Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - The Fake Princess Who Fooled Georgian England

Episode Date: May 5, 2026

What you'll hear in today's episode is a story that strikes to the dark heart of the British Empire.Despite being set in the time of Jane Austen's early 19th century polite society, Princess Caraboo's strange tale makes her an instant celebrity.But how much of it, if any, is true? Where does it lead? And what happens when the truth is a lot darker than the lie?Joining Kate today is the wonderful Dr. Maddy Pelling, co-host of After Dark and author of Hoax: Truth and Lies in the Age of Enlightenment, to reveal the truth behind Princess Caraboo.This episode was edited by Tim Arstall. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Freddy Chick.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? We'll sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles.

Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. You are back once again, Lusting to Betwit the Sheets. Hello, thanks for dropping by it. It's so lovely to see you.

But before we can go any further together, I have to give you the fair do's warning. Kate, what's a fair do's warning? Well, that's the warning we have to give you at the top of the show just in case you wandered in here accidentally and don't know what the show is about, so here it is. This is an adult podcast,

spoken about adulty things an adult-of-a-way covering age, adult subjects, new to be an adult too. And we do that because, I don't know why we do it. Why would you be here if you didn't want to listen to upsetting and smutty things? All right, fine, fine, we'll keep doing it. That was my producer telling me off. Right, fine.

Okay, proceed at your own peril. Today's story takes place in a small village between Bristol and Bath at the start of the 19th century. While Britain is expanding its empire overseas, you could be forgiven for not thinking that a world even exists outside of this tiny little village. But all of that is about to change when a strange-looking woman, claiming to be Princess Caribou, no less, staggers into a cobbler's cottage and collapses. And what happens next causes a sensation?

Who was she? Where did she come from? Where the hell is Caribou? And what fantastical story does she tell? I'm ready to find out if you are. Back to the Twix Sheets, the history of sex scandal and society with me, Kate Lister. The line between, what is true and what is a great big stonking fib has always been a little bit murky.

And long before we had fake news, the Georgians managed to come up with some pretty outrageous stories of their own. Today's episode focuses on one such story and it takes some incredible twists and turns, but where it ends up is probably the most extraordinary part of it. I won't say anything more than that, because joining me today is the fantastic, the wonderful Dr. Maddie Pelling, co-host of our sister podcast After Dark, whose new book, Hoax, Truth and Lies in the Age of Enlightenment delves into some of these amazing stories. Right, without further ado, everyone, let's just crack on.

Hello, and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Maddie Pelling. How the hell are you doing, gorgeous? Okay, I was just saying to you off mic, I am now so pregnant. By the time people hear this, I'll be holding a baby at home, I'll be crying, they'll be like, poo everywhere, and most of it will not be mine. Like, I am. You are not sailing through this glowing, are you?

You are not enjoying this at all. I'm sweating, Kate, it's sweat, not glow. Like, yeah, it's not good. But you've been having a very glamorous time. I've been enjoying you on Lucy Wersley's BBC flagship three-part series. It's a bit amazing. That was a bit of a behind-the-scenes fact for that one. I had the worst flu of my whole life when I was filming that.

It really is a sort of a lemc-sit blur. I was watching it back going, oh, that's I don't sound too bad, actually. That's pretty good. I mean, I will say you looked great on the drugs, so, you know, good for you. You looked fantastic. Thank you. But we are here not to talk about pregnancy and flu. We're here to talk about a rather extraordinary hoax.

I love a good con story. You know, like true crime is that, I think that's one of my favorite genres of true crime. And you're always sat there going, why would you believe that? Yeah, it's people's credulity that you just can't get over how gullible people can be. And I think it fits so nicely within the true crime genre as well, because it's one of those things where when people do a hoax, they do a scam, they do some kind of fraud, it's people who are able to somehow manipulate the rules of society and for a second to get away with it. And I think that's why we're so obsessed with it, because we can see how things have slightly clicked out

of place, but nobody's noticed until it's too late. And it's a something that's something. something so satisfying and so fascinating about that. And yeah, today this story is just, it's a wild ride. I'm going to take you on it. It is truly weird. It's a weird story. All right. Well, let's set the scene. Where are we and what time are we in? Okay, so we are in the 1810s. So we're kind of 1816 into 1817. So this is Jane Austen period. Peak Austin. Yeah. And you know, it's interesting when I started writing, so this is one of three stories in my new book, Hokes. And when I started writing that, I was like, okay, I'm going to have to situate people in this kind of Austin-esque world that people are familiar with. You know, you've got your Mr. Darcy's, you've got your Pemberley, you've got your polite little balls.

Everyone's kind of bowing and scraping to each other. There's some polite dancing. Maybe some love letters, that's it. But this is also, you know, this is a time when the world is feeling incredibly dark. Napoleon's just been defeated. Waterloo has just happened in 1815. There's been enormous bloodshed. People in Britain are seeing veterans come back from the continent with missing limbs.

they're not getting work. The industrial north is increasingly unstable and unsatisfied. There's food shortages. There's work shortages. You know, all of that. And on top of all of this, in 1816, there is the year that's known as the Year Without Summer, which listeners might know because of a little tale about Lord Byron in Switzerland, which, you know, ever heard of him, you know, where he invites Percy Shelley,

Mary Shelley and the guy who wrote the vampire novel that everyone forgets the name. Polidori. There we go. Thank you very much. It's my one little weird fact that I've got in there because I know Byron called him Polly Dolly and it's stuck in there ever since. Well, Byron was like so vile to that guy

but that's a whole of it. That's a whole podcast. That's a different show. That's like, yeah, there should be a podcast that's just moaning about Lord Byron. I would listen to that actually. Continue. Yeah.

