How a 17th-Century English Conwoman Shaped Early Novelistic Narratives
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Source: Public Domain Review
Known as the “German Princess,” Mary Carleton was a notorious 17th-century impostor whose publicized life of bigamy and deception became a foundational influence on the English novel and the female grifter archetype.
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In early June of 1663, Mary Carleton was tried for bigamy in London’s Old Bailey. A figure of considerable public fascination, Mary had been “viewed” by an estimated 500 visitors while in prison awaiting trial. Officially, she stood accused of having wed John Carleton in London while already married to John Steadman, a shoemaker, in Canterbury (over the course of the trial, the possible existence of a third husband, a Dover surgeon named Day, emerged). 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, 18 years old—into marriage. Though Mary herself modestly claimed noble rather than royal birth, she became widely known as the German Princess.
The facts of Mary’s life are difficult to pin down, with the best-recorded episodes (her bigamous marriage and subsequent trial) being the subjects of numerous conflicting accounts, and long stretches of her earlier and later life remain poorly documented. She was born Mary Moders in Canterbury, probably in 1642. Her father was a musician, maybe a fiddler. She married Steadman, the shoemaker, in the mid-1650s, followed by Day, the surgeon, several years after that. In 1663, she married Carleton, stood trial for bigamy, and was acquitted, with Carleton’s side having only been able to produce a single, ineffectual witness (Steadman reportedly would have testified but wanted money for travel expenses). Several years later, in 1671, she was sent to Jamaica for purloining a tankard. She returned to England illegally and resumed thieving; in 1673, she was tried, convicted, and hanged.
Mary’s exploits produced a publishing boom, for the year 1663 alone witnessed the printing of more than a dozen pamphlets and broadsides about the case, a pair of autobiographical self-defenses written by Mary herself, two rebuttals by John, and printed reports of the trial. A few elements of the story remain relatively undisputed: One early morning in the spring of 1663, a well-mannered, foreign-seeming woman entered the Exchange Tavern in Central London. She was accompanied by a parson, with whom she had just shared a ride in a tilt-boat carrying passengers to the city from Gravesend Port. Seeking to elude the parson’s increasingly amorous attentions, the lady appealed to the tavern’s host, one Mr. King, who provided her with lodgings. King and his wife took careful note of the stranger’s jewels and of letters she sent overseas, ostensibly to a steward. The couple introduced her to Mrs. King’s brother, young John Carleton, who wooed and wed her in the space of a few weeks.
When it comes to this courtship and its aftermath, accounts diverge. Mary’s version of events can be found in three works published in 1663. The first, A Vindication of a Distressed Lady, appeared before the trial. It is anonymous, but its tone and contents are in keeping with two subsequent works by Mary herself. Vindication insists on Mary’s Germanness, claiming anyone who has heard her speak can detect it in her “Natural Tongue.” It cites as evidence the elite birth and continental origins of her facility with “French, Dutch, Latin, Greek, [and] Hebrew,” as well as skills in “Musick, singing, dancing, and the like.” The work also refutes an earlier satirical pamphlet’s claims that she is a known English thief who stole £60 from a vintner, purloined rings from a French merchant, and “pickt a Kentish Lord’s pocket at Graves-end,” before closing with a statement that Mary looks forward to her trial, where it will be proven that “she hath no other Husband then Mr. John Carleton.” The bottom of the last page contains a postscript, informing the reader that her German maiden name was “de Wolway” and not—as vulgar English slanderers have apparently rendered it—“de Vulva.”
