Speaker 1: Ridiculous Crime is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hi Saron, Hello Elizabeth.
Speaker 3: How are you doing today?
Speaker 2: I'm doing pretty good. It was raining earlier and I
Speaker 2: was like a nice rainy dish. Yeah, yeah, I'm good.
Speaker 2: How about you? How are you good?
Speaker 3: I'm good.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm good.
Speaker 3: In my head and my body.
Speaker 2: That's the best place to be good.
Speaker 3: Why not? Do you know it's ridiculous?
Speaker 2: I do, Elizabeth. Now, I have to admit I don't
Speaker 2: know if this is real. Okay, it doesn't matter, right,
Speaker 2: But I often have this where I'm like, I spend
Speaker 2: a lot of my time now and I'm not just
Speaker 2: talking like oh this is ai slop? Is this real? Question?
Speaker 2: But like just news stories. I will see like a
Speaker 2: news story roll past and I'm like, is that real?
Speaker 2: And I have to click on it. I spend a
Speaker 2: lot of time not reading things I want to read,
Speaker 2: but reading things I have to discide is that real?
Speaker 2: Is that true? Could that be?
Speaker 3: Ye?
Speaker 2: Here's another example, according to and this is why I
Speaker 2: don't believe it w x y z S Channel seven News,
Speaker 2: a Florida woman has been accused of entering the Penguin
Speaker 2: enclosure to teach them him to tap dance using a
Speaker 2: live alligator as her partner. Jacksonville, Florida, PD stated she
Speaker 2: was also dressed as a pineapple. Wait, the guy just
Speaker 2: can't believe that's true. But I could very well tell
Speaker 2: me you x y Z a real station. I didn't
Speaker 2: look it up. I just saw this. I didn't have
Speaker 2: enough time. This is what I mean. Is I've yet
Speaker 2: to I haven't looked into this one. This is I'm
Speaker 2: giving you fresh. Is this real? This is like just happened.
Speaker 2: I was in walking into the studio and I was like,
Speaker 2: that can't pay. Too many were telling you right now
Speaker 2: where I.
Speaker 3: Am dressed like a pineapple?
Speaker 2: Yes, walks into a penguin enclosure with a live alligator
Speaker 2: and was like, all y'all want to boogie woogie?
Speaker 3: Helping to teach tap?
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, well but yeah, I guess so yeah, tap
Speaker 2: dancing it was involved. So I don't know if he
Speaker 2: was tapping to teach or he was a demonstrating so
Speaker 2: much like don't do it like.
Speaker 3: This strong army, making making them participate.
Speaker 2: Maybe he was the better dancer, Maybe he was teaching, you.
Speaker 3: Know, maybe he was the one doing all the moves.
Speaker 2: He's like, let's go show these penguins because when you're
Speaker 2: not here, I need someone to dance.
Speaker 3: I like that. I like so this is such a
Speaker 3: strange world that we live.
Speaker 2: In every day. Headline six or seventy you brought like
Speaker 2: is that headline? Reeal? I have to go and read it,
Speaker 2: and that's a new thing for me where I'm just
Speaker 2: spending all my day going is that real?
Speaker 3: Is this real? Do you want to know what else
Speaker 3: is ridiculous?
Speaker 2: Elizabeth?
Speaker 3: This hot take? Renaissance pamphlets are basically zines. Oh this
Speaker 3: is Ridiculous Crime a podcast about absurd and outrageous capers,
Speaker 3: hes and cons. It's always ninety nine percent murder free
Speaker 3: and one hundred percent ridiculous.
Speaker 2: Damn right, I know this.
Speaker 3: Our cycles have sinked once again. This is apparently historical
Speaker 3: crime Week here.
Speaker 2: I know.
Speaker 3: I got one for you from hundreds of years ago.
Speaker 2: I like this. Yeah, no iPhone faces in these stories.
Speaker 3: Oh it's the best. And then no one can get
Speaker 3: mad and send us a message that like, oh, you
Speaker 3: did a show.
Speaker 2: But got my story wrong. I'm actually her granddaughter is
Speaker 2: exactly how dare you?
