Princesses Behaving Badly (22 page)

Contemporary investigators had other theories. One craniologist (a person who examines the shape of the skull for clues about a person’s character) declared her “cold,” noting that she possessed “boundless ambition.” Surprisingly, he found that she had little “secretiveness” but exceptional “wariness” and “vanity,” indicating to him that her object in this little games was, “I, I, I, it is I, who can nose-lead you, and make fools of ye all!” Investigations into her character conducted by the indefatigable John Matthews Gutch of a local Bristol newspaper reveal a woman who had an incredible imagination and loved attention. Gutch found that everyone who knew Mary remembered her as an eccentric or a teller of tall tales “which never did harm to any body, but seemed to arise from the love of telling something extraordinary.” Gutch was clearly impressed with Mary, writing, “That the talents of such a girl should have been hitherto
directed to no better purpose, every one must lament.”

But Mary’s fantasies bordered on pathological. Even her “real” story was riddled with lies, many of them bizarre. Unlike the story she told Mrs. Worrall, she was clearly aware of the nature of Madgalen Hospital, the home for former prostitutes. She’d told the admitting officials she’d been led to a dissolute life by a gentleman who seduced her, and rather than be kicked out, she’d left of her own accord. She hadn’t been prostituting herself, so why she went to Madgalen Hospital is unclear. Whether she was ever married is another instance where her narrative detours from provable truth, though contemporary sources all agree that she did have a child and that the boy died around four months old. If anything, her stories and lies became more fanciful after her child’s death.

Such behavior is consistent with the idea that stress can bring on a mental breakdown, especially if the person was predisposed to a manic state. Which Mary may have been—people who survive rheumatic fever also suffer a higher incidence of neuropsychiatric disorders, including manic depression. So maybe her father’s claim that she’d been a bit strange since suffering a fever wasn’t too far off the mark.

As to why people believed her, that’s clear: she was a good actress, and they wanted to. The Romantic ideal of the “Orient” was incredibly fashionable at the time, permeating popular culture through art, poetry, picture books, even interior design. Having a Javasu princess pitch up in one’s quiet village must have seemed incredibly exotic. Who wouldn’t have wanted to believe she was the real deal?

After Mary’s deception was uncovered and published in local newspapers, interest in the erstwhile princess of Javasu only increased. Curiosity seekers from all walks of life—earls, doctors, and an unceasing parade of Christian ministers hoping to save her soul—came to town to meet her.

But in 1817, only a few months after she was found out, Mary left Bristol on a ship bound for America, her passage paid by the estimable Mrs. Worrall, whose kindness evidently knew no bounds. Tales of Mary’s hoax preceded her arrival in Philadelphia. The city’s wharves were crowded with curiosity seekers, and plans were already afoot to get her onto the stage, playing herself as the character she’d made up. “Carraboo,” as she was called in America, was a phenomenon, fueling a passion for
turbans among fashionable ladies. But Mary soon became the subject of ridicule. Certainly, an element of teasing the gullible British characterized local newspaper reports of Miss Carraboo’s American exploits, including swimming
up
a waterfall. But there was also a good deal of moral outrage that this girl, who’d “made her self notorious” in her native country, as one editorial boomed, would show herself in America.

By 1824, Mary was back in London, exhibiting herself at a New Bond Street public room as Princess Caraboo. Paying customers were few, and income didn’t cover the cost of renting the rooms. Fame, it seems, lasts only so long. But all did not end badly for the wannabe royalty. Mary returned to Bristol, where she started a business supplying medicinal leeches to the local hospital and pharmacies. She married Richard Baker and had a daughter, also named Mary, who kept up the business after her mother’s death. Mary the younger may have also inherited her mother’s colorful nature—she became the town’s crazy cat lady.

Mary Baker, a.k.a. Princess Caraboo, died in Bristol on Christmas Eve 1864, at the age of 75. Her story has continued to fascinate, resurfacing periodically in popular culture in the years since her grand adventure. In the 1990s, it was made into a film starring Phoebe Cates, a play in Bristol, and a BBC television program. Mary would have been proud. After all, she sure loved a good story.

