Well Behaved Women Rarely
Make History.
Im still working on my great Pirate Book, Under the Blag Flag by David Cordingly, and I got to the part of the book about Pirate Wenches. I read another laugh out loud paragraph in the book when it refered to a famous prostitute in Port Royal in the 1670’s by the name of Mary Carleton. She was described by one man as “common as a barber’s chair. No sooner than one comes out, another goes in.”
It was such a gutteral, low thing to say about a whore, I barked a laugh at the cleverness of the comparison.
The story also mentioned that the woman was banished to Jamaica as punishment for theft and bigamy, and while she was in Port Royal she became the most famous of all Pirate Wenches, partly due to her fame back in England. The book mentioned that Mary had starred in a play written specifically for her. I did some research on Mary, and this is what I found.
Mary Carleton was not a nice woman, but she was apparently very attractive. She frequently claimed that she was a German Princess who was on the lam to escape an arranged marriage in order to meet and seduce men that were hoping to marry her for a fat dowery.
She made a career of conning old men out of money by using false identities and marrying them, waiting until she could access their money, and then making off with their fortunes.
Born as Mary Moders, she married a cobbler in Canterbury and gave birth to two children who died as infants. Unhappy at her husband’s inability to maintain her expensive tastes, and undoubtedly heartbroken over the loss of her babies, she left her husband and went to Dover in search of her fortune. It was there that she married a surgeon. When news of this new marriage surfaced, she was arrested and tried for bigamy, but she was acquitted.
Rightly thinking that she needed to get out of town, she traveled to Cologne, Germany to live out her fantasy of being a German Princess. Having acquired a little pocket change from her former husband, she took an apartment in a “house of entertainment” near the Spa in Cologne, which was a prime spot to pick from wealthy would-be benefactors. It wasn’t long before she had several older men pursuing her and vowing their undying love for her. The biggest sucker of these men was a wealthy old nobleman with a large estate outside of Cologne.
Conspiring with her landlady who was also a grifter, the two of them managed to pass Mary off as a lady of refinement, eager to marry and love the old foolish doddard. He showered her with precious gems and jewelry and fine gold chains that had been awarded to him for services to the King of Sweden. Mary loved the jewelry and continued to lead the old man on. The nobleman made fabulous promises to her and pushed her for marriage. She agreed to marry him in three days on the condition that she make all of the arrangements. The nobleman was absolutely delighted and enraptured with the young seductress and gave her large sums of cash to put together a grand marriage ceremony.
Up until now, Mary had been splitting the wealth from the nobleman with her landlady as part of an arrangement for helping show Mary how to be a grifter. It was payment for the Con game. But Mary told the landlady that there was a larger fortune yet to come from marrying the old fool, but she needed the landlady’s help in the arrangements. Mary tricked the landlady into leaving the “house of entertainment” under the ruse of running a critical errand for her in order to pull off the next part of their caper together. As soon as the landlady was out of the house, Mary tore open the landlady’s secret chest where the landlady had been stashing her half of the con money, and she filled her bags with the loot that she had stolen from the old nobleman, and lots of other cash from other scams the landlady was running. Mary left town unnoticed.
She made it all the way back to London, arriving very early in the morning one day in late March, 1663. Her pockets full and her bags heavy, she tried to find somewhere to stay, but nothing was open except for the Exchange Tavern, located near the Exchange, where all of the money was traded and deals brokered. I guess it was much like a Renaissance Wall Street district. Tired and thirsty for gin, she went into the Tavern.
It was in this Tavern that she became to be known as the “German Princess.” When men that worked the Exchange inquired about her, she was able to conjure up fake tears. She would sniffle and she would cry that she didnt mean to burden anyone with her sad story. When the men insisted that she tell her tale, she told her fake story about how she was the daughter of a German Prince, a “Lord Henry van Wolway.” Her ficticious story told about how her wealthy family had abandoned her when she refused to marry the man her family had insisted upon.
Everyone in the Tavern started calling her the “German Princess” and Mary began to introduce herself as such as well, taking on the airs of a noblewoman. She had set herself up in another apartment and was living on the extravagancies of her loot from the nobleman she had fleeced in Cologne.
