Ridiculous Crime is a production of iHeartRadio.
Hi Saron, Hello Elizabeth.
How are you doing today?
I'm doing pretty good. It was raining earlier and I was like a nice rainy dish. Yeah, yeah, I'm good. How about you? How are you good?
I'm good.
Yeah, I'm good.
In my head and my body.
That's the best place to be good.
Why not? Do you know it's ridiculous?
I do, Elizabeth. Now, I have to admit I don't know if this is real. Okay, it doesn't matter, right, But I often have this where I'm like, I spend a lot of my time now and I'm not just talking like oh this is ai slop? Is this real? Question? But like just news stories. I will see like a news story roll past and I'm like, is that real? And I have to click on it. I spend a lot of time not reading things I want to read, but reading things I have to discide is that real? Is that true? Could that be?
Ye?
Here's another example, according to and this is why I don't believe it w x y z S Channel seven News, a Florida woman has been accused of entering the Penguin enclosure to teach them him to tap dance using a live alligator as her partner. Jacksonville, Florida, PD stated she was also dressed as a pineapple. Wait, the guy just can't believe that's true. But I could very well tell me you x y Z a real station. I didn't look it up. I just saw this. I didn't have
enough time. This is what I mean. Is I've yet to I haven't looked into this one. This is I'm giving you fresh. Is this real? This is like just happened. I was in walking into the studio and I was like, that can't pay. Too many were telling you right now where I.
Am dressed like a pineapple?
Yes, walks into a penguin enclosure with a live alligator and was like, all y'all want to boogie woogie?
Helping to teach tap?
Yeah, okay, well but yeah, I guess so yeah, tap dancing it was involved. So I don't know if he was tapping to teach or he was a demonstrating so much like don't do it like.
This strong army, making making them participate.
Maybe he was the better dancer, Maybe he was teaching, you.
Know, maybe he was the one doing all the moves.
He's like, let's go show these penguins because when you're not here, I need someone to dance.
I like that. I like so this is such a strange world that we live.
In every day. Headline six or seventy you brought like is that headline? Reeal? I have to go and read it, and that's a new thing for me where I'm just spending all my day going is that real?
Is this real? Do you want to know what else is ridiculous?
Elizabeth?
This hot take? Renaissance pamphlets are basically zines. Oh this is Ridiculous Crime a podcast about absurd and outrageous capers, hes and cons. It's always ninety nine percent murder free and one hundred percent ridiculous.
Damn right, I know this.
Our cycles have sinked once again. This is apparently historical crime Week here.
I know.
I got one for you from hundreds of years ago.
I like this. Yeah, no iPhone faces in these stories.
Oh it's the best. And then no one can get mad and send us a message that like, oh, you did a show.
But got my story wrong. I'm actually her granddaughter is exactly how dare you?
I love that. So we're going back to the sixteen hundreds, Bibery.
Yeah.
Sixteen forty two, Okay, the Treaty of Axiom was signed between the Dutch West India Company and the chiefs of the Enzema people in the modern day African nation of Ghana. That happened that year Broxhom folks in Galway, Ireland. They seized an English naval ship and closed the town gates to support the Irish rebellion of sixteen forty one. The years are okay, still going on. Three hundred thousand people died when the Ming dynasty defenders intentionally destroyed damns and
dykes of the Yellow River Washington. It was to break the siege by the large Manchu dynasty rebel force.
Just wash the wash them away. It was like mostly an army that gets washed away and then whoever attackted.
In Colonizer history, Georgiana, Massachusetts now known as York, Maine, became the first incorporated city in the British Colonies of North America.
First incorporated city. They made it official.
They put a ring on it. Able Tasman and his crew became the first Europeans to see Van Diemen's Land, later known as the Australian Island and state of Tasmania. Galileo died that year, so did Willata Petros saint in the Ethiopian Orthodox Touaedo Church.
Wait if okay, go on, sorry, I was going to do something a galley. It doesn't matter what did you say though.
The last part, well, let a Petros saint in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church that that person died as well. This is all sixteen forty two, King Charles the First of England and a bunch of his soldiers ran up on the House of Commons to arrest his critics for treason.
Oh yes, they were getting wild.
They escaped. The critics escaped and were protected by the Lord Mayor of London. And this is a note because that was the last time any monarch entered the House of Commons. That was it. Yeah? Well, and then the English Civil War kicked off one with Charles the First raised the Royal Battle Standard over Nottingham Castle and declared war on his own Parliament. England's Long Parliament ordered the theaters of London closed, a pretty much ended the era of English Renaissance theater.
Right.
Okay, So there's lots going on all across the globe, but a particularly tumultuous time in jolly old England, and that's where we're going to start today, sixteen forty two England. But put a pin in that. So now let's talk about riot Girls.
Okay, this is quite the skip. I'm gonna need a.
Who different record for I just finished listening to Kathleen Hannah's memoir on audible. She was the lead singer of the punk band Bikini Kill and the one who founded the Riot Girl movement. So for the uninitiated, Riot Girl was a feminist punk movement that emerged in the early nineties pretty much like in Olympia Washington and in Washington, DC.
And it combined this like DIY punk music with feminist politics created a space for women to express anger, like reclaim their bodies, challenge sexism in the music industry, and then like society at large. And so the core bands were Bikini Kill, Slater Kinney, and Bratmobile, and there were tons of like self published zines that shared personal writing, political manifestos, and community resources. And there was this phrase girls to the Front that Kathleen Hannah used to yell.
That was this rallying cry that encouraged women to take up like literal and figurative space at shows. So Riot Girl addressed topics that were largely taboo at the time, you know, like sexual assault, body image, racism, homophobia in this really raw, unapologetic and direct way. And it was as much of like a cultural and political network as it was a music scene. Influence third wave feminism.
I was gonna say, it's almost like its own subwave of feminism.
Yeah, exactly, And it left this mark on Indian and punk culture. So the memoir I thought was really good because I went back and forth between totally relating to what she was saying and experiencing, and then also rolling my eyes and how extra she was sometimes and how overly sensitive I thought she was about some things.
They could be super raw and then also super precious to be.
Challenged by writing and art. I don't want to just you know, feel all one way. I like the back and forth of my own reactions. She did get me thinking about why I thought things that she said or did were naive or precious and not like in the what we'd call the real world, like my own programming, you know, by an inherently misogynist society, I suppose. Anyway, when I stumbled upon the woman.
