The Peel Act of 1844 is often portrayed as the legal embodiment of David Ricardo’s monetary ideas. This paper argues that it was not. Ricardo’s final proposal regulated note issue through market signals—the value of paper relative to gold and the foreign exchanges—whereas Peel imposed a quantity constraint tied to bullion reserves. Using monthly circulation data and quotation-level foreign exchange and gold data, the paper evaluates whether these different rules were policy-equivalent over 1821–1844. Because Bank of England operations distorted the post-1822 London gold quotation, Ricardo’s rule is implemented primarily with the Paris sight rate, with Hamburg used as an additional quotation-level check through 1827. The Peel Act would have bound in 26 of 280 monthly observations. In none of those 26 cases does Ricardo’s rule call for contraction under transaction-cost bands ranging from 0.5 to 1.5 percent. In December 1825 the divergence is especially clear: on the monthly-average data, the Peel Act rule would have required a contraction in note circulation of almost 30%, while Ricardo’s rule called for expansion as the foreign exchanges indicated conditions favorable to bullion inflow into London.