Speaker 3: I love that. So we're going back to the sixteen hundreds, Bibery.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Sixteen forty two, Okay, the Treaty of Axiom was signed
Speaker 3: between the Dutch West India Company and the chiefs of
Speaker 3: the Enzema people in the modern day African nation of Ghana.
Speaker 3: That happened that year Broxhom folks in Galway, Ireland. They
Speaker 3: seized an English naval ship and closed the town gates
Speaker 3: to support the Irish rebellion of sixteen forty one. The
Speaker 3: years are okay, still going on. Three hundred thousand people
Speaker 3: died when the Ming dynasty defenders intentionally destroyed damns and
Speaker 3: dykes of the Yellow River Washington. It was to break
Speaker 3: the siege by the large Manchu dynasty rebel force.
Speaker 2: Just wash the wash them away. It was like mostly
Speaker 2: an army that gets washed away and then whoever attackted.
Speaker 3: In Colonizer history, Georgiana, Massachusetts now known as York, Maine,
Speaker 3: became the first incorporated city in the British Colonies of
Speaker 3: North America.
Speaker 2: First incorporated city. They made it official.
Speaker 3: They put a ring on it. Able Tasman and his
Speaker 3: crew became the first Europeans to see Van Diemen's Land,
Speaker 3: later known as the Australian Island and state of Tasmania.
Speaker 3: Galileo died that year, so did Willata Petros saint in
Speaker 3: the Ethiopian Orthodox Touaedo Church.
Speaker 2: Wait if okay, go on, sorry, I was going to
Speaker 2: do something a galley. It doesn't matter what did you
Speaker 2: say though.
Speaker 3: The last part, well, let a Petros saint in the
Speaker 3: Ethiopian Orthodox Church that that person died as well. This
Speaker 3: is all sixteen forty two, King Charles the First of
Speaker 3: England and a bunch of his soldiers ran up on
Speaker 3: the House of Commons to arrest his critics for treason.
Speaker 2: Oh yes, they were getting wild.
Speaker 3: They escaped. The critics escaped and were protected by the
Speaker 3: Lord Mayor of London. And this is a note because
Speaker 3: that was the last time any monarch entered the House
Speaker 3: of Commons. That was it. Yeah? Well, and then the
Speaker 3: English Civil War kicked off one with Charles the First
Speaker 3: raised the Royal Battle Standard over Nottingham Castle and declared
Speaker 3: war on his own Parliament. England's Long Parliament ordered the
Speaker 3: theaters of London closed, a pretty much ended the era
Speaker 3: of English Renaissance theater.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: Okay, So there's lots going on all across the globe,
Speaker 3: but a particularly tumultuous time in jolly old England, and
Speaker 3: that's where we're going to start today, sixteen forty two England.
Speaker 3: But put a pin in that. So now let's talk
Speaker 3: about riot Girls.
Speaker 2: Okay, this is quite the skip. I'm gonna need a.
Speaker 3: Who different record for I just finished listening to Kathleen
Speaker 3: Hannah's memoir on audible. She was the lead singer of
Speaker 3: the punk band Bikini Kill and the one who founded
Speaker 3: the Riot Girl movement. So for the uninitiated, Riot Girl
Speaker 3: was a feminist punk movement that emerged in the early
Speaker 3: nineties pretty much like in Olympia Washington and in Washington, DC.
Speaker 3: And it combined this like DIY punk music with feminist
Speaker 3: politics created a space for women to express anger, like
Speaker 3: reclaim their bodies, challenge sexism in the music industry, and
Speaker 3: then like society at large. And so the core bands
Speaker 3: were Bikini Kill, Slater Kinney, and Bratmobile, and there were
Speaker 3: tons of like self published zines that shared personal writing,
Speaker 3: political manifestos, and community resources. And there was this phrase
Speaker 3: girls to the Front that Kathleen Hannah used to yell.
Speaker 3: That was this rallying cry that encouraged women to take
Speaker 3: up like literal and figurative space at shows. So Riot
Speaker 3: Girl addressed topics that were largely taboo at the time,
Speaker 3: you know, like sexual assault, body image, racism, homophobia in
Speaker 3: this really raw, unapologetic and direct way. And it was
Speaker 3: as much of like a cultural and political network as
Speaker 3: it was a music scene. Influence third wave feminism.