The summer without sun. That's a good tangent. Yes. The year without a summer. And this is Mary Shelley and all of that gang meet in this really dark summer. And she writes what becomes the beginning of Frankenstein, which is kind of linked a little bit to this story and the context that we're going to talk about today. So this kind of unseasonal darkness is really the backdrop for this story taking place. And there's a feeling of unease.

Nobody at the time could really know why the summer hadn't occurred. And I mean, it was really serious. You know, there was snow falling in July across the Northern Hemisphere, which didn't help the food shortages and, you know, the lack of crops growing and all of that. And if you look at the work of like Turner, for example, the whole palette that he's working with that year becomes much darker. It's a really grim time. It was a volcano going off in Iceland, wasn't it, that did it?

Well, it was in the East Indies, Kate, which is going to be a sort of far-off setting for this story as well. So we have all these elements kind of coming in in terms of context. We've got the dark summer. We've got, yeah, it's Mount Tambora, which is one of the East Indian island volcanoes. And it produces something like 10 times as much dust into the atmosphere as Vesuvius did in AD79. It's a lot of dust. It's wild. It's a lot of dust.

And that basically causes the world to go dark for the entire year. So there's a lot of, yeah, a lot of darkness, both sort of spiritual and literal and environmental. And it's not the sort of polite, pastily coloured Austin worlds that we know. No, no. It's a bit stabby. It's a bit dark. It's a bit... It's a bit stabby. It's a bit anxious. It's a bit hungry. So, and of course, we're at the precipice of the Industrial Revolution. Like, there's big cultural. And then, of course, it's been the French Revolution.

I mean, that would frighten the shit out of you. Like, we look back at that now as historians, you know, with a kind of, I'm not going to say admiration because they were cutting people's heads off. But like, imagine like that just happened. People started cutting the heads off kings and queens. Scary. That's a scary turn to be in. You know, the world order has been upended. The rules have been rewritten. And there's a real fear in Britain throughout the 1790s and going into this sort of regency period.

That there are foreign spies everywhere, that, you know, the French are infiltrating with their politics and their revolutionary ideas. There's real panic that Britain is going to have its own revolution and chop the head off George the third. or indeed the Prince Regent. You know, there's a real sense that authority and hierarchy is breaking down. And of course, into this mix, you then get a hoax that does all of this and really humiliates the people in charge, it embarrasses them. And it exposes people's ignorance. Because the other thing, I suppose, in this moment, is that Britain is on a global stage.

We fought Napoleon. We, like, I wouldn't have been fighting Napoleon. I'd be like, you have great style, my friend. I'm on your side. Like, it's fine. Never mind the dictatorship, like, love the art. you know, he was being fought in this kind of global arena across the British and French empires. And what this story that we're going to talk about in a minute does is expose how ignorant people are about that empire.

The people who are living at home who've never boarded a ship, never gone anywhere, they benefit from the economics of the empire, from the goods that are being brought in, all of that from the sort of aesthetics that are born from especially the exploration and colonization of the East. and people have this fantastical idea of what the world is like out there and what they're entitled to of it and how they exoticise it and in some cases sexualise it actually and that is going to be at the core of this story and it yeah it exposes people's stupidity essentially God love them all right so that is the time period

where are we in the great British Isles okay so we are in a little tiny village outside of Bristol which today is butted right up against a motorway interchange, but it still exists as a tiny village called Armandsbury. And it has a really great pub, which was there in the 18th century, and is part of this story. I recommend it. There's a good chip butty in a pint.

And essentially, it's a sleepy backwater, nothing ever happens here. And one day, in 1817 in the spring, this young woman walks up the dusty high street, and she stumbles into the house of a cobbler whose door is open because that's the nature of his business. He's cobbling. He's cobbling.

is trying to get people in off the road whose shoes are broken. She stumbles in and kind of collapses dramatically in the doorway. And she isn't speaking English, but nor is she speaking any language that the cobbler recognises. And you might think, yes, well, a rural cobbler in Bristol is not necessarily going to have an encyclopedic knowledge of global languages. But of course, Bristol at the time is one of the biggest port cities in the world. It's the most busy.

There are people of all nationalities. You might have heard of smattering. even if you can't speak it, you might have been able to say, well, that's definitely French and that's Spanish. Yeah, yeah, exactly. There's Spanish, there's Portuguese, you know, there's all these different languages taking place. So he's like, okay, I don't, she's not French, she's not Spanish, she's not Portuguese, she's not out of all options. Yeah, yeah, exactly, those are the only options, and they're all European, beyond that, no idea. And she's also dressed quite unusually, and this really piques the attention of everyone in the village. She has this dirty old dress on

and she's carrying a bundle of rags, she has in her pocket, a bar of soap on a little string, and a forged coin, which suggests she's maybe a vagrant, that she's living, you know, sort of on the street or in fields or whatever. But around her head, she has this black shawl that she's tied as a turban. She has quite dark skin and very dark hair and eyebrows on these really big, beautiful eyes, and she's so attractive to the people of this village and so mysterious, that they call the overseer of the poor, who was the person who would usually be responsible

for moving vagrants on essentially in different locations. And he's like, well, she could be a beggar, but also she could be something else. And I'm not really sure, and I don't want to get rid of her in case she's something else, and I don't want to be in trouble for this. So he marches up to the hill, up the hill to the big house, called Null House, which is a kind of really ancient seat

that's being rented out at the time by the magistrate, a local magistrate of Bristol. And he's kind of, if anyone ever watched Poldar, he's kind of like George War Leggan, the antagonist of Poldark. He owns a small local bank. He's the magistrate. He's just like your classic baddie.

