Do we like Isaac Newton?
Our score: 6 out of 10. No harmful words of his own turned up, but he fought rivals hard and one author ties his Mint income to gold mined by enslaved people.
Newton is the bloke who changed physics, then took a government job and turned out to be a hard-nosed cop. He became Warden of the Royal Mint in 1696 and worked there in person, unlike most Wardens. He found about a fifth of the coins coming in during the great recoinage were counterfeit. He became Master in 1699, and after the 1707 Act of Union he oversaw the Scottish recoinage as well.
The Mint job is also where his darkest story sits. Newton went after master counterfeiter William Chaloner, who had publicly accused him of wrongdoing at the Mint. Newton ran informers and interrogations for nearly two years. Chaloner was convicted of high treason after a trial of about an hour and hanged at Tyburn in 1699. One account says Newton was a methodical civil servant doing his job, though it notes some historians disagree.
Then there's the feud with Robert Hooke. One writer argues Newton likely got to the inverse square law first but should have credited Hooke more generously in the Principia. Newton's own letter to Hooke gave us the famous line about standing on the shoulders of giants. Some historians read it as a veiled dig at Hooke's short stature, and others read it as plain gratitude.
A long-told legend says Newton had Hooke's portrait destroyed after becoming Royal Society President in 1703. The evidence is thin. One article says the case against him is circumstantial: the Society moved buildings soon after Hooke's death and the portrait is not heard of again. Call it tabloid-grade history. It tells you he held grudges, but it proves nothing about the portrait.
On the harm test, we found no words or campaigning of his own against any group. The sticking point is money. Author Nat Dyer argues Newton's Mint income rose from about £100 a year at Cambridge to nearly £3,500, and that much of the gold behind it came from Brazil, mined by enslaved people. Dyer points to a 1701 letter in which Newton wrote “We can have no bullion but from the West Indies.” Dyer himself says this shouldn't radically change how we see Newton, and one historian says bankers of the era were all linked to the slave trade. Hence the asterisk.
Nothing new on him lately beyond that 2024 argument, which is why the page reads more like a historical file than breaking goss. Anything on his religion or other private writings is outside what we could source and verify here, so we've left it alone. That's honestly the whole list.