1699: William Chaloner, Isaac Newton’s prey

ExecutedToday.com ^ | March 22, 2009 | Thomas Levenson

[CheshireTheCat]

Early in the morning of March 22, 1699, William Chaloner raged.

Chaloner, a convicted coiner, refused the Newgate Jail Chaplain’s plea to show proper penitence, shouting with “more Passion than Piety,” of his wronged state and unmerited destination (according to his anonymous biographer in the one surviving account of his life). In time, he calmed sufficiently to accept the sacrament, and so proceeded to the execution convoy to be borne from Newgate to the hanging tree at Tyburn (now Marble Arch, just to the west of the old City of London).

There Chaloner’s fury mounted again, and he shouted to the crowd, drawn as always to the spectacle of public hanging days, that “he was murder’d … under pretence of Law.” He mounted the ladder to the top of Tyburn’s gibbet. He prayed, and then pulled the hood over his eyes without aid. When the moment came, the executioner’s men pulled the ladder out of the way and Chaloner dangled, twitching and jumping (the “hangman’s dance”) as long as it took –- minutes, at least — for life to choke out of him. Richer men often paid the hangman to pull on their legs to speed death. Not the destitute Chaloner. He had to choke till he drooped, to the greater amusement of the crowd.

The investigator who had sent Chaloner to the noose was not present; or at least nowhere in his copious notes and letters did he admit to curiosity about the fate of a man whose pursuit occupied him for almost three years. The Warden of His Majesty’s Mint had more pressing duties to perform, and so Isaac Newton allowed the date of Chaloner’s death to pass unmarked.

Isaac Newton? That Newton?....

[Jonty30]

Have to pay the bills.

[Robert DeLong]

Well, he certainly was around in that time frame. He would have been 57, which means he would have been residing in London at that time as well.

During his last thirty years living in London he moved in wealthy aristocratic circles, exerted substantial political influence and profited financially from imperial trade and exploitation. He discovered the law of gravity under an apple tree in Cambridge before moving to a house just below its south east corner in what is now London.

Born: 4 January 1643 (Gregorian calendar date [Old Style (Julian calendar date: 25 December 1642] in Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, Lincolnshire, England

Died: 31 March 1727 (aged 84) buried: Kensington, Middlesex, Great Britain

[nwrep]

Beautiful story. What a delightful death the scoundrel enjoyed. Bless Newton for his thorough investigation.

[DesertRhino]

Guys like him have a lot of time to obsess on investigations. He wasn’t interested in women... at all.