Welcome to Criminalia, a production of Shondaland Audio in partnership with iHeartRadio.
There was something about Mary, but despite her claims, it wasn't an inheritance, prestigious titles, peerage, or any aristocratic honors. Mary Carlton was born in Canterbury, England, in sixteen forty two, probably in January of that year, although some reports suggest she may have been a virgo. She spent a lifetime using false identities to conmen into marrying her and then defrauding them as a way to not just boost her
bank account but also often social status as well. One con that we'll talk about is her renowned German princess persona. But ultimately, though, it wasn't this fabulous's fraud, deception or her way of putting one over on you that caught up with her. It was the bigamy. It'll make sense, trust me. Welcome to Criminalia.
I'm Marian Tremarky and I'm Holly Frye. Mary Carlton became famous for being famous when the paparazzi and media of her day caught wind of a bigamy scandal involving her. Why would they care about a young woman from an unknown family in southeastern England. Mary was self styling as a mysterious German royal at the time, and while we do know that she was not of royal blood, her real identity has actually been debated over the decades. Modern
historians agree that she was born as Mary Motors. Her father, a Canterbury musician, was either a chorister or a fiddler. But we don't really meet up with Mary on the historical record until she is legally accused of a crime noe not fraud. Even though she did a lot of that bigamy divorce we need to note in this time in England was not only scandalous, it was unheard of.
Let's go to the beginning to Mary and her first husband, Thomas Deadman. Mary and Thomas lived in Canterbury, where he worked as a journeyman shoemaker, and being a journeyman really just meant he was an apprentice working for a master cobbler. Some sources report she and Thomas had two children, both of whom died in infancy or perhaps maybe in childbirth. Years into their marriage, Mary left Thomas and moved to Dover,
which is about twenty miles outside of Canterbury. Mary was included in the Newgate Calendar, which is a biographical book of criminals that was published in the eighteenth century, and in it detailed that she had grown unhappy in her first marriage because her husband wasn't wealthy and couldn't quote support her in the splendor she always aimed at. In Dover, she married a second time to a man named Thomas Day, who was a surgeon. But when she left her first marriage,
Mary she just laughed. It's not like she could have filed for divorce, but legally she and Thomas Deadman were still married when she married Thomas Day, according to seventeenth century English law, one marriage at a time, Please and arrest warrant was issued for her for bigamy. Mary was tried in Maidstone, but because her first husband couldn't afford to travel the thirty or so miles to the trial and testify against her, the case was dismissed.
After her trial, Mary traveled to Cologne solo, and while in Germany, she told a few lies about herself, her wealth, and her personal history, so basically she established what would become her usual fraudulent scripts. She had a brief affair with a local nobleman who showered her with expensive gifts and desperately wanted to marry her. It was when he began preparations seriously for a wedding that Mary skipped town.
She skipped country. Actually, she returned to England with all of the lavish gifts she had received from him, as well as it turned out as much of her landlady's savings.
When Mary returned to London in sixteen sixty three, she shook off her two marriages and took on the persona of a German princess named Maria or Henrietta Maria de Wolwei, and her story was that she was a noble woman forced to flee an unwanted arranged marriage. Specifically, in her fictional backstory, she claimed to be the orphaned Princess von Wolway from Cologne and claimed her father was Henry von Bolweg, a lawyer and Lord of Holmestein, just like Maria. Though
Henry was not real. She really took these personas she created very seriously. Her Princess Khan was perhaps her most sensational and best known work. To breathe some life into her fictional characters, Mary used corroboration in her scams. She would often arrange for someone to send her letters that contained updates on friends and family and Cologne, or wherever her fake identity had taken her fictional every word, but
her marks didn't know that. Most often, Mary used letters to fool men into thinking her fabricated identities were real identities. The German Princess Act was not her first royal ruse, but probably her best.
When a new landlady found and read letters from Mary's friends in Cologne, she was convinced that Mary really was a princess. She wanted Mary to meet her nephew and wouldn't they make a lovely pair. Knowing her landlady was reading her correspondence, Mary arranged for a new letter to be sent, in which she was informed her brother had died and he had left her with everything, including her forthcoming inheritance from her also deceased father. But there was
a snag. She could only have the inheritance if she married the man from whom she'd fled back in Germany, and when her landlady's nephew stepped in to offer help, some reports suggest that he did offer marriage, Mary didn't hesitate to take advantage of the situation. Now, she didn't marry her landlady's nephew, at least not that we're aware of,
but she took the opportunity to fleece him. Yes, so we just said Mary often used this kind of method to defraud men, but really she would defraud anyone if she could, women and landlords, maybe even kids. Anybody she came in contact with was likely to lose some money. She sometimes worked with the aid of an accomplice, her maid, also known at the time as a lady's companion. Mary was sometimes accused of the classic con charge obtaining money
and property under false pretenses. We know her details of her German princess swindle because it was part of her court trial and court report, but it can be hard to know the extent of her work. More than three hundred years have passed since her death, and as we've noticed, history isn't always great with keeping paperwork safe. Many of her husbands and other marks were likely too embarrassed to reveal that they had been duped and left with empty pockets.
