The Counterfeiter Who Picked a Fight With Isaac Newton
William Chaloner arrived in London in the 1680s as a threadbare lacquer-worker from Warwickshire, his clothes daubed with dye, his pockets empty. Within a decade he was living in a large house in Knightsbridge, dressed as a gentleman, counterfeiting French pistoles, guineas, and Bank of England notes with enough skill to avoid prosecution for years. When he was finally arrested, he turned informant, got himself released, and then did something almost incomprehensibly brazen: he petitioned Parliament claiming the Royal Mint was incompetent and corrupt, and demanding to be appointed their supervisor to fix it.
The petition landed on the desk of the Mint's newly appointed Warden: Isaac Newton. Newton had spent thirty years defining the laws of motion, optics, and gravity. He was also, it turned out, incapable of letting something go. He began taking notes on Chaloner. Then he started interviewing witnesses, dozens of them, then over a hundred, slowly building a documented record of every crime Chaloner had committed since 1690. Newton took every statement himself. He cross-referenced them. He was methodical in the way only the man who invented calculus could be.
By early 1699, Newton had a case so comprehensive it couldn't be escaped. Chaloner went to trial at the Old Bailey on March 3, 1699, in front of a judge known as a "hanging judge," with no advance notice of the evidence, no legal counsel, and no presumption of innocence. Witness after witness testified: they had seen him strike thousands of French pistoles; seen the dies in his own hands; handled his counterfeits themselves.
From Newgate Prison, Chaloner wrote to Newton directly. The letters survive. "O for God's sake," he wrote, "do not for suspitions and sugestions seem reall truth and so let me go murtherd out of the world." And: "If I dye I am murtherd." Newton did not reply.
William Chaloner was hanged at Tyburn on March 22, 1699, "stinking, wet, cold, and mercilessly sober," as one contemporary account put it. He twitched on the rope for several minutes. Then he was publicly disemboweled. The man who spent a decade eluding the law by pointing fingers at everyone else had chosen to point his finger at Isaac Newton. Newton simply waited.
He picked the wrong man to accuse of incompetence.