So we don't like him. Is he? Right. No, boo and hiss for him. He is known locally as Samuel Devil Worrell. All right. Okay, that bad then, right. Yeah, that bad.

And there's an amazing anecdote about him when he has been like out drinking in Bristol at some fancy event. and he gets out of his carriage and he slips on the step of the carriage and falls on the pavement. And he's so kind of pissed off that people have seen him

that he accuses a random shopkeeper who's watching of having pushed him over and he's like, I will take you to court, sir. Like he's just... Oh dear, right. He's just the dick. Yeah, he's not great.

This poor woman who's collapsed is taken up to the magistrate's house and she's let into the parlour and they're like, who are you? And she just carries on speaking this language. They don't understand. And she's, you know, quite animated. She's trying to explain to them what's going on.

And at one point, And again, I just love the sort of, oh, you're a foreigner, you'll know. One of the people in the household is like, we have a Greek servant. Bring him in. See if he can understand what she's saying. And this poor Greek servant gets dragged in. And, you know, they're like, what she's saying, mate? And he's like, well, she's not Greek, so I don't know.

Why are you asking me? Because I'm foreign. It becomes this sort of farce immediately. Anyway, they can't get a sense of who she is, but nor can they just abandon her because she's very... Well, they're involved now, aren't they? They're involved. And also, there's something about her. She moves in this very elegant way.

They describe her as being very sort of cultivated and elegant. She's not someone of the lower ranks, they claim. That's how they see her that. She's more delicate than that. She's more refined than that in their eyes. And they see a little bit of a opportunity here because she's something of an exotic mystery. And so they're like, she could bolster our standing in this community.

What kind of fucked up madness is that? That would be one of your first thoughts when you found some random woman with a rag-tied round her head, talking gibberish. How can I make money from this opportunity? Yes. How can I improve my own situation? And so they take her in,

not out of the charity of, you know, sort of goodness, but because they see that this is an opportunity. And one of the first things they do in the following days is they take her down to the ports of Bristol. They sort of parade her up and down

and they ask people of different nationalities coming off ships, what language is she speaking? Scientific. And yeah, exactly. A really good process way of doing this. And, you know,

everyone's like, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. I've just come in from South America. She's not speaking a language from there. I've come in from the Caribbean. She's not speaking any kind of language that I've encountered there, blah, blah, blah. And then we get a Portuguese sailor. And this is one of the most fascinating moments in this. And throughout the book, and particularly in this story, I try to get the readers to pay attention to who is the liar in this story. Because we have the woman at the center of this story, but everyone here has some kind of skin in the game, some money to make, some

advantage to have. And this Portuguese sailor, comes forward. And by now, they're offering a reward for anyone who can name the language or country that she's from. And so he's like, ha ha ha ha. Right. Okay. And he has this conversation with her in a language and she responds to him. And there's a back and forth that goes on for a few minutes and both seem to understand each other. And then he turns around to the magistrate and his wife and says, okay, she's from an East Indian island. I've been out in the East Indies for a long time. I'm not sure quite which island, because she's speaking a strange mixture of dialects. But, and this is where, again, it becomes laughable, but everyone buys into it.

He says, she's a princess from one of the islands. She's been kidnapped by pirates. She's been stowed aboard a ship, and she's made it all the way to Bristol Port before escaping and running off into the countryside. Just before we go any further, can we clarify straightway? Is any of that true? Well, Kate. No, it's complete nonsense.

He's just... He's just made this up. Yeah, so everyone watching, their perception of this scene is that he has spoken to her and she has explained this to them. What has actually happened is that he has spoken gibberish to her. She has spoken gibberish back to him. This is... Wait, was he a plant?

So he is a random person off the street. He just wants a little bit... He's not in on this at all. Yeah, and he, even though he's... I mean, he's literally like, not even a side-carriage. character in this story, he just walks in, drops this bomb that then has all these knock-on consequences in the story. Takes his fibre and he's off. Yeah, exits stage right. It's wild. So his little lie suddenly explodes. So you'd think the magistrate would be like, okay.

Pull the other one. You know, yeah, exactly. You're not getting your money. You can do one. But no, he's like, here's your bag of coins. This is amazing. We have a princess from the east in our house. Love it, love it, love it. So what they do is, they start to let people know that they have an East Indian member of royalty based on the testimony of a random sailor that they paid it down the docks yep yep yep okay

and this woman she gives only a little indication so the question really is how much is she going along with this the only thing that she says is her name they keep asking her what are you called what you called and eventually she says caribou cariboo she keeps saying this over and over again And she says it really slowly at first.

She's like, Caraboo and sort of spells it out for them. They're like, okay, so this is Princess Caribou from an East Indian island that we don't know where she's from. She's staying with us now. This is ground. Nobody's questioning this. And so for the whole summer of 1817, people, the great and good of Bath and Bristol. And of course, you know, think about Bath in the age of Jane Austen. It's this fashionable city where the sick are going to get healed.