Vindication is short and offers scant biographical detail, but An Historical Narrative of the German Princess (1663) and The Case of Madame Mary Carleton (1663), both attributed to Mary herself, amply supply it. The Case in particular offers a romantic tale of an orphaned heiress, whose difficulties are matched only by her resourcefulness. Raised and educated in a convent, young Maria flees to take possession of her estate in Cologne rather than becoming a nun. When two horrible suitors refuse to leave her alone—one a wheezy old soldier, the other a Faust-like student of the dark arts—she again flees, this time to England, winding up at the Exchange Tavern by chance. There, she becomes the victim of a con, not its perpetrator. King and his in-laws, the Carletons, keep her semi-imprisoned, fearing that a courtier will hear of this rich, foreign lady and snatch her up. They set John to woo her in the guise of a Lord, a ruse complicated by the fact that it was only hatched after John and Mary had already met, but the Kings get around this by telling Mary that he had been in disguise as a commoner during their first encounter. John plays his part, spinning “rhapsodies and fictions” of stately houses and ample lands. In print, Mary generously forgives her young husband these fabrications. His “castles in the air” were not really lies. After all, he truly planned to own such properties once he got hold of her money.
The wedding is a rushed affair, performed twice (the first time, the Carletons failed to obtain a license). Afterward, when Mary’s wealth fails to materialize, John’s family turns on her, stripping her of clothes and jewels and accusing her of bigamy with the help of paid false witnesses. Throughout, Mary presents John’s father as the chief villain: a man covetous of her imagined wealth, bitterly disappointed at its loss, and vengeful in his attempts to bring her to the gallows. John, by contrast, comes across as a hapless ninny. He “lovingly” visits Mary the day she is sent to prison, but then participates in the case against her, knowing full well that the penalty for bigamy is death. Still, Mary concludes magnanimously, “Yet shall I always have my heart and arms open to Mr. Carleton.”
About the matter of her own deceitfulness, Mary concedes a surprising amount. She claims not to be lying about the big things: She is German, and she is innocent—that is, of bigamy. She happily admits to stringing the greedy Carleton family along. On her arrival at the tavern, she made her jewels and letters visible in order to gain credit and respect. Once she spied “plain and public signs” of their plot to ensnare her, though, she hatched her own “counterplot,” insinuating a more massive estate and a nobler lineage than she, perhaps, possesses. As she tells it, greed drives their scheming, a native ingenuity and harmless love of mischief, hers. Rather than censure, she deserves applause, noting, “It was very difficult to personate greatness for so long a time without slips or mistakes.” On just what she does possess back in Germany, Mary teases the reader: “Whether I have that estate they dreamt of, it is not material,” adding, “I am not much to be blamed, if I have it, and conceal it.”
John’s responses to Mary’s self-vindications present a very different version of events. In both The Replication (1663) and The Ultimum Vale of John Carleton (1663), he depicts himself as a naïf, blindsided by Mary’s ardor and impressed by her splendor. He recalls expressing anxiety about the great gap between her “then-thought high descended birth and fortune” and his own comparatively lowly status as both a commoner and a younger brother. John’s account agrees with Mary’s on one point: She was a stellar actress. With her “wit,” “courteous behavior,” and “great variety of tongues,” the German Princess simply “left no room for suspicion.”
A spate of criminal biographies published around the time of Mary’s death retold and expanded her contested life story: “By the time of her execution in 1673,” Elaine Hobby reports, “more texts had been published concerning her misdeeds than were issued about any contemporary criminal.” One of these, Memories of the Life of the Famous Madam Charlton (1673), supplies a vivid portrait of her Canterbury childhood, where she displayed a precocious aptitude for both learning and theft. Another, The Life and Character of Mrs. Mary Moders (1673), adds episodes to her later life; in these pages, she brutally (yet ingeniously) fleeces lovers, tradesmen, and landladies. A third, Francis Kirkman’s The Counterfeit Lady Unveiled (1673), enriches the story with psychological detail. On Mary’s youthful ambitions, he writes, “The meanness of her quality did not suit with her spirit”. And of her fabricated background, he states, “She had told this lie so often that she at last believed it herself to be true.” These novelistic details may not be accurate, but they are plausible. Mary, in Kirkman’s hands, comes to resemble a literary character.