Could you experience a Rye girl summer of your own?
Not necessarily, No, it was like kind of swimming around and like you know, would like listen to parts of it and stuff, but I never got into like the zines in the meetings and like oka going heavy into that kind of stuff.
I got you.
But so I'm looking around, like who am I going to tell you about this week? And I found this woman and it made me think of Kathleen Hannah. So this woman, Mary Carlton, she was just like a blatant criminal. Kathleen Hannah not a blatant and Mary Carlton, though she wrote her own account of her life, and like numerous pamphlets, plays, and broadsides were written about her both during and after her life.
This is beyond uncommon, right.
And so she's this fascinating figure in the history of female agency, crime and celebrity. So she navigated this world with like very few legitimate opportunities for women. Okay, So, like Kathleen Hannah had to choose between waiting tables and stripping in order to make money to get her band on the road for tour. And she chose stripping because there was so much more money involved.
Yeah, so they that I stripped, but I know that there's more money there dancers.
Imagine how tough it was for Mary Carlton three hundred and fifty some years earlier. Yeah. So Carlton and Hannah they no, Yeah, I did the math. They're both they were so audacious.
I mean places where you can actually make a good living right.
And changing and have the agency. So they both they were audacious and they reinvented themselves. So I kind of feel like Mary Carlton was like a proto riot girl.
I like this.
Yeah, I like, I'm going with this, and it's a risk, it's a gamble. I know these dice.
I do a number of riote girls, and so far everything you're describing is eliciting both their spirit and their comportment.
So yeah, see, okay, I'm on the right track. I said, like, people can't from if I tell something from the sixteen hundreds, they can't complain. But now I got like, right, girls are going to come at me. But that's okay.
Now I think you're doing this is it is with love?
And so it was in sixteen forty two, I told you all the things that.
Happened sixteen two.
That was also the year. That's the year that Mary Carlton was born in Canterbury, England. Her dad was a fiddler, professional musician one hundred percent. Going on my list of fake jobs that I tell people, I have taxidermists, greeting card writer, fiddler.
Play green fleas. It's not like to play free bird period exactly. He's like, oh, got it.
So when she arrived in the world in sixteen forty two, she was Mary Moehler's into an England in crisis. She grew up. She married a shoemaker named Thomas Steadman. Like just like Oprah, she hooked up with her. He had a job, but like Mary, wasn't stoked on it. She wanted more. She didn't want to be the daughter of a Canterbury fiddler and the wife of a Canterbury shoemaker.
Ah.
She hung on for four years with this guy, and then Steedman got called to fight in the Civil War and Mary saw her chance. She ran off to Dover, England. So in sixteen sixty, she's eighteen years old, she got busted in Dover. Now let's do the math. Assuming she got busted pretty quickly upon arrival. That means that she was married to the shoemaker when she was fourteen.
I was skipping past that because you did, I know, you know how to do that.
Math so bleaked so common.
Oh yes, yeaheen fourteen and she's four years deep in a marriage at eighteen, just like I want to get to Dover.
I got to get out of here. So she gets to Dover. She got in trouble for trying to marry a surgeon named Thomas Day, like she's trading up. The problem is that she was still married to Stedman. Oh yeah, he's off fighting in Dunkirk, which that place has had it rough Ittilia. But Mary told the court that she heard he was dead. She's like, big of me, not guilty.
You're on her, No, not me. So the judge let her go, but only on the condition that she either provide proof that Stedman was really dead or break it off with the surgeon. And so she.
Says, no, Stedman, he's still fighting at this point on the front. She's a guy.
She She's like, well, I don't have written proof that he was killed in battle, but I'll swear to it in court. And the court's like, well, let's call for him to appear, and he didn't show, so she got acquitted. She's like, there you go proof.
Yeah, okay, no body, no crime.
Wait apparently quote. There was also present at the trial a bricklayer one Billing, who had brought with him a parson and a clerk is witnesses that he too had once married her, but for some reason his case was not ever heard no onet to because he was kind of like a push bricklayer.
Rough hand justice for Billing.
I feel.
This was a guy who hitched us.
That's making me roll the dates back even further. If she was four years in deep with.
The husband was a bigamous so she like married him at sixteen.
She married the original guy like thirteen, and then did four years, got to dover married Billing married Like yeah, there's a lot going on, but I feel like Mary was doing that thing where you start with a paper clip and start trading up until you have like a yacht. For she went from shoemaker a surgeon. Me too.
I can't have that kind of stick to it and care enough. I'll be happy with like the early thing. Like you feel like here's a light bulb. I need a light bulb.
Yeah, exactly, and then I don't have to talk to anyone else. So anyway, she was able to beat the charges, and so she decided like, well, maybe England isn't the place for me.
I love it, by the way, busted in Dovers. It sounds like a Pogue song.
It dover or like a old steady. So they knew too much in England. So she went to Germany, and it was there that she put the moves on a wealthy nobleman, an older gent, and he was all about it. He gave her presence, he bought her clothes, He just like handed her straight up cash, promised her the moon. He's like, as long as you will marry me, And she's like, you know what, why not, I will marry you. Let's do it.
I still have the dress.
I mean there's this whole thing like I might be already married, and like I've already beat big em me by a hair.
People keep saying I'm married everywhere I.
Go, and I think that maybe like this reality got to her.
I think they're just jealous.
Well, like the whirlwind, romance with the nobleman ended just as quickly as it began. Oh, she promised, okay, you know what, I'll marry you in three days. Three days. And he gave her a ton of cash and was like, go get whatever you need for the wedding, my love, okay yeah, and he's spitting. He's like, I just want
to make you mine. So she's staying at this lodge and the nobleman gave the landlady there this wedding chest full of absolute treasure for safe keeping, and Mary would get the chest and all the loot upon their marriage. So as soon as the land lady left the law like she went out to the toilet in the back or something, Mary busted open the chest and took everything, and then she got the heck out of town. She's like, I don't want to marry this guy, Mary marry him.
I want to just like So she got a ticket to Utrecht and ghosted old homie.
Okay.
And I got to say, these men, they're using her for her youth and beauty.
Oh yeah, I don't feel about at all.
They would discard her without a thought.
Yeah, it's a transactional thing. And she just moved quickly exactly.