We're going to take a break for a word from our sponsor now, and when we return we will talk about how Mary's next marriage is the one that made her famous.
Welcome back to Criminalia. Look, we all knew it was coming. Marrying Mary got married.
Again in April of sixteen sixty three. Mary hit her next mark. She employed her royal alias Swindle to captivate and marry John Carlton, who was either an eighteen year old law clerk or perhaps a young surgeon. Records suggest as way more likely, though, that he was a clerk and she, it was rumored, despite her alleged royal background and assumed wealth, was quite a spendthrift with his money. Carlton became the surname by which she's remembered in history.
And that's because she was arrested using that name, and she had a very public trial. She was arrested for masquerading as a German princess, for marrying John Carlton under a fraudulent identity, and, as we've said, for bigamy. Some sources suggest her fraud was exposed through an anonymous letter that was sent to John shortly after the wedding, debunking
her princess story and exposing her other marriages. Mary had gained notoriety as a princess, a real princess as far as anyone knew the matter here though, wasn't that fraud? To quote her court records, The trial of Mary Motor's alias Stedman, styled the German Prince at the Old Bailey for bigamy fifteen Charles the Second AD sixteen sixty three. So to be clear on this, bigamy is entering into one marriage while the previous one is undissolved, and that
certainly fits Mary's situation. All right, now that we've got that out of the way, let's go to court.
While she awaited trial, London's German Princess was the talk of the town. You wouldn't be wrong to call Mary's trial at the Old Bailey, which was the central criminal court of England and Wales, a sensational one. Mary defended herself against charges brought against her by her new husband bigamy and possibly impoture. Depending on the report or transcript we read. The whole event happened both in and out
of the courtroom. Back in this day, if you were literate, you were likely getting your news and general information and gossip from pamphlets. Pamphlets were kind of a forerunner to newspapers. News wasn't really printed within periodical publications in England. Yet at this time. The London Gazette, for instance, claims to be England's oldest newspaper. It published its first edition as the Oxford Gazette in November of sixteen sixty five, and that's after Mary's trial.
Both Mary and John published pamphlets to tell their personal narratives and gained support for their individual side of the story. Several, perhaps dozens of pamphlets were written by them both. Most of these pamphlets, to be honest, were for mud slanging, but as a whole they were ultimately heartbreakingly detailed accounts of a marriage gone wrong, focused on he said, She said volleys between the pair, the kind of gossip that
sells more pamphlets. Mary detailed the quote incivilities and miseries that she endured in marriage that are, according to her quote, irredeemable by the laws of the Kingdom may against femis covert. So a femis covert, if you haven't googled that yet, is a now obsolete legal term for a married woman. John replied in his pamphlets by calling her quote this two legged monster, and the Canterbury German specifically accusing Mary of not being a real princess and of not even
being German either. Mary in response claimed that John himself had exaggerated his own status and had when they met, claimed to be a lord, which he was absolutely not, and she stated this bombshell in court that he was only trying to end their marriage because he had discovered
she had no money or impending inheritance. There were also pamphlets published that reported sensationalized details of what went on inside the courtroom, on the scene and in the moment, and these were distributed right there at the trial.
Throughout the trial, Mary, who as we mentioned, defendant herself, played the character of a victim, a distressed foreign aristocrat, alienated from her home, her finances, and her possessions, and on trial overseas. As for the prosecution, they bungled their case. They managed to produce a witness to her first marriage,
but they failed to deliver the husband, Thomas Steadman. In addition, any claims that Mary had already been tried for bigamy, remember Thomas didn't show in the courtroom in Maidstone, and any accounts of her well known spurious and double dealing adventures were dismissed as hearsay by the judge Ultimately, though, this was not a trial about donning fictional personas, marrying under false pretenses, or much of anything to do with
personal finance. As we keep saying, these were all about bigamy. And because neither of her first two husbands, Thomas Stedman or Thomas Day, traveled to appear at this trial in London, Mary Carlton was acquitted without other husbands, there was no bigamy case.