Blending fact and fiction, this explosion of texts around Mary has been termed a “missing chapter” in the history of the English novel. Mary herself, somewhat irresistibly, asks the reader to “cast a favourable eye upon these Novels of my life, not much unlike those of Boccace [Boccaccio], but that they are more serious and tragical”...not, however, more true. Literary historians have noted Daniel Defoe’s debt to Mary’s story in Moll Flanders, and it is easy to see her as the great-grandmother of a long line of fictional female cheats, from Becky Sharp in the 19th century to Amy Dunne in the 21st.
However, perhaps the German Princess’s closest modern echo is a living—rather than literary—figure. Anna Delvey, née Sorokin, appeared as a wealthy German socialite in New York from 2013 until her arrest in 2017. Delvey wore designer clothes, lived in hotels, and waved around wads of cash, even routinely tipping hotel staff with hundred-dollar bills. She gained entry into the realm of art-world-adjacent, super-rich 20-somethings before proceeding to scam her newfound friends, as well as various hotels and banks, out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. To her marks, she resembled “some kind of old-fashioned princess who’d been plucked from an ancient European castle and deposited in the modern world.” Like the earlier German Princess, Delvey claimed to be from Cologne. And, like Mary’s con, Delvey’s grift transformed almost overnight from scandal to entertainment. She has been the subject of a podcast, a play, a Netflix series, and numerous episodes of documentary television. In 2024, she appeared on Dancing with the Stars, and she is purportedly at work on a book.
Separated by three-and-a-half centuries, Mary Carleton and Anna Delvey nevertheless seem to embody the same self-making, media-friendly, post-truth ethos. Yet, each woman also belongs to her own historical moment: Delvey worked a particular 21st-century New York scene, while Mary, too, executed her hustle with an eye to the constraints and possibilities of her time and place. Early modern London witnessed economic expansion and population growth, facilitating (and sometimes incentivizing) urban anonymity and self-reinvention. In a society where divorce was nearly impossible to obtain, runaway wives made their way to London to start fresh. Yet even in the capital, licit economic opportunities were limited for women. Marriage, including bigamous marriage, was one path to security. As any fleeing wife would already know, however, marriage also had its drawbacks: The English law of coverture dictated that wives’ possessions belonged to their husbands, which stung Mary Carleton. Acquitted for bigamy, she remained legally married to John; when she asked the court to restore her jewels, she learned that they now belonged to her husband.
The economic limitations on women’s lives were clearly a source of anxiety for those tasked with enforcing them. Male writers frequently imagine women concocting workarounds, developing a repertoire of tricks in their pursuit of money and consumer goods. William Gouge, a preacher and staunch defender of coverture, imagined sneaky wives purloining household money—that is, their husbands’ money—to buy “silken gowns” and “beaver hats.” Joseph Swetnam, a writer so virulently misogynistic he earned the moniker “the Woman-Hater,” saw women in general as greedy deceivers. After a woman “entangles” you, he warns, she “will pick thy pocket, and empty thy purse, laugh in thy face and cut thy throat.” These writers firmly locate blame with bad women, not a bad system. Inadvertently, though, they call attention to deception as a function of women’s economic disenfranchisement rather than of their essential nature as the corrupt daughters of Eve. If women had direct access to money or the means of acquiring it, perhaps they would not need to work so hard at what Swetnam punningly terms their “craft.”
In some ways, Mary Carleton feels like the invention of 17th-century patriarchal anxiety as Gouge’s or Swetnam’s bogeywoman who comes to life. In others, though, she seems the manifestation of a peculiarly 17th-century understanding of a theatricalized social world. In the popular conduct book for women, The English Gentlewoman (1631), Richard Brathwaite admonishes female readers: “Think how this world is your stage, your life an act.” Essentially, Brathwaite wants women to know that they are always being watched and thereby judged by both a sublunary and a divine audience, and to behave—to act—virtuously. But the world-as-stage metaphor was as supple as it was pervasive, for religious writers employed it to express the transience of worldly things. Shakespeare used it in As You Like It (1599) to express the shifting “parts” people play across the life cycle, from infancy to death. However, as the 17th century progressed, the theatrum mundi metaphor increasingly came to refer to the stage business of social life. Brathwaite’s exhortation to virtue (“Think how this world is your stage, your life an act”) could just as easily be understood as an invitation to feign, dissemble, or even invent a whole new person to be.