But it's also, you know, a sort of riotous marriage market. It's full of scandal. It's exactly. it's a party city. And so people are now nipping across to Noel Park where this grand house is to see this young woman. And she becomes a spectacle. She becomes, you know, something part of a sort of fashionable itinery. You do your morning promenade and bath. You go and pay your calls. And then, oh, in the afternoon, you go and see Princess Caribou. And her life in these weeks becomes incredibly performative. She's sort of put to work by the magistrate and his wife, by the

morals. She does things like she'll hunt in the deer park with a bow and arrow and people will watch her doing that. She will prey on the roof of the building. People will climb up to the roof to watch her. This is a very weird story. It's so weird. It's so weird. And she, again, the question is, how much is she leaning into this? And we will get to, like, who exactly she is and why she goes along with this in a little bit. But on the surface, she seems to embody this character. She's performing for them. She even does things. And this makes me so uncomfortable and angry. She does things like she will strip half naked and swim in the lake, and people will sort of get their chairs and sit on the side of the lake and watch her.

And she becomes this kind of exotic, sexualized object for people that she represents the fantasy of the East, that she's this, you know, sort of incredibly petite, beautiful woman with this dark hair and this sort of gorgeous body. And she's, you know, emerging Mr. Darcy-esque out of the lake with all this wet clothes on. And she's invited to do things like to fence with and sword fight with the gentleman. who come to visit her and things like that. Back with Maddie and Princess Caribou after this short break. Who's funding this? Who's paying for her to hang out and shoot arrows

and have sword fights for gentlemen and go skinny dipping? The magistrate, he had to go skinny dipping, I love that. The magistrate, this is putting him on the map, essentially. He is, you know, now the centre of this little world. People are like, oh gosh, you're so lucky to have found this princess. and it's so exciting. You're so cultured. And, you know, the house that they live in

is just full of, you know, quote unquote, sort of oriental decoration and stuff. And they really lean into it. And they're redecorate some of the rooms and they're like, you know, we're in the palace of this princess. That's bonkers. Right.

We'll redecorate as well. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, we're like, this is an art theme park. Like, we're going all in. Our house needs to match the princess we found. It absolutely, yeah, it absolutely does. I mean, that's obviously that would be your first step.

Who doesn't redecorate their house after it. house guest. It really depends on the house guest. Yeah. So the other thing that they do is they do try and legitimize this a little bit more. And I suppose they're thinking about how can we make this story bigger. It's too fucking late now. No point has anybody checked this. Has anybody looked into this? Is anybody asked any questions whatsoever? There's no fact checking happening at all. No. So they decide the way to deal with this. And I don't think this is because they're suddenly thinking, maybe this isn't real. I think they're thinking, can we make this bigger? So, you know, They've already attracted the great and good of the West Country,

but we want more than that. They invite a doctor from Bath to come and spend some time with a young woman to try and understand her language. And the idea is that he will gather a load of information that he can get from her, publish it to make his own name as well, and that they will take that to the East India Company with the proposal that they will then take an expedition out to find the island that she's from.

And they're all going to make their names and be incredibly famous, because they found this far off country. Yeah. So the doctor that they pick is called Dr. Wilkinson, and he is, I think he's something of a charlatan. So he lives and works in Bath, and he's there in the cold, miserable dark year of 1816 into 1817. Now, he is a galvanist. So he is electrocuting people and animals are left, right and centre. Oh, that's the 19th century that I know and love. There they are. The mad doctors just go. We found electricity. Let's electrocute women's uteruses. First, first plan. And he is doing that every single day. See, there they are. Yeah, his particular specialist is the treatment of women. You know, and he describes, and so much of his writing survives,

and he's like, you know, oh, I attended a woman who'd just given birth and she had really bad mastitis in one of her breasts. So I electrocuted her head, her breasts and her groin. And then she got really upset with me for some reason. It's like, yeah. It's not funny, but like there's so much Victorian medical testimony that's like that from just these absolutely mad as a Jaratwap physicians who are like, and they just didn't seem grateful for it at all. Yeah. Why was she getting upset? She's so hysterical. I electrocuted her breast at great expense to myself and she wasn't. She wasn't pleased at all the way to her house with my equipment on a Sunday and she wasn't grateful. That's exactly it. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry, right, okay, I've on a side quest already. Let's get back on track. Okay, Dr. Wilkinson and his electricity.

Yeah, so the other thing to say about him, and this is where the Frankenstein element comes in, is that he is performing every day in Bath, so as well as electrocuting ladies, when he's not doing that. He has a sort of side hustle as a showman in Kingston buildings, which is just to side. That's someone you want to seek medical advice from, isn't it? Yeah, exactly. And he has this show where he basically cranks up the galvanistic machine, and he will electrocute a frog or a toad that's dead and he's cut it up with a scalpel. and briefly its legs will come back to life

and, you know, kind of move or contort or whatever. And this is a well-known trick. He was involved early in his career, sort of 10 years before this, in the electrocution of a man who'd murdered his wife and child in London. And supposedly, at that experiment, the man sat up on the bench and his eyes opened and one of his arms moved or something. And you can see where I'm going with this, because at the end of 1816 into 1817, who is also in Bath living meters

from where this guy's doing his experiments, it's Mary Shelley. She's finishing the manuscript of Frankenstein and we don't have records that she went to see his experiments and his shows but she was literally like three doors down from him You can join the dots, can you? It's a possibility. Yeah, and a little bit like Frankenstein and the monster Wilkinson becomes involved with Princess Caribou and the question really is who is the monster here?

Who is the liar and who is the victim? And so he is brought in to Noel for that summer and into the autumn and he starts to spend time with her. Now he doesn't electrocute her, which I think she was probably very grateful for. It's a low bar, but thanks. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like, it's a win. So he does things like he starts to note down her language.