She decides to use them first fair play. So from utrek she went to Amsterdam, and once there she sold this gold chain and some other jewelry that he'd given her, and she used that cash to get to Rotterdam. And she's smart. She's like spreading out her fencing so it can't really be traced. From Rotterdam, she bounced around a little, and she finally bought a ticket back to England. You know, it's a successful trip to Germany. I've had a bunch
of stuff. It's a fun So she arrived in Billingsgate, which is like this entry point into London at the end of March sixteen sixty three. She's twenty one, sixteen sixty three, okay, And she didn't enter London as Mary Moehlers or Mary Steedman or any other names she'd already held. She walked into the Exchange tavern in central London, dressed to the nines, carrying herself with dignity, dripping in jewels
and speaking with like this slightly continental foreign accent. Can't put your finger on it.
She's like, I imagine, kind of like a less pronounced, kind of.
Like it could be anywhere I could be singing from rich So she said her name was Princess Henrietta Maria devouve from Cologne, French, German Frankish, long way from a fiddler's dot huh. So this is how she characterized her
background in her own words. Quote. My father's name was Henry van Woolway, a license tat and doctor of the civil law, and Lord of Holmestein, A man esteemed for his services done to the City of Kollen in mediating their peace and security and neutrality in the Swedish and German War, and for other effects of his counsels and endeavors to our ecclesiastical Prince Elector and the House of Lorraine in all those turmoils of that country in the
first rupture of the Spanish and French War. I instance these remarks, because having been so long dead some nineteen years, I cannot better describe or characterize him to strangers, though he were known in his own country by other great and noble actions, as well as for his long and ancient descent from an honorable family of that name, which whosoever shall give himself the trouble of curiosity and inquiring may yet find preserved from the ruins of a destructive
and but just composed conflagration, an so like break it up girl, like the period is your friend you put it in there. Yeah, a lot of commas, but it's also it's like it's all the like high falutin flowery language.
It sounds like imitation lawyer speakers.
And it's a long way from a peasant Kentish accent of the time. So she has she's trained herself in this. She said that her parents died before she was three, but her father left his entire estate to her, and she was an orphan and taken in by the church, specifically the nunnery of Sancta Clara, and there she got this education, good home training. She was given all the proper breeding and such, but she wanted more. I mean, that's like her true story, right, just once more exotically
in this version of her life. She didn't want to be alone all the time. She didn't want to live like an old nun while being this like vivacious young gal. She said quote, I felt some such strong impulses and natural instincts to be ranging abroad and in action, as the first finders of Tara incognita were urged with to discover of those regions of whose existence they had no further assurance than their own hopeful bodings and divinations.
She's like, look, it's the age of exploration. I want to want to explore.
I want to get out there. I got that. So she told people that she traped around Europe and she was hounded by suitors. One was an old soldier, according to Laura Colb, Associate professor of English at Baroke College, cuney quote, a faustlike student of the dark arts.
Gotcha the old soldier.
Yes, that's a little scary. And then there she was walking into the Exchange tavern, ready to see where the day would take her. Let's take a break. When we return, we're going to join Mary in the tavern on her search for her next fool zaren All right, So here we are in the exchange tavern. Now I think this must have been attack picturing and jewels, crash trippin and like fancy clothes, and she rolls in got her.
Like weird continental German French act right right.
I think that this place must have been located next to the Royal Exchange, and that was created by Sir Thomas Gresham. He was this wealthy merchant and a financial agent to the crown. So by like the mid fifteen hundreds London merchants were had been conducting their business outside, not like the poshtraders that this guy had seen in Antwerp and Amsterdam.
They were still doing it like a farmer's market style.
Yes. Yes, So he was like, you know what, London deserves a mercantile exchange. That's worthy of a great trading.
We should be indoors too, We need.
To be inside and out of the l Dutch. So he's like, I'll build it if the City of London Corporation will give me the land.
Gotcha.
So they're like, cool, we got land. It's we can make this work. So in fifteen sixty five they start working on it. Three years later they're done. That's like breakneck speed for huge building like this with no like excavators and all this stuff, you know what I mean, like not a dozer and slights sarin. So the January twenty third, fifteen seventy one, Queen Elizabeth the First visited
it for this formal ceremony. There's all this pageantry. She proclaimed that it would henceforth be known as the Royal Exchange. So that made it legit, like people believe it, and it served as dual purpose that made it really unique in London. So the lower courtyard was where all the merchants and brokers and traders would gather and conduct business in like commodities, shipping, bills of exchange, insurance.
Yeah, the more liquid stuff.
Yeah. And the merchants typically congregated in like specific areas of the courtyard according to their trade or their nationality. So there were recognized walks for like Virginia merchants.
Okay, and flying in tobacco, yeah, those.
Trade future with the levant and then Goldsmith's over here. So the upper galleries were called the pawn and they were lined with shops that were rented out to like Millner's, haberdashers, booksellers, apothecaries, dealers in luxury goods, and the retail spots were super fashionable and like commercially valuable, and they attracted this wealthy clientele and gave the exchange an additional revenue stream.
Now are they selling direct to customers at.
This place in the upstairs?
Yeah, So it's like a bit more like a like a shopping market, but it's a nice like the level of like thoroughfare, bizarre style, got dealers going, look at my wares and you're like, that's some nice ass.
I love that. That's that's awesome. Can I have some sure?
How much for that? La?
So there's this combination of like high commerce would be amazing. I was like, well, I can't dwell because now I'm just imagining what is the lace Like I'm kind of thinking, is it like a lace fezz or is it floppy like a flop?
Yeah, exactly covers the ears a little bit, it's harder.
It's so there's this high commerce on the floor, retail up top. It made it into this like social and commercial hub. So gentlemen were there, noble women, visitors to the city. It was like a tourist attraction. And then it's this emerging culture of news and information comes out there because that's where booksellers in the pond were selling pamphlets, gazettes, news books, zines, So that's where you're getting all your information and.
Paper ain't cheap. Then it was like an investment books is like man got a library.
There's information about what's going on the world, and there's commercial intelligence because you've got like shipping arrivals, commodity price, political rumor, like you could get things going like in terms of movements, that gets traded, just like the commodities do. So it made sense that Mary would show up there. It's the place to see.
In BC is and the money.
