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William Chaloner (1650s, or 1665–22 March 1699) was a serial counterfeit coiner and confidence trickster, who was imprisoned in Newgate Prison several times and eventually proven guilty of high treason by Sir Isaac Newton, Master of the Royal Mint. He was hanged on the gallows at Tyburn on 22 March 1699. He grew up in a poor family in Warwickshire, but through a career in counterfeiting and con artistry attained great wealth, including a house in Knightsbridge. He started by forging "Birmingham Groats", then moved on to Guineas, French Pistoles, crowns and half-crowns, Banknotes and lottery tickets. At various times he also made and sold dildos and worked as a quack doctor, soothsayer, and sham anti-Jacobite "agent provocateur" to collect government rewards. In ''Guzman Redivivus'', a posthumous biography published anonymously in 1699, it was stated that == Early life and scams == Chaloner was born in Warwickshire, the son of a weaver. His parents had great difficulty controlling him, so he was apprenticed to a nail maker in Birmingham, a town notorious for coining. At this time groats (worth four pennies) were in short supply, so the forged "Birmingham groat" constituted a significant proportion of the national coinage. Chaloner, a quick learner, became skilled in their production. He soon demonstrated his ambition and, sometime in the 1680s, walked to London but the Craftsmens' Guild system prevented him finding gainful work, so he established himself by manufacturing and hawking "tin watches" containing dildos (''Tin Watches, with D-does &c in 'em.'') to cater for the sexually adventurous age. Thomas Levenson stated in ''Newton and the Counterfeiter'' that as early as 1660, two years after Cromwell’s death, "there were reports of imported Italian dildos being sold on St James’s Street".〔In this period, "dildo" may also have referred to a decorative curlicue, although there is no obvious market-worthy opportunity for street sales of such items.〕) Next he became a quack doctor and soothsayer. According to the anonymous, posthumous 1699 biography ''Guzman Redivivus'': According to the ''Oxford National Dictionary of Biography'' "He may have been the 'William Chaloner' who on 31 March 1684 married Katharine Atkinson at St Katharine's by the Tower, and he certainly had several children. However, this relatively respectable period of Chaloner's life ended when he was suspected of robbery and forced to flee his lodgings." His "trick" for recovering stolen property was "to steal it in the first place". As a result, he made his first appearance in the public record in 1690, as a suspect in a burglary case. But the "tongue-pudding" and the knack for playing two sides against each other were established as hallmarks of his increasingly large-scale criminal enterprises. By early 1690 he was working as a japanner where he probably learned and practised the gilding process. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「William Chaloner」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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