And this is where things start to get murky. He gets her to draw a map of the voyage she supposedly took from the East Indies to Bristol. And it exists in the archive still. And what's interesting, Kate, is that the ink and the handwriting that are used on this map are exactly the same as everything in Dr. Wilkinson's archive. so it's almost like he's the one drawing this and not her. And, you know, this map has, it's sort of a squiggle across the page, and it has this kind of fantastical journey.

And there are sort of, there are places on that that you would recognize on a world map today, but then there are made up places as well. But is he making up the names of? Is she giving him the names? It's so hard to know. The other thing that's happening is they're working together in the library and old house, which is full of reference books to other languages, other places. We have Captain Cook's voyages. The accounts of those voyages are in that library.

We've got Fry's Patagonia, which is a story of different languages and things like that. So how much of this is actually coming from her, that she's speaking a real language, how much is just Dr. Wigginson flicking through some books and writing things down. Oh dear. But whatever the case is, he rushes to publish in the local press and he's like, I, Dr. Wilkinson, galvanist extraordinaire, have discovered, this exotic princess and her language. And I am, you know, a champion for doing this, and I would like to go and find her island.

And she becomes even more famous, and more famous and more famous. And he sends off samples of her handwriting to various people who should be experts. He sends some to Oxford and gets a letter back where they're like, babe, no. This is not a language. Nobody speaks this. This is not a thing. And he sends another letter to Stanford Raffles, who is a sort of career colonist,

and he's the founder of Singapore. He spent his time in the East Indies. He is like, I don't recognise this language, but it could be somewhere in the East Indies. Like, I recognise lettering in this. I recognise some words, some phrases. It might be. And that is all Dr. Wilkinson needs.

So he heads off to London, puffed up, ready to go to the headquarters of the East India Company, to pitch this expedition. And as that's happening, everything goes to shit back in Bristol and people are about to come up the woodwork and tell the truth of what is going on. Okay.

Because that's the thing with these cons is they're not sustainable. No. The cracks are there and once someone starts, you know, tugging at one thread, the whole thing's going to unravel. Absolutely. And, you know, this has gone on now for weeks,

if not months, across 1817. And as the lie gets bigger and bigger and becomes, you know, more ridiculous and more people get involved and more people hear about it, at some point somebody's going to call it out, especially in a place close to Bristol where there really are people who have travelled the world

and been to the East Indies, spent time there, interacted with the locals, spoken the language, learned the language. Something is going to click at some point and people are going to call this out. So while Dr. Wilkinson is off making his name in the big smoke, thinking he's going to become the most famous explorer of the 19th century, two people come out of the woodwork in Amundsbury. One is a wheelwright's son.

And I love this element of the story, that it's the lowliest people in this society who come forward and show the truth and show just how credulous and foolish and ignorant the ruling classes are in this moment. So the Wheelwright's son comes forward and he says, I recognize in the local paper the description of the young lady who's staying with you. And I remember her from the previous summer. She walked past my workshop on the road, and she spoke English to me, and I offered her some water, and we had a whole chat, and I thought she was incredibly beautiful, and I remember blushing at the time, but she's not a foreign princess. She's a vagrant. Now, another person who comes forward to corroborate this is a Mrs. Neal, who is a landlady in Bristol, near the docks, and she says, this young woman stayed with me last summer.

Again, she's English. she legged it without paying her bill and left all of her belongings in my lodging house and I still have them. Oh dear. And you know at this point, Caraboo, as she's known, has been painted by society portraitists. There's an account of her life being written. This is an absolute disaster for the warals.

They're like, oh, shit, this is embarrassing. And the whole thing falls apart and the warrels are humiliated. It's only a couple of years after this that the magistrate's bank that he owns, goes tits up and collapses, and he loses everything. So was it just the two people coming forward? And what did they put that in the papers to say that's, so it was reported that that isn't who this is? So they come forward to the Wurles themselves.

And Elizabeth Warrill, the wife of the magistrate, who has become quite close to Caraboo over this summer, she challenges her and she calls her into the drawing room and she's like, I know that you're lying to me, who are you? and this young woman says, I'm Caribou, Caraboo, Caraboo, Caraboo, Caram. She's like, stop it. Tell me the truth. Who are you?

Just cut this. And there's this incredible moment where she just turns around and she says, okay, my name is Mary Wilcox. Uh-oh. And there's just like silence. Elizabeth Worrell's like, oh no, I see what's happened. And Elizabeth Wilcox slash Princess Caraboo

has, I think, the most incredible life story, far more interesting than a princess who's escaped from the East Indies and been, you know, brought here by pirates. She's such a remarkable person who has endured and survived some of the darkest elements of life in this period and has found herself by accident swept up in this story and the silliness of the ruling classes. Before we get into who she was, was she crazy? Was she a con woman? Was she, did she really think that she was a princess? Like what, what the fuck? Yeah, what the fuck, exactly. It's hard to get to the bottom of this.

Now, my theory in the book is that everyone around her is the liar, and that she is severely mentally unwell. She might have been telling a bit of a liar, like a little, a baby life. So I think when she's taken up, when she walks into Amundsbury in the cobbler's house and she collapses and she's taken to the magistrate, I think at that point when she's brought before the magistrate, she's like, well, I can't speak English now.

I'm stuck in this situation. and they're offering me bed and board and a comfortable life. Like it's just got a bit, it's snowballed. It's snowballed, yeah. And she's like, they're offering to, like, literally feed me and clothe me. And, you know, they dress her in fine silks for the summer. Why do you think that she even wandered into the cobbler's going squeakle-s-gly-blis-blis. Because she's ill.