Speaker 2: I was gonna say, it's almost like its own subwave
Speaker 2: of feminism.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly, And it left this mark on Indian and
Speaker 3: punk culture. So the memoir I thought was really good
Speaker 3: because I went back and forth between totally relating to
Speaker 3: what she was saying and experiencing, and then also rolling
Speaker 3: my eyes and how extra she was sometimes and how
Speaker 3: overly sensitive I thought she was about some things.
Speaker 2: They could be super raw and then also super precious
Speaker 2: to be.
Speaker 3: Challenged by writing and art. I don't want to just
Speaker 3: you know, feel all one way. I like the back
Speaker 3: and forth of my own reactions. She did get me
Speaker 3: thinking about why I thought things that she said or
Speaker 3: did were naive or precious and not like in the
Speaker 3: what we'd call the real world, like my own programming,
Speaker 3: you know, by an inherently misogynist society, I suppose. Anyway,
Speaker 3: when I stumbled upon the woman.
Speaker 2: Could you experience a Rye girl summer of your own?
Speaker 3: Not necessarily, No, it was like kind of swimming around
Speaker 3: and like you know, would like listen to parts of
Speaker 3: it and stuff, but I never got into like the
Speaker 3: zines in the meetings and like oka going heavy into
Speaker 3: that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2: I got you.
Speaker 3: But so I'm looking around, like who am I going
Speaker 3: to tell you about this week? And I found this
Speaker 3: woman and it made me think of Kathleen Hannah. So
Speaker 3: this woman, Mary Carlton, she was just like a blatant criminal.
Speaker 3: Kathleen Hannah not a blatant and Mary Carlton, though she
Speaker 3: wrote her own account of her life, and like numerous pamphlets, plays,
Speaker 3: and broadsides were written about her both during and after
Speaker 3: her life.
Speaker 2: This is beyond uncommon, right.
Speaker 3: And so she's this fascinating figure in the history of
Speaker 3: female agency, crime and celebrity. So she navigated this world
Speaker 3: with like very few legitimate opportunities for women. Okay, So,
Speaker 3: like Kathleen Hannah had to choose between waiting tables and
Speaker 3: stripping in order to make money to get her band
Speaker 3: on the road for tour. And she chose stripping because
Speaker 3: there was so much more money involved.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so they that I stripped, but I know that
Speaker 2: there's more money there dancers.
Speaker 3: Imagine how tough it was for Mary Carlton three hundred
Speaker 3: and fifty some years earlier. Yeah. So Carlton and Hannah
Speaker 3: they no, Yeah, I did the math. They're both they
Speaker 3: were so audacious.
Speaker 2: I mean places where you can actually make a good
Speaker 2: living right.
Speaker 3: And changing and have the agency. So they both they
Speaker 3: were audacious and they reinvented themselves. So I kind of
Speaker 3: feel like Mary Carlton was like a proto riot girl.
Speaker 2: I like this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I like, I'm going with this, and it's a risk,
Speaker 3: it's a gamble. I know these dice.
Speaker 2: I do a number of riote girls, and so far
Speaker 2: everything you're describing is eliciting both their spirit and their comportment.
Speaker 3: So yeah, see, okay, I'm on the right track. I said, like,
Speaker 3: people can't from if I tell something from the sixteen hundreds,
Speaker 3: they can't complain. But now I got like, right, girls
Speaker 3: are going to come at me. But that's okay.
Speaker 2: Now I think you're doing this is it is with love?
Speaker 3: And so it was in sixteen forty two, I told
Speaker 3: you all the things that.
Speaker 2: Happened sixteen two.
Speaker 3: That was also the year. That's the year that Mary
Speaker 3: Carlton was born in Canterbury, England. Her dad was a fiddler,
Speaker 3: professional musician one hundred percent. Going on my list of
Speaker 3: fake jobs that I tell people, I have taxidermists, greeting
Speaker 3: card writer, fiddler.
Speaker 2: Play green fleas. It's not like to play free bird
Speaker 2: period exactly. He's like, oh, got it.
