Mary Carleton’s false additions: the case of the ‘German Princess’

Abstract

Mary Moders Carleton aka Henrietta Maria de Wolway, the 'German Princess' (1635-73), was the subject of a sensational trial at the Old Bailey in 1663 in which she successfully defended herself against charges of bigamy and imposture brought by her new husband, John Carleton, an eighteen-year-old lawyer's clerk. Even before the trial began, the incarcerated 'German Princess' was the talk of London; her acquittal confirmed her as a figure of scandalous celebrity with a reputation for formidable arts of persuasion and argument under duress. By all accounts, Mary played the part of a distressed and victimised foreign aristocrat - alienated from her just position and possessions - very well indeed. The prosecution, on the other hand, bungled their case. They managed to furnish a witness to Mary's first marriage in Kent but failed to deliver the husband, a shoemaker by whom she was said to have borne two children who died in infancy. Claims that Mary had already been tried for bigamy in Kent and that she was well known for her fraudulent adventures there as 'quality in disguise' were dismissed as hearsay by the judge. There was luck in it, and legal nicety, but if Mary had not performed impressively, the verdict might well have gone against her. It was her talent for passing as a wronged gentlewoman and a 'stranger' newly arrived in London that allowed Mary to cut such a compelling and mysterious public figure. Indeed, Mary went so far as to claim that it was John Carleton, her young husband, and his family who had tricked her into marriage and then prosecuted her under false pretences: [I]f any be deceived, I am. My lord, If that they could have been insured that I had been the person as to Estate, that they imagined me to be, your Lordship should not have been troubled... they would have been contented to have practised concealment, in case I had had more than one husband. Instead of this defamation that I am loaded with, my Lord, my crime is, that I have not an Estate, or at least such a one as they imagined it to be.1 Mary presented herself to the court as what she was - from a meritocratic standpoint and in terms of the romance plot she had adopted: quality without an estate. She refuted the charge of bigamy with a series of double entendres and apercus like something spoken by an actress in one of the modish city comedies playing at London theatres:2 My Lord, they brand me for marrying of a Shoo-make, and another sad piece of Mortality, a Brick-layer. My lord, My Soul abhorreth such a thought, and never was accomodated with such Condiscention, to move in so low an Orb. My Lord, by all that I can observe of the Persons that appear against me, they may be divided into two sorts; the one of them come against me for want of Wit, the other for want of Money.3 That this daughter of a Kentish musician called Moders, probably raised in the immigrant Dutch community in Canterbury, was able to pass 'en Princesse', as she later put it, owed much to her own talents and industry. At a time when the unsettled relation of merit and commerce to social value and prestige was a matter of constant, everyday debate, Mary was a case in point. Well-spoken, charming, highly literate and plausibly accoutred, she had taken advantage of the unusual opportunities for education and 'finishing' that seemed to have come her way through her musician father's genteel connections. The character of 'the German Princess', which Mary was able to flesh out in great detail in person and in print, was probably based in part on a woman Mary encountered at Dover and in whose service she travelled to Cologne; in part on her knowledge of romance conventions; and in part on the ubiquity of similar stories of dispossessed, exiled and often impoverished aristocrats returning from exile in the early years of post-Restoration London.4 Mary's scandalous celebrity began with her imprisonment in London on charges of bigamy but, interestingly, it was news of her previous scams outside the capital, delivered in the form of a letter to her new husband's family, that precipitated Mary's arrest. …