Yeah, she walks into the tavern, but she's not alone. She has a parson with her. They'd met on the ferry in. They just pick them up. It's like it gets stuck on your shoe or something. They met on the ferry in from the port in Gravesend, and the parson was like sweet on her.
Of course he wanted to.
Get in them draws. He was like, let me see that lacey hat. Mary.
He's kind of country too, I imagine, pretend to go in the city. I like you, Yeah, you're.
So. Mary's like I'm not about that, Like I I'm operating at such a higher level, but.
I'll take the social protection until we get to Yeah.
Well though, she gets to the tavern and she asks the owner, mister King, like can you help me? I need a place to stay, but I also have to get away from this creepy parson, like he will not leave me alone. And King's like yeah, of course, And so he and his wife like they they they're scoping Mary out though, they like, get her set up in a room. They see, okay, she's got all these jewels, she has trunks of stuff. Oh yeah, so many, so
many laces. So she moved in and she's like sending letters overseas and they're looking to see, like, oh, she's writing two and they wound up being no better than all the creeper dudes. They're like, you know what, you should totally meet missus King's brother. He's rad you would really love him. His name's John Carlton. He's a lord. Did you know that?
He's a lord and the richest man they knew who was young enough to.
My wife's brother. This doesn't make any sense, but okay, Mary is like, yeah, okay, you sing okay. So he jumped into action and wooed and wed Mary in the space of just a few weeks.
Okay.
And Rebecca Hess, writing for Mental Flaws, said, quote she met John Carlton, a well to do clerk, and spun a sad tale of misfortune, claiming she had escaped a forceful union with an elderly count. She forged elaborate letters quote proving she had an aristocratic family. At one point, Mary even conceded that if she were a man, she'd have been heir to the Danish throne. You know what, girls saying.
Yeah, got reached for this, the royalty, you can claim.
So the wedding had to be performed twice the first time. The first time that Carltons forgot to get a license, but they then they made it official.
I don't know they had have licenses. Then I figured they did have like a church person signed up paper, the.
Bands get it all signed. Mary was because she thinks she landed a rich guy. John is dote because he thinks he's landed a.
Rich lady, aristocratic ow.
So when Mary's wealth failed to materialize, John's family turned on her.
What about all the jewelry? Can cock a little bit.
They busted in and they took all her stuff, her clothes and jewelry included. Like they took all her clothes. She had nothing, Oh damn. And so according to Mary quote, my husband's father cometh to my lodging in Durham Yard with Missus Clark and my husband and others called me cheat and Harlot violently stripped me of all my apparel and jewels, pulled off my silk stockings from my legs, cut the lace off my bodies, and scarce left me
anything to cover my nakedness with. Hurried me before justice, where the father and son are bound to prosecute me for having two husbands. They pressed me to confess the truth I did, insist upon no other justification than my innocency. The witch, at last was my security refuge against there malicious and unnatural dealing with me.
Man, she's got breath like a saxophone, players going, you're going she so wait a minute, this place. So do you think that because she's been somewhat of a con artist up till now, do we believe her account? Is she being a faithful narrator where she actually did get got.
She's looking stuff.
She might have promised some stuff and then they just took it to retired of being lied to when we had the stuff.
I don't think she ever does an outward facing truth. Okay, Yeah, So she gets indicted on charges of bigamy at the Old Bailey in London in sixteen sixty three. You know that same old song and dance.
She's like twenty twenty three years twenty one years old.
Yeah, so this is the revel in sixty three. This is basically the revel.
Sixteen forty two. She was born, so's twenty one years old.
Twenty one years old, because remember she gets to London and it's within a few weeks that she marries. She's so busy her third fourth she is efficient, probably yes, and who knows how many we now have though the Revenge of the Canterbury Shoemaker and then also the guy
in Dover, because they're still sort of marriage. She's just racking them up, So Laura Cole wrote, quote unofficially, she stood accused in the court of public opinion of a far more interesting cheat, impersonating a fabulously wealthy foreigner in order to lure the hapless Carleton, a lawyer's clerk eighteen years old, into marriage. Uh huh. Though Mary herself modestly claimed noble rather than royal birth, she became widely known as the German princess. So it was one month between
her arrest and her trial. In that time, Yeah, she had almost five hundred visitors in that time.
What, Yes, she's a celebrity.
Oh, people were paying the jail to come and just look at her. They wanted to size her up see for themselves, Like what she's about see if the woman that they'd been reading about and god thinking about was anything like what they'd imagined.
And is she getting or cut with the jailers. Oh, of course the jailers are just getting like opening the door and say show.
One of the people who came to visit was Samuel Peeps, an English naval administrator, member of Parliament, but best known today for this crazy detailed diary that he kept between sixteen sixty and sixteen sixty nine.
How we know a lot about this era, correct.
So his diary is one of the most celebrated in the English language. It was written in his like personal shorthand, and it was vivid and candid. Had these intimate accounts of life and restoration in England, including eyewitness description of major historical events like the Great Plague of London, the Great Fire of London, and the Second Anglo Dutch War.
So those are like the highlights in there. And then it's also that all these like you're saying, like really frank accounts of his personal life, his habits, his relationships, his emotions that give us the full picture of what it was like to live then. So it kind of makes sense that he went to check Mary out, like he wanted to be a witness.
He's a chronic.
Yeah, he wanted to see for himself the woman at the center of what people are calling the Case of the German Princess.
And he's basically a journalist, so this is the biggest story going.
Yeah, and he's got like, you know, he's a member of Parliament. He's known so. Kate Lily of the University of Sydney wrote, quote from first to last, the Case of the German Princess was in Fukut's famous phrase and incitement to discourse, the talk of London coffeehouses and taverns, and the subject of about thirty published texts of various
kinds and sizes over the next ten years. Mary was resolute in her refusal to confess either bigamy or imposture, insisting that she was an aristocrat and a quote stranger, that is, an immigrant deserving of courtesy and assistance, and that she had never before been married.
I like that you hear Kathleen Hannah in her story, whereas I hear Kim Kardashian and her story. You like, she's this masterful person who keeps moving through husbands and partners and bouncing her way up and inspires to be semi royalty. He gets up there where everybody knows her name. People were just paying to take a look at her. I mean like this, and also I mean like everyone wants to talk about her, but like, really, what is she offering. It's not like she's a you know, affecting
world politics. There's all these wars going on, but she's just like this young girl who's just out there living her life. Like fully, people are like, tell me more about her.