Mary liked the Exchange Tavern a lot. She hung out there all the time and was a local celebrity. The owner of the Tavern was a man by the name of Mr. King. He had a brother-in-law by the name of John Carleton, and John was smitten by the beauty and personality of the German Princess, and began to pursue her with the intent of marrying the young woman. She put up a resistance, even saying that she, as a person of noble blood, could never stoop so low as to marry a commoner! She finally relented, and John Carleton acted as if he was the luckiest man alive, having found the good graces of a Royal Princess, and he fawned over her for having accepted a lowly man as her husband.
It was not long before John Carleton even began acting as if he was of royal blood. After all, having married a Princess surely made him a Prince! Shortly thereafter, an anonymous letter arrived at the Exchange Tavern addressed to Mr. King. The letter detailed how Mary had been married several times before and only did so to defraud her husbands.
It said:
SIR, I am an entire stranger to your person, yet common justice and humanity oblige me to give you notice that the pretended princess, who has passed herself upon your brother, Mr John Carleton, is a cheat and an impostor. If I tell you, sir, that she has already married several men in our county of Kent, and afterwards made off with all the money she could get into her hands, I say no more than could be proved were she brought in the face of justice. That you may be certain I am not mistaken in the woman, please to observe that she has high breasts, a very graceful appearance, and speaks several languages fluently.
Mary was arrested again on bigamy, and it led to a trial that was sensational for its day. Mary fought it publically by distributing pamphlets written by her detailing that John had sought to marry her only because he thought he could get money from her. Somehow, she was acquitted of her crime. It is likely that her own sensational story had turned her into so much of a local celebrity that no jury would convict her.
Mary was still very fond of the local taverns, and she began to frequent one that was visited often by the players of the local theatre. The dramatists instantly knew that Mary would be a great draw to the local theatre. She was already a little famous and people who had read her pamphlets were eager to know more about her. So at the urging of her new friends in the theatre, she wrote her own life story and they turned it into a play with her as the star. At the end of her play, she gave the following epilogue:
“I’ve passed one trial, but it is my fear
I shall receive a rigid sentence here:
You think me a bold cheat, put case ’twere so,
Which of you are not? Now you’d swear I know.
But do not, lest that you deserve to be
Censur’d worse than you can censure me:,
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.”
Mary parlayed her fame into fleecing her greatest admirers. Many theatre goers wanted to be near her and court her, and of course, she looked upon them as mere marks. She would play hard to get with some, and would entice others, depending on how much money they would spend on her. She even drained a small fortune from some of her best admirers and then cast them aside, publically declaring “How dare they think they could pretend love to a Princess?”
As her acting career began to wane, she accepted the advances of a wealthy old man, who, even after knowing the whole background story of Mary, doted after her and began to believe tales about how she never hurt anyone. She eventually married him, waited for him to get drunk, and rolled him, taking his keys to his treasure chests, his bank account access notes, and about 150 pounds worth of valuables. She fled and never saw him again.
For years to come she continued to fleece her victims with her guile, beauty, and the help of her accomplice, a young woman grifter cohort who posed as her maid. Together, they conned men out of thousands of pounds of money.
Mary was eventually caught stealing a silver tankard. She was sent to Newgate prison and ordered to be transported to a penal colony. In this case, Jamaica. It was in Jamaica that she became the West Indies’ most popular prostitute and Tavern Wench, utilizing her training as an actress, her long history of outlandish tales of plunder and beguilement, and her street smarts to become a very wealthy woman.
Violating the tenets of her banishment, Mary tried to make one more go of it in London. She returned only two years into her punishment and tried to pass herself off as a wealthy heiress. Using this guise, she pulled off a few more cons, robbing husbands and lovers of thousands of pounds.
By accident, she was recognized by the local police when they were looking for another thief. She was apprehended. On January 22nd, 1673, Mary was hanged. She was 38.
After researching Mary Carleton, I came to realize that this woman was not as “common as a barber chair.” Far from it. She was a vibrant, brilliant, beautiful woman who used her talents to plunder wealthy men. Her story should be told. Yet Hollywood insists on making Pirate movies about sea critters. **sigh**