At that point, the word “actress” had only just entered the English language; when it did, it referred to social rather than theatrical performers. Its first recorded use falls near the end of Lording Barry’s comedy The Family of Love (1608), when the protagonist Gerardine exhorts his beloved, Maria, “to be an actress in the comedy.” There may be a winking theater joke in play (Maria would have been performed by a boy), but within the play’s fiction, Gerardine is asking his love to exercise her ingenuity to help him pull off a ruse. To be an “actress” here is to manipulate social identity and shared reality: to play a part not on the stage but in the world.
Mary herself was both a social and stage actress. In 1664, she appeared as herself in a play called The German Princess. Potentially one of her 500 visitors in jail, a man named Samuel Pepys attended and found it disappointing. The German Princess is now lost, but another contemporary play focused on Mary’s story survives; that is, Thomas Porter’s A Witty Combat: Or, the Female Victor (1663). The play’s central figure, “Madam Moders,” delivers a series of soliloquies that recruit audience sympathy (or complicity) while granting insider access to her schemes. At the end of the play, she gives an epilogue: “You think me a bold Cheat,” she teases the audience, but “Which of you are not?” All the world’s a stage, and what’s a stage but a fountain of endless artifice: of tricks, lies, fake people, and feigned realities? She concludes, “The World’s a cheat, and we that move in it / In our degrees do exercise our wit.”
Who was Mary Carleton—or Moders, or Steadman, or Day—really? It is an impossible question. As her “biographer,” Francis Kirkman mused, “How can Truth be discovered of her who was wholly composed of Falsehood?” Across the many works dedicated to her story, multiple Marys emerge, each a work of fiction shaped by the parameters of genre and audience expectation. There is the typically deceitful woman who beguiled John Carleton, just as Eve beguiled Adam. There is the serial criminal cheating her way from Canterbury to the gallows. There is the soliloquizing anti-heroine, with her Iago-like appeal. And, there is the romance damsel, fleeing amorous pursuers, flung onto foreign shores, navigating life’s uncertain seas with pluck and wit.
Mary’s own writings overtly promote the last of these works. Subtly, though, they make room for other, less-honest versions of Mary. Take the Mary that emerges in the pages of An Historical Narrative and The Case as a slippery figure, simultaneously claiming innocence and demonstrating guile. Admitting to inflating the Carletons’ expectations, she comes tantalizingly close to a confession of having fabricated her entire estate. This is not a misstep. Perhaps Mary wants us to notice the holes in her story and to look on, bug-eyed, as she dances right up to them then darts away. She manipulates both her marks and her readers—that is, us—and she invites the reader to admire her for it. Truth is not the point here; performance is.
Opposite the title page of The Case of Madame Mary Carleton appears an engraved portrait depicting Mary in three-quarter profile, her hair in grape-bunch ringlets and her gaze directed at whoever has just opened the book. A brief verse unfolds underneath:
Behold my innocence after such disgrace
Dares show an honest and a noble face
Henceforth there needs no mark of me be known
For the right Counterfeit is herein shown.
“Counterfeit,” in the period, was another word for “portrait”: On its surface, the poem’s last line states that this image, a “right counterfeit,” is an accurate likeness. But “counterfeit,” then as now, could also mean forgery, a deceptive imitation. Read either way, the word applies simultaneously to the image, its human subject, and the tale she tells in print. Its use in this frontispiece perfectly captures the essential doubleness of all Mary’s self-representations—as ingenue and savvy operator, as wafted by fortune and weaving her own story, as a lady born and a princess made. “Here I am,” she seems to say, “Look at me! Perfectly real, perfectly fake.”