Princess Caraboo was by no means the only woman who ever tried to pass herself off as a princess. History is littered with royal imposters who, for reasons of love, greed, or insanity, pretended to be someone they most certainly were not.

Most rely on a “Princess and the Pea” strategy: talk like a princess, act like a princess, make a fuss about vegetables under your mattress like a princess, and maybe everyone will believe you
are
a princess. Other imposters have bet on their audience’s ignorance and willingness to believe; like Caraboo, these were usually exceptional actresses gifted with an incredible imagination (and gall). And in some cases, the fiction worked because the would-be princess came to believe her own crazy story.

So if you’re thinking of giving it a go as a royal fake, here are six notable attempts to learn from.

1. M
AKE A NAME FOR YOURSELF
:
P
RINCESS
T
ARAKANOVA

In 1774 a young woman surfaced in Paris claiming to be the legitimate daughter of Russian tsar Peter III’s aunt, Empress Elizabeth, and her secret husband, Count Aleksy Razumovsky. Had that been true, her claim to the throne would have been greater than that of the reigning empress, Catherine the Great, who’d achieved her power through marriage rather than by blood.

The woman bizarrely called herself Princess Tarakanova, or Princess Cockroach (
tarakan
means “cockroach” in Russian). She claimed it was a pet name given by her illustrious
mother before she sent her to be raised in Persia. Beautiful and well educated, Tarakanova had attracted a few European aristocrats to be part of her entourage. (Note: When pretending to be a princess, it’s helpful to have some real royalty on hand to bolster your claims.)

Her timing was bad. Catherine the Great had just had her boozy husband murdered in a bloody coup and was in no mood to entertain claimants to her throne. The self-proclaimed princess, now living on borrowed splendor in Italy, graciously offered to split the Russian empire with Catherine, noting that she didn’t want to have to resort to calling on the Turks for military support. But Catherine was not one to hesitate about squashing little bugs. Especially when evidence turned up that Princess Cockroach had been put up to the plot by Polish rebels looking to sow the seeds of revolution in Russia.

Still, Catherine worried that the notoriety and support the girl was attracting could lead to rebellion. So she sent a former lover, Count Alexei Orlov, to Italy. The plan was to gain the princess’s trust, pretend to support her claim, seduce her, and then kidnap her.

It worked. Orlov lured Tarakanova onto his ship with the promise of marriage, and when she was safely on board he sprang his trap. The princess was arrested and returned to Russia. She died in prison in 1776, barely a year after her capture, still awaiting trial. At the time of her death, rumors circulated that she drowned in her cell during a flood. In reality, she died of an illness no doubt exacerbated by life behind bars.

2. D
RESS THE PART
:
P
RINCESS
S
USANNA
C
AROLINE
M
ATILDA

In the early 1770s, the sister of Queen Charlotte—wife of England’s George III and namesake of plenty of cities, counties, roads, and pubs in the British colonies—visited the New World. Colonial gossips, starved for news of the old country, were all atwitter. Never heard of Princess Susanna Caroline
Matilda? She was evicted from court after a scandal. But isn’t Queen Charlotte from Germany? Why doesn’t Princess Susanna speak German? Why, that’s because she is refusing to speak her native tongue until she’s reconciled to her most beloved sister. Royal scandal! everyone squeaked.

For a year and a half, Princess Susanna was
the
social accessory in Virginia and the Carolinas, passed from house to house and put up in lavish comfort. So imagine everyone’s shock when the princess was revealed to be not a disgraced royal but an escaped convict.

Princess Susanna was in fact Sarah Wilson, born in Staffordshire and hired in London as a maidservant to Caroline Vernon, one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting. After a short time in Vernon’s employ, it was discovered that Wilson had managed to steal a fine dress, a miniature portrait of the queen, and some jewels, among other things. She was tried and sentenced to death; thanks to Vernon’s kind intervention, her sentence was commuted to transportation to the colonies.

Wilson arrived in Baltimore in 1771 and was sold as an indentured servant to William Devall, a plantation owner in Maryland. Somehow she escaped and ran away to Virginia, taking with her the ill-gotten dress, jewels, and portrait (which, incredibly and inexplicably, she’d managed to hang on to throughout her trial, sentencing, and transatlantic voyage). These items would serve her well in her new identity, as would the court gossip she’d picked up as a servant.