Feel like her whole thing is like what have I got to lose? Why not?
Why?
So back to court she goes she went hard on John for misrepresenting himself as a lord.
Oh, by the way, I should say I never looked down on Kim Kardashy. A lot of people do. I'm not. I'm I like her as a if you if you put it in the sense of like making your life into what you wanted to be.
She's phenomenal, like her mother made her life.
Well, sure, but I'm saying, but she continues, I do respect a person from like, Wow, I'm not going to say like anything about how I don't say like reality TV is worth it? I don't mean that. I'm just saying is like she done earned what she wanted to to attain, and so just like this woman, you know, conditions were being what they were. You have to keep the context in mind. How many options did she have?
So I'm exactly so Mary, she's like to get political. Though I'm not the bad one. John's the bad one. He said I was. He said he was a lord. She said, quote, you told me you were a lord, and I told you I was a princess, and I think I fitted you. So back to Laura Cole, she said, she said. Quote. There she becomes the victim of a con, not its perpetrator. King and his in laws, the Carltons
keep her semi imprisoned. Fearing that someone else will hear of this rich foreign lady and snatch her up, they set John to woo her in the guise of a lord. This ruse is complicated by the fact that it is only hatched after John and Mary had already met, but the Kings get around this by telling Mary that they had been in disguise as commoners during their first encounter.
Everyone I'm I'm royalty, but not everyone knows.
They're all just a bunch of working class folks pretending, pretending, attending, So who was better at pretending? So John? He told Mary all sorts of tall tales. He's talking about mansions, tons of land.
I got to take you to my ancestral lands.
And Mary was like, I'm willing to forgive him because I figured like he intended to get all of those things with the money that he thought she had, you know, like, oh, I'm going to be his vehicle to become better.
Martha Washington.
Yeah, the one that Mary really went after was John's father. She knew he was the driving force behind the bigamy charge now that he figured out that he didn't have a princess in the family. So she admits she lied about who she was, and she admits that she went out of her way to show off her jewelry and flash the letters she was writing to European big wigs. She said she wanted credit and she wanted respect. Those are two things she never would have gotten from anyone
had she just been herself, no matter what she did. So, according to Laura coleb quote, as she tells it, greed drives their scheming, a native ingenuity and harmless love of mischief hers rather than censure. She deserves applause since quote, it was very difficult to personate greatness for so long a time without slips or mistakes. So she's like, look, I did this convincingly for so long. Like gott to give me respect. I'm an artist, Yeah exactly, she is.
Look at my commitment to the bit I am these.
Ginger rogers to his fred astaires. She's doing the same thing, but backwards it's even harder.
Completely, and she was fully k fabe. She was like, look, I never broke character. Yes.
So John didn't see it this way. He was the big victim. In his narrative. He was overwhelmed by Mary's love and her sophistication in Jena Sequa. He couldn't believe that a bodacious babe like her would go for a guy like him.
You know, me really did like her, and his family was the one trying to get him to Connor who knows, And he was like, what, she's real beautiful.
Yeah, who knows? Maybe maybe not, Maybe he's just as nasty as the rest of them. He said that he because he wrote his own book about all this later. Oh yeah, everyone got a book out of this. He was nervous about this chasm in their social standing. She's a princess's commoner and a little brother at that like that was his other thing. It's like, I'm a younger brother. Really also ran.
He order of course he's not going to inherit the land exactly. It wasn't just like oh I'm the kid.
No, I'm just so. He called only one witness who wasn't very convincing, and he'd wanted to get Steedman there, but he I know right. Stedman was like, you got to pay for me to come out there. I'm not going to. And the Carlton's are like, never mind.
Really yeah, So in the end, Mary, everybody broke his story.
Mary convinced the judge and the jury. She got acquitted.
Nice guy.
There was a catch. She wasn't a bigamist, which meant that her marriage to Carlton stood, and that meant that everything she had belong to her husband, Jules and all. She played herself. So after her acquittal she started studying law. She was like, I have to figure this out and that makes sense, like it's gonna help her like craft future endeavors. She's like, I am not falling into any traps like this ever again, they just took all my worldly,
ill gotten possessions. Lawyer, Let's take a break and when we come back more, Mary Zaren, Elizabeth, how you doing okay? So Mary Carlton, the public interest in her following her acquittal in June of sixteen sixty three was absolutely remarkable in its intensity. It was print on the stage and in person. She was like basic. She was the first true celebrity scandal of restoration England.
Wow, get it girl, right?
And so this.
Fascination actually preceded the acquittal itself. So remember, like all those people came to gawk at her in prison. The acquittal but like unleashed a flood of print. So within her time she was the subject of more than thirty pamphlets published between sixteen sixty three and sixteen seventy three. The bulk of like the initial burst, came out in
the weeks and months immediately after the trial. In sixteen sixty three alone, there were more than a dozen pamphlets and broadsides written about the case, a pair of autobiographical self defenses by Mary herself to rebuttals by John.
I can start to see the zine quality.
Yeah, print reports of.
Give me that box of type all of like.
The transcripts from the trial. Everybody got a book deal out of this.
Can you imagine when you imagine they're just using you know, movable text at this point, right, so you got like drawers of letters like like trying to like write out his thing. Imagine hopefully you wrote it out beforehand in long hand. He's not actually writing while he's like handy the key press, right exactly. So like the idea of like you doing your zine on a literal press and having to like you know, like impress your letters into this, you know, in the print.
So like that's the pinnacle of hipster zine. Like if you had a letter press and then you'd have a handle our mustache and drive a fixie bicycle and you're like some weird way to brew your own coffee roast coffee beans, and you're.
Like a roast battle. Basically that's what they're doing.
It was they had a battle. There was like a genuine literary battle going on. Like both sides are publishing pamphlets to support their own story. So John Carlton's camp published the replication or certain vindicatory depositions. Yeah, so he's like trying to rehabilitate his image. Mary responded with his own, like richly embellished autobiographical piece, the Case of Madam Mary Carlton. So she puts it in her own name, but she wrote she wrote it as if she were directly addressing
Prince Rupert, the British royal exile in Germany. But she's Mary Carlton, so she was.
And all that.