Speaker 3: So when she arrived in the world in sixteen forty two,
Speaker 3: she was Mary Moehler's into an England in crisis. She
Speaker 3: grew up. She married a shoemaker named Thomas Steadman. Like
Speaker 3: just like Oprah, she hooked up with her. He had
Speaker 3: a job, but like Mary, wasn't stoked on it. She
Speaker 3: wanted more. She didn't want to be the daughter of
Speaker 3: a Canterbury fiddler and the wife of a Canterbury shoemaker.
Speaker 2: Ah.
Speaker 3: She hung on for four years with this guy, and
Speaker 3: then Steedman got called to fight in the Civil War
Speaker 3: and Mary saw her chance. She ran off to Dover, England.
Speaker 3: So in sixteen sixty, she's eighteen years old, she got
Speaker 3: busted in Dover. Now let's do the math. Assuming she
Speaker 3: got busted pretty quickly upon arrival. That means that she
Speaker 3: was married to the shoemaker when she was fourteen.
Speaker 2: I was skipping past that because you did, I know,
Speaker 2: you know how to do that.
Speaker 3: Math so bleaked so common.
Speaker 2: Oh yes, yeaheen fourteen and she's four years deep in
Speaker 2: a marriage at eighteen, just like I want to get
Speaker 2: to Dover.
Speaker 3: I got to get out of here. So she gets
Speaker 3: to Dover. She got in trouble for trying to marry
Speaker 3: a surgeon named Thomas Day, like she's trading up. The
Speaker 3: problem is that she was still married to Stedman. Oh yeah,
Speaker 3: he's off fighting in Dunkirk, which that place has had
Speaker 3: it rough Ittilia. But Mary told the court that she
Speaker 3: heard he was dead. She's like, big of me, not guilty.
Speaker 3: You're on her, No, not me. So the judge let
Speaker 3: her go, but only on the condition that she either
Speaker 3: provide proof that Stedman was really dead or break it
Speaker 3: off with the surgeon. And so she.
Speaker 2: Says, no, Stedman, he's still fighting at this point on
Speaker 2: the front. She's a guy.
Speaker 3: She She's like, well, I don't have written proof that
Speaker 3: he was killed in battle, but I'll swear to it
Speaker 3: in court. And the court's like, well, let's call for
Speaker 3: him to appear, and he didn't show, so she got acquitted.
Speaker 3: She's like, there you go proof.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, no body, no crime.
Speaker 3: Wait apparently quote. There was also present at the trial
Speaker 3: a bricklayer one Billing, who had brought with him a
Speaker 3: parson and a clerk is witnesses that he too had
Speaker 3: once married her, but for some reason his case was
Speaker 3: not ever heard no onet to because he was kind
Speaker 3: of like a push bricklayer.
Speaker 2: Rough hand justice for Billing.
Speaker 3: I feel.
Speaker 2: This was a guy who hitched us.
Speaker 3: That's making me roll the dates back even further. If
Speaker 3: she was four years in deep with.
Speaker 2: The husband was a bigamous so she like married him
Speaker 2: at sixteen.
Speaker 3: She married the original guy like thirteen, and then did
Speaker 3: four years, got to dover married Billing married Like yeah,
Speaker 3: there's a lot going on, but I feel like Mary
Speaker 3: was doing that thing where you start with a paper
Speaker 3: clip and start trading up until you have like a yacht.
Speaker 3: For she went from shoemaker a surgeon. Me too.
Speaker 2: I can't have that kind of stick to it and
Speaker 2: care enough. I'll be happy with like the early thing.
Speaker 2: Like you feel like here's a light bulb. I need
Speaker 2: a light bulb.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly, and then I don't have to talk to
Speaker 3: anyone else. So anyway, she was able to beat the charges,
Speaker 3: and so she decided like, well, maybe England isn't the
Speaker 3: place for me.
Speaker 2: I love it, by the way, busted in Dovers. It
Speaker 2: sounds like a Pogue song.
Speaker 3: It dover or like a old steady. So they knew
Speaker 3: too much in England. So she went to Germany, and
Speaker 3: it was there that she put the moves on a
Speaker 3: wealthy nobleman, an older gent, and he was all about it.
Speaker 3: He gave her presence, he bought her clothes, He just
Speaker 3: like handed her straight up cash, promised her the moon.
Speaker 3: He's like, as long as you will marry me, And
Speaker 3: she's like, you know what, why not, I will marry you.