She's definitely ill. She's not a well person. Yeah, she's not well. She's not well. And I think that continues over the summer when she becomes a celebrity. But I think the lines of what she's aware of what she's not a well. where I do become blurred, and it is complicated. Okay.

But everyone around her is so keen for the fame that comes with this that they all jump on the lie. They all create it. Who is the person who initiates this? Is it the, is it the, is it Caraboo herself? Is it the magistrate? Is it that Portuguese sailor who's like, oh, yeah, she's a foreign princess? I mean, you couldn't have plotted this, could you?

This isn't like... If you wrote this as a novel, the editor would be like, this is too much. It's too much. Like, you couldn't possibly think, I'm going to wander into a cobbler's and then somehow I'm going to end up being a celebrity that summer. That's not... No, no, you couldn't have planned that. No, it's not her intent.

It's definitely not her intent. So who is Mary Wilcox? She is certainly not from the East Dixie. She's not a princess. She is, coincidentally, a cobbler's daughter. Which, you know, maybe that's why she felt at home walking into the cobbler's house. She's from Devon. So, again, very white, very English,

not someone from the East Indies. And she is born to kind of respectable poverty in a tiny rural place. And she has an early career as a servant in various places. Now, whether this is a sort of character trait, whether this is ongoing mental illness, it's really hard to tell. But she has this kind of pattern of behaviour where, wherever she works, wherever her situation is,

she's always walking away from it within a few months. Something always happens. She's kind of pissing other people off. She's maybe, she won't be told. what to do. So she's not good as a servant, basically. People will say, you know, you have to work this day, you can have this day off. She's like, no, no. I'm having Tuesday off. I'm not great in domestic servitude, that one. Exactly. Yeah. She's like, I'm better than this. If anything, she does see herself as a little bit of a princess, I suppose. So she, you know,

she's, she's constantly kind of moving from job to job. And in her sort of late teens, early 20s, she finds herself out of work, walking across the Salisbury Plain towards London. She's left the West Country behind. And she describes this herself later on. And this is written down as part of her life story that's published at the end of 1817, that she starts to have these blinding headaches. And she's close to suicidal thoughts. On the road, she does think about, unfortunately, taking her own life. And she's picked up by some people who were heading into London who find her in this sorry state. And she's sort of, she's speaking gibberish, interestingly, already at this point. She's not making sense. She's kind of delirious and they pick her up in their

cart and they take her into London and they take her to St. Giles' Workhouse and they just deposit her on the steps of the workhouse and are like, we found this lady on the road. She's not well, help her. And she spends almost a year, I think, in the workhouse, during which time, you know, entry to the workhouse in this period, you would be stripped of your clothing, you would have your body inspected for sexually transmitted disease or other diseases. You know, so very kind of intimate humiliation already, especially for a woman. Her head is shaved and she's kept in the hospital wing and she has this treatment for like cupping, so sort of hot cups are applied to her scalp. Yeah, and it leaves scars forever. And the scars are noticed later on when people

think she's a princess and they're like, oh, she's so exotic. She's got these strange markings on her head. It's like, nope, they're from torture in the workhouse. It's completely wild. And she has this, you know, kind of horrendous time in the workhouse. She's not allowed to leave for ages. And at one point, she's begging the doctor saying, I just want to go. Like, I don't want to be here anymore. And the doctor says, okay, well, you see that huge vat of boiling water at the end of the ward. If you can pick that up, you're strong enough to leave. Not a great doctorate.

And so she tries to do it. What health test is that? Yeah. Yes, this is not the days of the NHS. So she tries to pick up this boiling vat of water. She pulls it all over herself and scores herself. And he's like, yeah, I told you. Get back into bed.

What a dick. Right. Okay. Yeah. It's wild. It's wild. But she has this kind of, you know, in the 18th century, we talk about this idea of like the progress of different characters. You think of like Hogarthian progress, you know, the sort of Hogarth Prince that show like a young character arriving in the city and then it will all go downhill and these stories happen.

And she becomes a character like this. And it's really hard to kind of find the truth of what really happened to her in London and this kind of mythical, fantastical version. But we do find her in the archive at certain points. So we know, for example, that she goes from the workhouse. and there's a vicar who works in the workhouse who sort of comes to sermonise to these poor people who really don't need to be sermonised to. But he does help her to find a position as a servant.

So she ends up being a servant in Clapham for a little while. That doesn't work out inevitably because that's what she's like. We then find her, and we do find her in the record, in the Magdalene House for Penitent Prostitutes, which, you know, the name tells you everything. Again, you'd be stripped of your clothing. There was a sort of hideous brown uniform that you had to wear. and you're expected to, you know, go to the chapel all the time, you're doing menial work.

And this was, you know, this was an institution that inevitably, I mean, it sounds sort of so obvious to say it, but, you know, it was full of the people who were involved in this at a higher level. So the people who ran it, the patrons of institutions like this were themselves involved in all kind of scandalous affairs and, you know, having sex with various different partners and all of that. But there was so much judgment on these poor women who were coming in to the place. So she ends up in there.

we know that she actually wasn't working as a sex worker. She's not selling sex because she's just such a liar. It's so fascinating. She creates these characters for herself. And she gives a false name, by the way, when she goes into this place. So she's already kind of embodying different versions of herself. And one day, one of the women in there says to her, you know, what were your tricks then?

What did you used to do when you were selling sex? And she's like, I would never. How dare you? And everyone's like, what? And so they're like, yeah, you need to leave. Like if you're if you're not a penitent prostitute This isn't the home for you. Exactly. Yeah, yeah.