So furnished, Wilson became Princess Susanna for the excited locals, who put her up in their guest rooms and allowed her to hold court in their living rooms. She was, it appears, an exceptional actress: meticulous in her details, she had even embroidered little crowns with her monogram onto her linens. She adopted the attitude of an exiled aristocrat, letting it be known that she still had some influence in the royal houses of Europe and implying that kindness toward her might bring financial rewards. How long she intended to keep up the fiction is unclear,
but in the meantime she was doing a brisk business in favors.

Word in the colonies didn’t travel fast, and it wasn’t until months after Wilson’s escape that Devall heard about the exiled princess. He sent one of his men down to South Carolina, where she was then residing, to bring her back into custody. The man found Wilson happily holding court at a local worthy’s house. After unmasking her true identity, he ushered her out the door at gunpoint.

Back in Devall’s service, Wilson spent two years as a humble servant until fate once again gave her an opportunity to escape. When another Sarah Wilson arrived in the colony, she managed to switch places with the woman. The erstwhile princess later married a British officer, and the couple set themselves up in business using the money she’d amassed during her time as an exiled aristocrat. They lived happily ever after, growing a big family and enjoying life in postrevolutionary America.

3. P
UBLISH YOUR STORY
:
P
RINCESS
O
LIVE OF
C
UMBERLAND

Olivia Serres, née Wilmot, was a woman who sometimes found herself in debt. And when she did, well, the most expedient thing to do was to claim that she was not just Olivia Serres, semi-successful landscape painter and novelist, but Princess Olive of Cumberland, the sometimes-legitimate, sometimes-illegitimate daughter of the king’s brother.

Olivia first made her claim in 1817, putting forth a petition to King George III (who was by then irretrievably mad) that she was the illegitimate daughter of the late Henry Frederick, duke of Cumberland. This, however, wasn’t enough to keep Serres out of debtors’ prison, so in 1820 she revised her claim: she was his
legitimate
daughter, born April 3, 1772, of his secret marriage to Olive Wilmot, which had taken place on March 4, 1767.

Olivia wasn’t content to appeal just to the British royal
family; she took her case to the court of public opinion. Repeatedly. A prolific writer, she published pamphlet after pamphlet explaining her contradictory claims; she once had London papered in posters that read “The Princess of Cumberland in Captivity!” In 1822, Olivia published her pièce de résistance, the aptly titled “Princess of Cumberland’s Statement to the English Nation.” Ridiculously long and meandering, it includes descriptions of an episode in which the young princess is rescued from drowning by a dog, and another in which she is beset by robbers in her own home.

More to the point, Olivia claimed that her uncle, Dr. Wilmot, was in fact her grandfather, and that he’d secretly married a Polish princess. The product of that union was Olivia’s mother, who’d caught the fancy of the duke of Cumberland and married him in 1767. But their domestic bliss was tragically torn asunder. The duke abandoned his wife, who died soon after, and bizarrely abandoned his daughter into the care of a Warwick house painter with a tendency to embezzle.

Happily for Olivia, everyone who could have attested to the truth of her claims was dead: the duke died in 1790; King George checked out in 1820; and Olive Wilmot, her mother, “died of a broken heart” sometime at the beginning of the princess’s narrative. Olivia backed up her claim with a lucky resemblance to the deceased duke and a bit of theatricality. She had the royal arms painted on her coach and hired footmen dressed in royal livery. The rest of her “proof” consisted of copies of letters between herself and members of the royal family and various ministers, as well as signed affidavits purporting to support her claims—all of which were forgeries.

Olivia upheld the fiction, often in print, until her death in debtors’ prison in 1835. One of her last pamphlets, titled “Wrongs of Her Royal Highness the Princess Olive of Cumberland,” was published in 1833 and declares that “every law, both human and Divine, has been violated in the person of this lady.” It ends, “This Subject to be Continued …” And it
was. After Olivia’s death, her daughter took up the cause and demanded to be recognized as Princess Lavinia of Cumberland. Unsurprisingly, she was denied.