Speaker 3: Let's do it.
Speaker 2: I still have the dress.
Speaker 3: I mean there's this whole thing like I might be
Speaker 3: already married, and like I've already beat big em me
Speaker 3: by a hair.
Speaker 2: People keep saying I'm married everywhere I.
Speaker 3: Go, and I think that maybe like this reality got
Speaker 3: to her.
Speaker 2: I think they're just jealous.
Speaker 3: Well, like the whirlwind, romance with the nobleman ended just
Speaker 3: as quickly as it began. Oh, she promised, okay, you
Speaker 3: know what, I'll marry you in three days. Three days.
Speaker 3: And he gave her a ton of cash and was like,
Speaker 3: go get whatever you need for the wedding, my love,
Speaker 3: okay yeah, and he's spitting. He's like, I just want
Speaker 3: to make you mine. So she's staying at this lodge
Speaker 3: and the nobleman gave the landlady there this wedding chest
Speaker 3: full of absolute treasure for safe keeping, and Mary would
Speaker 3: get the chest and all the loot upon their marriage.
Speaker 3: So as soon as the land lady left the law
Speaker 3: like she went out to the toilet in the back
Speaker 3: or something, Mary busted open the chest and took everything,
Speaker 3: and then she got the heck out of town. She's like,
Speaker 3: I don't want to marry this guy, Mary marry him.
Speaker 3: I want to just like So she got a ticket
Speaker 3: to Utrecht and ghosted old homie.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 3: And I got to say, these men, they're using her
Speaker 3: for her youth and beauty.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I don't feel about at all.
Speaker 3: They would discard her without a thought.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a transactional thing. And she just moved quickly exactly.
Speaker 3: She decides to use them first fair play. So from
Speaker 3: utrek she went to Amsterdam, and once there she sold
Speaker 3: this gold chain and some other jewelry that he'd given her,
Speaker 3: and she used that cash to get to Rotterdam. And
Speaker 3: she's smart. She's like spreading out her fencing so it
Speaker 3: can't really be traced. From Rotterdam, she bounced around a little,
Speaker 3: and she finally bought a ticket back to England. You know,
Speaker 3: it's a successful trip to Germany. I've had a bunch
Speaker 3: of stuff. It's a fun So she arrived in Billingsgate,
Speaker 3: which is like this entry point into London at the
Speaker 3: end of March sixteen sixty three. She's twenty one, sixteen
Speaker 3: sixty three, okay, And she didn't enter London as Mary
Speaker 3: Moehlers or Mary Steedman or any other names she'd already held.
Speaker 3: She walked into the Exchange tavern in central London, dressed
Speaker 3: to the nines, carrying herself with dignity, dripping in jewels
Speaker 3: and speaking with like this slightly continental foreign accent. Can't
Speaker 3: put your finger on it.
Speaker 2: She's like, I imagine, kind of like a less pronounced,
Speaker 2: kind of.
Speaker 3: Like it could be anywhere I could be singing from
Speaker 3: rich So she said her name was Princess Henrietta Maria
Speaker 3: devouve from Cologne, French, German Frankish, long way from a
Speaker 3: fiddler's dot huh. So this is how she characterized her
Speaker 3: background in her own words. Quote. My father's name was
Speaker 3: Henry van Woolway, a license tat and doctor of the
Speaker 3: civil law, and Lord of Holmestein, A man esteemed for
Speaker 3: his services done to the City of Kollen in mediating
Speaker 3: their peace and security and neutrality in the Swedish and
Speaker 3: German War, and for other effects of his counsels and
Speaker 3: endeavors to our ecclesiastical Prince Elector and the House of
Speaker 3: Lorraine in all those turmoils of that country in the
Speaker 3: first rupture of the Spanish and French War. I instance
Speaker 3: these remarks, because having been so long dead some nineteen years,
Speaker 3: I cannot better describe or characterize him to strangers, though
Speaker 3: he were known in his own country by other great
Speaker 3: and noble actions, as well as for his long and
Speaker 3: ancient descent from an honorable family of that name, which
Speaker 3: whosoever shall give himself the trouble of curiosity and inquiring
Speaker 3: may yet find preserved from the ruins of a destructive
Speaker 3: and but just composed conflagration, an so like break it
Speaker 3: up girl, like the period is your friend you put
Speaker 3: it in there. Yeah, a lot of commas, but it's
Speaker 3: also it's like it's all the like high falutin flowery language.