So this is like for her to write directly to a royal was bold and unusual. You know, no one from those kind of began or humble origins would do such a thing. And in the book she issued this critique of women's subordinate status in marriage, and she asserted herself as quote merely my own free agent, and she talked about like she connected her issues to contemporary political
debates about self determination and contracts and property rights. So scholars have since recognized everything she's done as more than just scandal literature, that she was laying the groundwork for really important cultural changes in England.
So it wasn't just distracts people might dismiss it. It was actually like riot girl level of critiquity.
Yeah, of larger social critique, and it basically introduced feminist philosophical critique of domestic patriarchy in that time, political and social theories of human subjectivity. There was some of her stuff was about early capitalist ideology. And also it sort of is the rise of the novel because it's all this invention, her story. She's got something for everybody. So her fame quickly found its way to the theater. She
starred in a play about her life. There were a couple plays that came out, and one of them she started. She did her own biopic. This was an incredible instance
of a living figure playing herself on the stage. So it was called A Witty Combat or The Female Victor, and it was written by Thomas Porter, and it capitalized on this public appetite for her story and then the fascination with this persona and the fact that she could perform her own myth for a paying audience shows like how thoroughly her identity he had become kind of like commercial property.
Totally the Kathleen Hamma and Kim Kardashian of it all.
It's like a yes, So you want to know who went to see A Witty Combat Who Elizabeth Samuel Peeps. Of course, right, he went and he said he found a disappointing.
Smart for that.
So it got mixed reviews, but it also got her a bunch of new admirers who gave her gifts, rich young guys. She even married one of the dudes.
Naturally, that's what.
And then the pattern is pretty predictable, Like you know, she left him, took his money, his valuables, and his keys when he was drunk. She oh, yeah, completely. So then her next thing is she pretended you should have known who I wasn So then her next thing is that she pretended to be a rich virgin heiress fleeing and undesirable suitor that her father had arranged for her.
I'm at this point waiting for her to flee to the colonies.
Oh just wait, So this was like this is like her preferredm O, like this old gross guy wants.
Yeah. Yeah, she keeps doing smith.
So she builds up this fake identity that's you know, appealing to social aspirations, as we know. But she's focusing not really on aristocratic men, but like, I'm prosperous.
That's why I said, yeah, rich and successful. By successful, I mean rik and like her.
Other thing that she would do is that she would kind of like win over the closest female relative first, smart to like plant the flag and like the get the money move. So in the one instance, she made it seem to her landlady like she had the fortune of one thousand pounds left to her by her uncle, all right, and then she let it slip that, oh, yeah, and my dad's also super rich. He has like way more than a grand Is.
She establishing a credit line again inheritance to come?
I wish, But she's like, I don't have access to the money because my dad tried to marry me off to someone I just couldn't stand. So I made a run for it. I left the countryside, I came to London. I'm trying to lay low. And then she faked a bunch of letters back and forth to old friends at home, who would like these fake friends would keep her posted as to like what was happening with her dad and stuff.
So she's pulling a runaway bride and then sending fake letters as if she's wanting to find out is daddy upset? Is he going to send somebody for me?
She'd leave the letters lying around a room like that nosy land lady. So the landlady is like, I have a rich nephew.
This is a Spanish prisoner.
She's like, you got to meet my nephew, Zaren. Close your eyes, I want you to picture it. You are a porter and an upscale lodging in London. A rich lady named Mary is staying there. You think she's off. There's something strange about her and slightly familiar, but whatever, what do you care. She's taken up with your boss's nephew. He is smitten. You can't tell if it's with the girl or her money, but you know both are pretty nice. You prefer a bustier, heartier wench, but that's just you.
There's a knock at the door. It's the day's post. You open the door to the bustle of the street outside. You take in the one letter and close the door. You look at the address. It's to that Mary character. Luckily she's in the parlor with that dim wit nephew. You pad down the hall and stand in the doorway, clearing your throat. Mary and the nephew look up. You tell the miss that you have a letter for her and walk it over to her. She takes it and
thanks you doesn't tip as she opens the letter. You step out into the hall, but you decide to have a seat in the chair just outside the doorway. You listen in on what they're saying. This has been a very slow day, and you are bored and nosy. You hear the tearing and then the shuffling of paper. There's a pause. The nephew ask what the letter says. Mary bursts into tears. You lean toward the doorway to get a better ear full of this. This is good good.
She tells him that her brother has died. Here, she says, read the letter, and you hear him shuffle the pages a bit. You peek around the corner and he's staring at the paper, his lips moving as he reads. So does this mean your father's estate goes just to you know, when he dies? He asks. She tells him yes, but that in order to collect she has to marry the man her dad wanted to marry her off to. She
has to collect herself. She says, she has to leave the lodgings because this letter means that both her dad and her intended groom now know where she is. Come stay in my lodging. The nephew says, you know where he's going with that offer. He wants to share a bed with that lass. You scoot your chair to get closer to the doorway, and it makes a loud screeping sound on the wood floor. You freeze. It's silent. Then you hear the nephew sneeze. The two continue talking. You
don't think they noticed you in the hall. You quietly stand and head toward the back of the house. You freeze in your tracks. You know where you remember that lady from that's Mary Carlton. You want to go tell her not to worry that her secret is safe with you. You're looking forward to your boss's nephew getting everything stolen out from under him, which will be much easier now that she'll be staying at his place. You smirk and duck out the back door, already used the prisoner.
Leave me on the squad.
We'll give you your pricy So Mary kept running that con over and over again like she did. Indeed, rob the nephew and disappear like she moved into his place, took all the stuff, left his clothes.
Her cost of living is so high that she's never satisfied. Nor can she create like an investment or like buy like an inch. Yeah, she's always I got to get through this.
But then things caught up to her, and not the way you'd expect. See Mary returned to the public's attention in sixteen seventy one.
Is it Quicksand Well she got her.
Expect How did you?
I guess she did expect it.
She was arrested for stealing a silver tankard in Covent Garden. Oh no, so this elegant, thoughtful fraudster got pinched for that.
In a small time one too, like swiping a glass and the court big glass glass.
But the courts had pretty much exhausted their patience with her at this point, like the there was going to be no leniency, and at the following sessions.
She was in it. They're like, marry all the guys you want, but if you steal a big.
Well this was the thing.
Is that that was?
That was a capital offence stealing a silver tanker. Yeah, she gets Yeah, she gets found guilty and condemned.
Wow.