By all accounts, Mary's acquittal only confirmed to the public that she was a figure of scandalous celebrity. Perhaps in an attempt to cash in on her freedom and her new fifteen minutes of fame, or maybe just to set her fictional story straight, Mary wrote an autobiographical work, which was of course not a true story of her life in any way at all. It was called The Case of Madam Mary Carlton, and in it she detailed an account of her life and the events that she claimed
to have lived through. It was kind of an expanded version of a previous writing she had published that was a work called An Historical Narrative of the German Princess. She promised her audience the book would set the record straight about her quote, birth, education and fortunes. What her audience got was part romance narrative of her lovers and husbands, and part exposition of her husband, John Carlton and his family.
That latter part about the Carlton family is interesting, and it's interesting because Mary accuses his family of tricking her into marriage in order to secure her wealth, or more accurately, the wealth they thought she had, and then prosecuting her under false pretenses. In addition to personal details, Mary also included details of her trial in this book in her own words, as she had testified in court, quote, if
any be deceived, I am my lord. If that they could have been ensured that I had been the person as to a state that they imagined me to be, your Lordship should not have been troubled. They would have been contented to have practiced 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 they imagined it to be. She also wrote of her time growing up in a noble family in Germany.
This telling of her pretend background is also interesting because she, like any good con artist, got her backstory out there ahead of those who might try to discredit her, especially that princess part and the many husband's part two. Probably.
She also writes about the moments leading up to being charged with bigamy and describes the moment of her acquittal. There's an interesting common theme in the story. She tells. It's a question actually that emerges in her writing, and that question is what's so bad about pretending you're a princess? To quote her from the case of Madame Mary Carlton quote, what harm have I done in pretending to great titles?
When it came to the taking money under false pretenses part Mary actually had a few things to say about that too. She stated that as a woman under English law, she was deprived of her right to secure quote The Ways to a Better Fortune. Women were essentially second class citizens in England in Mary's lifetime. At birth, they became subject to their fathers and then later to their husbands.
They had limited opportunities and were mostly focused on their households. Basically, she argued that she wouldn't and couldn't be able to live her best life until such unjust laws against women were changed. Despite her arrests for bigamy. Mary continued to improve her financial and social situations through marriage. Bigamy be damned.
So we're going to take a break forward from our sponsor right now. When we return, we'll talk about Mary's post trial fifteen Minutes of Fame.
Welcome back to Criminalia. The final years of Mary's life are interesting, with her doing things that range from play acting and engaging in additional marriages to imprisonment and execution. But let's start with the happier times. Mary on stage.
As we know, during her fifteen Minutes of Fame, Mary published The Case of Madam Mary Carlton, but she also took to the stage after her trial concluded, starring as herself in a play in London. Some reports suggest she performed at what would become the legendary Duke's Theater, but we're actually not so sure the dates match up on that.
The German Princess was written by John Holden in sixteen sixty four, but the original Dukes known as the Dorset Gardens Theater, didn't open its doors until sixteen seventy one. But regardless of which playhouse it was staged in, Holden wrote a dramatization of real life fraud based on Mary's
adventurous life, and she performed it. We have a little taste from the epilogue she delivered as an example quote, the world's a cheat, and we that move in it in our degrees, do exercise our wit and better 'tis to get a glorious name. However, got than live by common fame.
It was a box office success. English diarist Samuel Peeps was said to have been taken in by Mary and claimed that he had seen the play several times. Of the work, he wrote that he quote saw the German princess acted by the woman herself. The whole play is very simple, unless here and there a witty sprinkler or two. She grew a bit of a loyal local following, and many reports suggest she married one of her admirers, which
would bring her to husband number four. Mary is Mary, though so she left him and took all his money. To quote Mary's fake autobiographical character on stage, You think me a bold cheat, but which of you are not?
When the plays run ended a newscam. This time she brought in an accomplice who pretended to be her husband. She would bring a suitor home, only to be discovered with him by her jealous spouse, remember thanks spouse. Fearing blackmail or scandal, these would be suitors. Her marks basically paid whatever she asked so they could get out of there without any undue attention.
As the years went by, Mary also began other non aristocratic and non marital frauds, including mostly running small cons on local merchants to keep cash flowing. Years after her high profile bigamy trial, Mary also began stealing, specifically stealing silver tankards from taverns and then reselling them. When she was caught taking one in the Covent Garden district, she was arrested. Mary was charged, convicted of robbery, and transported
to Jamaica for her punishment. Jamaica, you may be wondering, Yes, Jamaica. England had recently gained claim of Jamaica from Spain in sixteen seventy through the Treaty of Madrid, and had taken to sending indentured servants and prisoners to the island to serve out their punishments. And as far as Mary's story goes, in sixteen seventy two, she either sneaked or swindled her way aboard a ship and returned to London, where she again began what seems to have been one of her
favorite cons pretending to be a rich heiress. Some reports suggest she married again to an apothecary at Westminster. That would have been her fifth marriage, at least as far as we know. Do we have to say it all righty we will? Mary took his money and she left.