So she's gone from there and she's on the streets again. Now we know at some point that she becomes pregnant. Is she then forced into sex work? Is that an active choice? Is she in a relationship in some versions? She tells people different versions at this time. She's married. In other, she falls in love with a soldier who leaves her.

In other versions, it's a bricklayer from Devon. We don't know. We don't know. She's Mary is making this at left, right and centre. We do find her, though, in so this by this point it's like because obviously we've gone back in time before she becomes a princess so this is sort of I think 1815 at this point we do find her at the foundling hospital which for listeners who don't know is was a charity at the time that took in children whose parents

couldn't look after them for whatever reason and would try and rehome them into apprenticeships train them up in skills that would be useful in service and that kind of thing and it was a sort of lottery system of getting in there and we know that she has a son. called John. So she definitely was pregnant and that definitely happened. Yes. So he's born a few days before she enters a workhouse. She spends a few days in the workhouse postpartum to sort of recover.

I mean, if that's your only option, postpartum, it's not great. And we find her applying to the Foundling Hospital to take her some because she simply can't look after him. She's very mentally unwell at this point. She has no employment. She's living on the street. And this is the story of thousands of women in London at this time. And one of the things I did when I was researching this book is to go to the archive and look

at her petition, and I looked at the petitions for the whole summer of the year that she applies. And every single woman has a similar tale to tell these women who've been abandoned by men or the fathers of these children simply cannot help. They are not in a position to support the woman and the child, or women who've been sexually assaulted and that kind of thing. There's all kinds of circumstances, but they're all equally desperate for their child to be taken and looked after. And for some reason, because of, I think, her charisma, there's something about Mary Rorcox that she is sort of fascinating to people, whether it's her physical beauty, the way she moves, she has this kind of elegance that everyone picks up on. She is successful

and her son is taken into the hospital in a way that others aren't. And it broke my heart, it really broke my heart sitting in the archive reading those petitions. Yeah, they're devastating. Yeah, and you think, what happened to these women and these children who don't get in? They disappear from the record. We will never know. Do they just starve on the street probably? You know, it's really, really grim. And Mary's so close to that. her son does get in to the workhouse. Unfortunately, he dies a short time later so he doesn't survive the family hospital. And she finds this out. And I think this is the kind of trigger for her descent into very, very severe mental illness. And we know that she... That makes sense.

She makes her way back to the West Country and we find her in the Bristol Docks where she is living on the street. She's possibly working as a sex worker at this point. She's desperate. She's starving. She's begging for change. And one of the things she notes about this time is the other women along the dock, especially French women, who tie their hair with a turban in a certain way and dress in this slightly sort of performative, characterised, sort of exotic way that's playing into the fantasies of the sailors who are coming in and out of the dock, and they're making a lot of money. And Mary's sat there, you know, just sat with a hand outstretched begging, and she's like,

hmm, okay, I see what's happening here. This is another character I can embody. And that, I think, is how she ends up exhausted, unwell, but dressed in this slightly odd way in Amundsbury when she becomes Princess Caribou. So it's a wild story, but I think it's one... That is nuts, isn't it? Yeah, it's completely nuts. And it's also, it's like a tour of every charitable institution in this era. It's a tour of like the very highest, the very lowest of society, the absolute luxury you could live with. And what's so fascinating is that really it's a story about empire and the fantasy of empire, but nobody in this story is ever leaving the shores of Britain.

No, anything about empire whatsoever. Mary Wilcox is from Devon and has made it as far as London and back again. That is it. Wow. It's crazy. Back with Maddie and Princess Caribou after this short break. When you first started telling this story,

I was ready for like a big, you know, manipulative con artist, like some of the greats. I shouldn't say greats, they're all shit heads. But like, you know, like people can, make millions out of spinning yarns and, you know, like the Tinder Swindler and all of these people have their own Netflix special. This just sounds like she wasn't very well. Like she'd been absolutely through the ringer and she's been reduced to the point where she's wandering around Bristol and Bath with a turban on her head talking gibberish. And then she just went with it.

She just went with it. She got somewhere to sleep. She got, I mean, she was homeless, right? She was homeless and she got someone to look after her. You know, she had someone to care for her. And in the book, the other stories that I look at, there are those manipulative, very dark people in there. And, you know, we have other instances of, you know, really kind of scary individuals who know how to manipulate people in their darkest, most vulnerable moments.

But she is not that. And she, you know, I think in this story the liars of the people around her, I think it's the Wilkinson. He's the prick, isn't he? They're the ones that have clearly knowingly lied. They're the ones that have made up a language. They're the ones that have sold us to the world as this exotic princess. They're the ones that have attempted to bolster this bullshit story.

I'm afraid this one is on them, and I feel remotely sorry for them. Yeah. Well, you'd be glad to know that, you know, like I say, in the case of the magistrate, his bank collapses, his reputation is ruined. He's sort of socially pushed to the side in Bath and Bristol, and eventually they leave Noel House and sort of disappear off into the countryside and obscurity. And Dr. Wilkinson has his career ruined. doesn't publish any more work for another 15, 20 years, something like that.

He's completely humiliated. But what about Mary? Where does she go after this? After this weird Scooby-Doo sort of ending to the story of just like, no, sorry, I'm just Mary and I'm from Devon, sorry. Yeah, sorry about that, everyone. So she has an extraordinary afterlife as Caribou. So initially, even though it comes out in the press, you know, guess what, everyone,

Princess Carribe is not real. She's a cobbler's daughter, this is wild. and for a little while she's taken in by someone else in Bristol and people will clamour to see her day after day but eventually they all realise they need to get rid of her because she's humiliated everyone she's upset the status quo she needs to go so they put her on a ship called the Robert and Anne

which heads to Philadelphia and she's off to the new world and what a perfectly sensible solution well done everybody yeah exactly we'll just ship her off it's fine and what I sort of love about this story and her resilience is that she's put on the ship with two nuns of a sort of obscure religious order, who are meant to, you know, take her to the new world, and they'll find her position as a servant.

