and family evicted. In a desperate attempt to save his life, he tried to shop colleagues for committing the same crime. But, right or wrong, his evidence was not enough to placate the Crown. In the spring of 1578, like his kinsman Philip before him, he was hanged.