But then she gets a reprieve and is ordered for transportation. She's like, whew, where am I going Australia? No, they sent her to Jamaica. Mom oh, yeah, she's going to Jamaica. So she gets sent to Port Royal, Jamaica in sixteen seventy one.
Just too early.
Oh yeah. Well when she got there, the opportunities for her were less than slim. Like, she did the only thing she could do and worked as a prostitute. Now, sixteen seventy one was a very interesting year in Port Royal. This was the town at its most vivid and raucous, and it was also the year for the earthquake. Well yeah, and it was the year that the tide began to turn against like the buccaneering the pirates.
Yeah, totally, this is the height of piracy.
Yeah. A little about Port Royal. It was locate hit it at the mouth of Kingston Harbor in south southeastern Jamaica. It was once the largest and most prosperous city in the Caribbean, functioning as the center of shipping and commerce in the Caribbean Sea. For the riots, Yeah, It's proximity to like many of the only safe passages Heart giving access to the Spanish Maine from the Atlantic, made it like the ideal base for state sanctioned pirates.
Yeah, buccaneer.
Yeah, so the harbor was large enough to accommodate large ships. The shallow waters provided a place to like Korean and repair vessels. Port Royal was prosperous thanks to the proceeds of that that privateering. The state sanctioned piracy, and the
returns were eyewatering. The three hundred men who accompanied Henry Morgan to Portobello in sixteen sixty eight came back into town with a prize of at least sixty pounds each and that was two or three times the usual annual plantation wage and so and that's just for one run. Port Royal was one of the wealthiest communities in the English territories of North America. And because the money went way beyond anything they were pulling for sugarcane. So whenever
the buccaneers were successful, the town rejoiced. You know, all these citizens they had, like a lot of them, had invested in their ventures in exchange for a share of the spoils.
Money flows through town when it hits Oh yeah.
A tenth of the loot was claimed for the king, and then you know the rest off it went. So by sixteen seventy, God, you can take you got like, Yeah, sixteen seventy one, Port Royal was this like dense, intensely concentrated settlement. There's like ten thousand people living there, and so there are prostitutes and pirates, but there are also goldsmiths. There were forty four tavern keepers, all these artisans and merchants.
There were two thousand buildings, and it was fifty one acres of real estate, so it was more densely packed than London. Drinking a culture alone was legendary, so there was one drinking house for every ten residents.
Can you imagine all the doctors they need because of.
The dagon Seriously, in July of sixteen sixty one, forty new licenses were granted to taverns, and the town's wealth was so huge that coins were preferred for payment over bartering. Like all the other colonies, bartering was everything. The high rollers in Port Royal dealt in cash, and the abstraction.
Of cash as opposed to like, give me two healthy goats.
Yeah exactly, I know.
What I have.
So this The defining event of sixteen seventy one in Port Royal was Henry Morgan's return from his most audacious expedition January sixteen seventy one, this buccaneer force led by Captain Morgan attacked and captured the port of Panama on the Spanish main. This is like the pinnacle of a pirate era Morgan. He had this fleet of like thirty ships. He had like two thousand men under his command.
Army, yeah, army.
So he seizes the fortress of San Lorenzo, hacked through the jungle of the Isthmus, swept aside all the Spanish defenders, sacked the city that had never before fallen. So he comes back to Jamaica. He gets there on March twelfth, sixteen seventy one. I don't think Mary was there yet, but she came later in the year. He got a hero's welcome. But the political oh my god, right, like to see them like coming into port and just everyone
going nuts. The ground is shifting under his feet. Politically though, yes, because like only shortly after he'd left Port Royal, a message came to the governor there that a treaty had been signed between England and Spain. Yeah, so that meant that the pirates had attacked Panama during a time of peace. So the governor was already under arrest on his way
back to England in June. Yeah, Morgan got arrested April the next year and sent to London for his attack on Panama, because like it's like exquisite irony, right, Like he gets arrested at the moment of his greatest triumph, not for what he had done, but like when he had done it.
Yeah, it's purely it because it's it's the sliding legality of like they were our enemy, you can do whatever you want, there are total loyal ally how dare you exactly? And then you get punished as an example that they're loyalty each of course nobody does and it takes context. So then to beat this whole idea of like it should be more like when did you know? As opposed to when did it occur?
Right, So, by the time Mary Carlton arrived as a transported convict in sixteen seventy one, she's like washing up on the shores that were already starting to change. So Captain Morgan's been arrested, the governor has been arrested. London is like we're reining it in here, Yeah, we want this is like the free for all era in Port Royal is like entering its twilight. And so I mean Henry Morgan eventually gets appointed as Lieutenant governor.
The reason why she's on a liquor bottle exactly capt.
Pirates are no longer needed to defend the city. And then you know what takes its place in importance is the selling of enslaved people. So even from Jamaica, though Mary couldn't resist like selling her myth. So this new pamphlet starts to circulate a zine claiming to have been written by Mary quote to her fellow sufferers in Newgate in the prison. So the pamphlet had her claiming to have been received and accommodated on princis, So the German
Princess persona had not died. This is from the pamphlet quote in gratitude is the blackest of crimes, and forgetfulness in a friend is more than a venial sin to avoid both, though our noble extraction and the eximonious of our birth and state might apologize for either, I send this missive to inform you of my condition. Since I was exiled the British shore, which is this health and success still waits upon me, and I cordially wish you the same attendance. So she's like, they sent me out here.
I'm doing great, guys, I hope you're doing well.
And she's sending this uh bis letter back to Port Royal. Yes, she lets people just see it.
Uh look what they've done to your princess. So she eventually returned to England illegally. She snuck back to all right, they banished her Central Yeah. Yeah, so this is a super bold move because like she was sent there as an alternative to hanging.
Yeah, exactly. It has to be like a life of exile, right, and that's the kindness.
She wasn't the only transported convict to risk, you know, coming back instead of life in the colonies like for her. Okay, the gallows are a known risk, but there's this anonymity. Death by anonymity in Jamaica is like unthinkable.
She'd rather face.
Yeah, So she wasted no time reverting to the only life she knew. She set up again as a rich heiress and she got married to a really rich apothecary in Westminster apothecary.
Okay, she was gonna get a planter's self.
Well, then she robbed him of more than three hundred pounds and left him.
Oh, that's bad on an island three hundred No, this was back in England.