While living in a boarding house in London, Mary, through simple bad luck, was recognized in the building by a man who worked as a guard in one of the prisons in which she had once spent a little time for one of her various crimes. Technically escaped from a penal colony, Mary was on the lamb. It wasn't long after she was spotted that she was arrested, and at this time things were much more serious. She was sentenced
to death. Mary pled the belly, which is a turn of phrase meaning she told the court she was pregnant. Pregnancy changed the picture because pregnant women's execution sentences weren't carried out until their babies were born. But her lie was exposed after midwives examined her. Mary was not pregnant. She was convicted on January sixteenth, sixteen seventy three and
sentenced to death. On January twenty second. Mary was hanged at a now infamous execution spot, the Tyburn Tree, which actually wasn't a tree at all, but rather than name for a three legged gallows at the Tower of Tyburn, a scaffold capable of publicly hanging twenty four people at once, twenty four people at once. Mary, who had just turned thirty one years old when she died, is buried at Saint Martin's Churchyard in London, and there's no word if
any of her husband's plural traveled to her execution. I hope that you called today's scam sauce sprinkle.
That's my favorite I did. I called it the witty sprinkle because that's a great name for.
A das ergic. And as soon as I saw that we're pop up in Whenever Quits, I was like, Oh, no, that was Samuel, wasn't it who we were quoting?
Yes, thanks Samuel. Peak that I was trying to think for Mary about a drink that suited her story and would be a little bit of a fun place to land on since her story ends in tragedy, Even though to her marks there was probably a lot of tragedy Before them, I kept thinking about her many marriages and the kinds of drinks you would have at a wedding, even though I think probably she wasn't having big weddings.
I wanted a toe staying celebration drink, but I also wanted one that's strong enough that it will knock you on your keyster and make you unable to travel twenty miles to testify. So this is the Witty Sprinkle, and this is a drink that you're making for two. It's actually not as heavy hitting as it might sound initially because you're splitting it. So it is two ounces of reposato tequila, one ounce of a raspberry liqueur like shambour, one ounce of lime juice, and then an optional splash
of simple or vanilla syrup. You have the liqueur, which is sweet, but because of how this plays out to me, it felt a little too tart and crisp without it. But if you like a crisp drink, you could skip that syrup. You're gonna shake this, you're gonna strain it into two chilled coups, and then you're gonna top it with prosecco, so you get like a champagne cocktail, but it's a prosecco cocktail and it has tequila in it, so kaboo. It's very pretty because of the raspberry liquur.
Its is beautiful pink color. It feels like a wedding drink that you would have, except you would have it many times over and maybe not feel great in the morning, depending on how you handle tequila and champagne cocktails, which you can also use champagne instead of prosecco. Prosecco also helps sweeten it a little bit more, which is why I went with that. This is one of those drinks I personally have to be careful with because it is
exactly the ingredients that make me way too drunk. Tequila and I have made friends, but we're not like besties. And champagne cocktails I love, but I find that they will hit me harder than one would anticipate. As a combo, this is borderline deadly. If you want to do the mocktail version of it, you are going to sub out that reposado tequila for and agave juice. I would recommend cutting it with a little bit of water because I find it to be too sweet on its own. And
then you're also gonna add raspberry syrup. I prefer at this point you already have a juice involved. Cut back the raspberry syrup to like three quarters of an ounce instead of a full ounce. Keep your one ounce of lime juice. You don't have to bother with any additional syrup at that point, and then top it once you've shaken it and strained it into pre chilled coups with a little light ginger ale and you're you're ready. And
that's actually a very yummy drink. That's one of those mocktails that I would want to make the base of it in batches and just have the ginger ale ready to pour over to like have it a party, because it's really easy and yummy. You can also make the cocktail in batches at that point too, but tequila at scale is always scary. That is the witty sprinkle, which hopefully you find as delicious and giggle worthy as I do,
and it takes the Jeff Mary's sad end. We are grateful that you hung out with us today and talked about Mary and her many marriages. We will be right back here again next week with another cocktail at Mocktail and another story of scams.
Criminalia is a production of Shondaland Audio in partnership with iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from Shondaland Audio, please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.