They're sort of responsible for her moral recovery. And, you know, the whole journey, they're sort of lecturing her and saying, you shouldn't lie, and it's really bad, and you should just know your place, and you're going to be a servant in America, and that's going to be your lot. Be really grateful for this.

We're helping you, blah, blah. When she gets to Philadelphia, the newspapers have already gone ahead of her saying about this story of Caribou, and she gets so many often, and she sort of falls in with this one guy who takes her on the stage and they do a tour of American theatres with her as Princess Caribou. And it's so interesting because the joke for the Americans is that aren't the British stupid for having fallen for this. And so she's exhibited

as a famous hoaxer. Nobody's taking this seriously now. She knows how to monetise this. I respect to the hustle. Absolutely. She really does. And she, you know, she does make quite a lot money. She is described, it gets sillier and silly. At one point, she's described as, like, the daughter of the man in the moon. And, like, that's the nation she's from. And that's where her language is from. And she does this whole bit on stage where she, like, leans down to the audience and talks in the language of the moon. And everyone's like, oh, very good, you know, hilarious. Well done. And so she talks for a few years. We don't really know what happens. We think it peters out. She disappears in the archive. And eventually, by the early

1820, she does make her way back to Britain, where she tries to exhibit as Caribou again, keeping the hustle up. And she's brought all her sort of American costumes and stage and stuff. And everyone in Bath and Bristol's like, no, we're not doing this again. It's too soon. Yeah, exactly. Nobody's recovered from this. Like, no, we're not doing it.

And so she sort of falls into a life of obscurity. We find her again in the late, later sort of, I know, the 1860s, I think, where she is married. She works as a leech cellar. So really the lowest of the low, you know, her and her husband wake up early in the morning with the other leech sellers and they sort of, tread out into the bogs outside of Bristol and the leeches, you know, you pull your skirts up, the leeches attached to your legs. Oh, fuck. Oh, that's grim. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You pick them off and you put them in a jar and you take them to the hospitals and their big business, you know,

in medicine at the moment, like leeches in this. That is a shit job. It's a really shit job. You know, it's sort of parasitic in all kinds of ways, right? Wow. Okay. kind of being leached off by the medical profession. So she does that for a little bit. We think potentially there's a report of her husband. We think it's a husband who is arrested and taken before a court in the 1860s for having buried a number of their children who die before they're baptized in their garden. That's not good.

It's not good, no. So she has multiple, she just have a daughter who survives, but she has multiple children potentially who, die and, you know, they're not baptised. They're just buried in the backyard. And it's really tragic. So she has this tragic life. And she eventually dies. She has a heart attack on Christmas Eve in the street. And it's, you know, I describe it in the book as this kind of like one last final dramatic performance for her. Yeah, what a good way to go out. Yeah. And she's buried, she's buried just outside Bristol and you can go to her grave today. And yeah, she's a sort of,

she's a fascinating person. But she has, yeah, a life of stability in some ways afterwards with husband and her daughter, but, you know, there's a lot of tragedy in there as well. And let's not forget her son who dies in the Foundling Hospital as well, you know, there's a lot of loss in there. And children in the street shout after her Princess Caribou, and she gets really upset by it, and she just wants to sort of forget that period of her life. So, yeah, it's a bleak history, but it's one that I think, yeah, as I say, sort of takes you on a tour of the early 19th century in Britain and how people understood their place in the world, the sort of global stakes of empire and actually how no one knew what was going on.

And she exposed it all, whether she meant to or not, she really upended the power structure of that time. Maddie, you have been fabulous to talk to you. Thank you so much. What an amazing story. That's a wild ride. It's wild. That's a wild one. Thank you so much for coming to talk to us about it.

You've been absolutely fascinating. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? Well, my new book, Hoax, Truth and Lies and the Age of Enlightenment is out on the 7th of May. You can pre-order it. It's available online. It's available in stores. it will be available as an audiobook. I am reading it. Amazing. I did read it seven months pregnant and it's very breathy, let me tell you. So if that's your thing, enjoy that. But yeah, it's out now.

And of course, you are the co-presenter of After Dark. Yes, thank you for reminding me. It's a good job. Sorry, so I'm here, baby brains. I'm here. Yeah, I'm here. Yeah, exactly. Thank God for Kate Lister, everyone. Yes, I am the co-host of a little podcast called After Dark with Dr. Anthony Delaney. I am on and off it while I'm on Matt leave. We've pre-recorded some stuff. I'm making some appearances. I'm going to be back in the summer. So by the time this episode goes out, I might be slightly on a hiatus, but I am available as a back catalogue of episodes, several hundred. Thank you so much for coming by, and best of luck, are you going to smash this? Is Caraboo a name that you're considering? Yes, that is the only name that I'll be taking under consideration

at this point. Thank you. You've been wonderful. Thank you very much, Kate. Thank you for listening, and thank you so much to Maddie for joining us. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along whatever it is you get your podcasts. And if you'd like us to explore a subject or if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at betwixtat history hit.com. This podcast was edited by Tim Arstall and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The Senior Producer was Freddie Chick. Join me again, Betwixt O'Sheets, the History of Sex, Scandal and Society,

a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.