Sorry, so then okay, so she's back the apothecary in Westminster. Three hundred pounds was a huge amount of money, like several years wages for a skilled trades set. So her luck finally ran out December of sixteen seventy two. She got busted when a turnkey from Newgate Prison was searching for stolen property and then recognized her. So it wasn't a magistrate or a wronged husband or like an officer
of the law. It was a prison warden looking for someone else's stolen property who happened to know her face. So she was kept in jail until January sixteenth, sixteen seventy three. She was thirty years old.
He basically it's just doing his like you know whatever, like not a raid, but like his rounds, like he's been told to go check this place, checked upon, like he does like a don't I know you? And she was like yeah, And then at that point does not that her sentence gets basically reinstated, But is it up to him to decide?
Like he's got a dragon in front of the court.
Okay, so he takes possession of her legally and he's like, oh yeah, coming back to.
Prison, into jail. She's thirty at this point.
Yeah.
She was brought by writ of habeas corpus to the old Bailey and asked whether or not she was the woman who usually went by the name of Mary Carlton. She was honest and answered that yes she was. There's no point denying it. So the court then demanded to know why she was back so soon from Jamaica. So she stalled, she performed, she lied, she maneuvered, she was married basically, and then she tried everything. Nothing would work, so then she did what they called, quote pleading her belly.
She said she was pregnant. Oh wow, so by this long legal custom that would stay the death sentence until yeah, but they called in this jury of matrons and they announced that she was quote not quick with child. So like she's lying. So on the last day of the sessions she gets the death penalty, and it was noted in the record that she took the sentence without flinching.
Really yeah, So once she was condemned rested.
People start wanting a visit her again. Before the hanging they couldn't get enough clergy come by. The curious well wishers are all coming through the prison and the weeks between the sentencing and the execution.
She's just thirty years old, so she still looks real young, Oh yeah, even though she's been in rough places like part Royal.
So she was hanged at Tyburn and January twenty second, sixteen seventy three, died as she had lived, performing to a crowd. So if anything like death amplified her fame, more pamphlets came out in the years after her death. It turned her into this folk here zines I'm telling you.
Oh and they died young James deaned out.
Oh yeah. They were full of tall tales too. In one, she seduced the son of a rich man, got him dead drunk, and took his money and sold him into slavery on a ship bound for Barbados, taking little elements of stuff.
Because you know, like in the the the era of like say the eighteen seventy basically the post Civil War era, you start getting all these letters back from the West telling the selling the stories of the cowboys to people in Philadelphia and Baltimore and Boston so forth, and it's all pamphlet style stuff about full books. They're getting like
these little like basically chat books. You're doing the same thing in England, but it's with the colonies, especially Jamaica, where it's like, now she's part of the great ending of the piracy era. Did they tie her into that as like a pirate queen?
Yeah? And then another had her earning her freedom in Jamaica after foiling a plot to murder the captain of the ship that was taking her there and then charming the governor. So yeah, they make her a character in all of these events. The public needed her to be larger than the historical record, and the writers are like, oh you got it. Oh yeah, what's your ridiculous takeaway?
It's not that ridiculous. I have to ad met Elizabeth because I'm very impressed with your Kathleen Hannah Kimagardashian like meld of this woman who's basically we spend like, you know, what is it like a few years with her. I know we started when thirteen fourteen, yeah, up to thirty, but basically it's most of her adulthood that we really focused on her life, and she did a heck of a lot bounced around, saw a lot. Even though she was sent places on like prison bar or prison ships.
It wasn't like, oh the luxurious I took the liner. But for where she started and with a few simple lives in mythosis, she was able to make herself like, make real out of make believe a great life.
Well and think about it too. Samuel Peeps is like this witness to history, but she just as much, if not more so, because the actor she's going, she's seeing, like the England that she's born into and the Europe that she travels through, the things that she must have heard and seen, and then to you know, to be in London when she's in London, and then to go to Jamaica and see what's happening there, and to be
to live it. You know, what she witnessed in history is absolutely remarkable in those you know, those brief adult years.
I don't want to like, uh, I'm reluctant to do this, but we don't really have it now. I guess we do with Joan Diddyon. So but and I was gonna say Hunter S. Thompson will say Joan Didion is the person who lives the story. And then writes about it and basically writes themselves into better stories in the sense yeah, like and makes their mythos part of what people then start responding to. So now she's living inside of the
stories other people are helping her to write. Yeah, you know, so she really nails that kind of like gonzo journalism California cool before it was a thing in terms of like, I live on my myth and I don't have to fight or kill anyone to do it. Yeah, exactly, because Peemes is like, he's like, what do you call it? The observer? The observer? Right, you got to be both observer and exactly.
And it's a shame she didn't get to really comment on what she had observed.
Yeah, I would have liked to see.
Yeah exactly. I think after that I need to talk back.
What about saying, girl, let's do it. Dave? Oh god, I went cheat.
Hi ridiculousness. I wanted Daren to know that due to his pocket contents, he if you were a bird, would be a magpie, and Elizabeth, because of the characteristic traits with which you share, you would be a white like horned chicken. Please enjoy googling what their characteristic traits are and I hope you get a chuckle and if you don't, who knows?
Who cares?
Okay, you're you are magic.
I love that. Oh that's pretty.
And I'm a chigall.
Exactly.
I'll say that's it for today. You can find us online at ridiculous Crime dot com. We're also at Ridiculous Crime on both Blue Sky and Instagram, and we're on YouTube at Ridiculous Crime Pod. Email us at ridiculous Crime at gmail dot com leave a talkback on the iHeart app reach out. Ridiculous Crime is hosted by Elizabeth Dutton and Zaren Burnett, produced and edited by Princess Dave Cousten
Nay Carlton, starring Anilic's Rutger Mis Judith. Research is by Renaissance investigative journalist Murssa Brown and Suspicious innkeeper Jabari Davis. The theme song is by Celebrity Bards, now performing at the Globe Theater and their two man show What It Do, Thy Fair Maiden Thomas Lee and Travis Dutton. Host wardrobe is provided by Botany five hundred. Guest hair and makeup by Sparkleshot and mister Andre. Executive producers are Jamaican goldsmith Ben boll And, Jamaican cobbler Noel.
Brown, Ridicous Crime, Say It one More Time Piquious Crime.
Ridiculous Crime is a production of iHeartRadio. Four more podcasts from my heart Radio. Visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.