Speaker 2: It sounds like imitation lawyer speakers.
Speaker 3: And it's a long way from a peasant Kentish accent
Speaker 3: of the time. So she has she's trained herself in this.
Speaker 3: She said that her parents died before she was three,
Speaker 3: but her father left his entire estate to her, and
Speaker 3: she was an orphan and taken in by the church,
Speaker 3: specifically the nunnery of Sancta Clara, and there she got
Speaker 3: this education, good home training. She was given all the
Speaker 3: proper breeding and such, but she wanted more. I mean,
Speaker 3: that's like her true story, right, just once more exotically
Speaker 3: in this version of her life. She didn't want to
Speaker 3: be alone all the time. She didn't want to live
Speaker 3: like an old nun while being this like vivacious young gal.
Speaker 3: She said quote, I felt some such strong impulses and
Speaker 3: natural instincts to be ranging abroad and in action, as
Speaker 3: the first finders of Tara incognita were urged with to
Speaker 3: discover of those regions of whose existence they had no
Speaker 3: further assurance than their own hopeful bodings and divinations.
Speaker 2: She's like, look, it's the age of exploration. I want
Speaker 2: to want to explore.
Speaker 3: I want to get out there. I got that. So
Speaker 3: she told people that she traped around Europe and she
Speaker 3: was hounded by suitors. One was an old soldier, according
Speaker 3: to Laura Colb, Associate professor of English at Baroke College,
Speaker 3: cuney quote, a faustlike student of the dark arts.
Speaker 2: Gotcha the old soldier.
Speaker 3: Yes, that's a little scary. And then there she was
Speaker 3: walking into the Exchange tavern, ready to see where the
Speaker 3: day would take her. Let's take a break. When we return,
Speaker 3: we're going to join Mary in the tavern on her
Speaker 3: search for her next fool zaren All right, So here
Speaker 3: we are in the exchange tavern. Now I think this
Speaker 3: must have been attack picturing and jewels, crash trippin and
Speaker 3: like fancy clothes, and she rolls in got her.
Speaker 2: Like weird continental German French act right right.
Speaker 3: I think that this place must have been located next
Speaker 3: to the Royal Exchange, and that was created by Sir
Speaker 3: Thomas Gresham. He was this wealthy merchant and a financial
Speaker 3: agent to the crown. So by like the mid fifteen
Speaker 3: hundreds London merchants were had been conducting their business outside,
Speaker 3: not like the poshtraders that this guy had seen in
Speaker 3: Antwerp and Amsterdam.
Speaker 2: They were still doing it like a farmer's market style.
Speaker 3: Yes. Yes, So he was like, you know what, London
Speaker 3: deserves a mercantile exchange. That's worthy of a great trading.
Speaker 2: We should be indoors too, We need.
Speaker 3: To be inside and out of the l Dutch. So
Speaker 3: he's like, I'll build it if the City of London
Speaker 3: Corporation will give me the land.
Speaker 2: Gotcha.
Speaker 3: So they're like, cool, we got land. It's we can
Speaker 3: make this work. So in fifteen sixty five they start
Speaker 3: working on it. Three years later they're done. That's like
Speaker 3: breakneck speed for huge building like this with no like
Speaker 3: excavators and all this stuff, you know what I mean,
Speaker 3: like not a dozer and slights sarin. So the January
Speaker 3: twenty third, fifteen seventy one, Queen Elizabeth the First visited
Speaker 3: it for this formal ceremony. There's all this pageantry. She
Speaker 3: proclaimed that it would henceforth be known as the Royal Exchange.
Speaker 3: So that made it legit, like people believe it, and
Speaker 3: it served as dual purpose that made it really unique
Speaker 3: in London. So the lower courtyard was where all the
Speaker 3: merchants and brokers and traders would gather and conduct business
Speaker 3: in like commodities, shipping, bills of exchange, insurance.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the more liquid stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And the merchants typically congregated in like specific areas
Speaker 3: of the courtyard according to their trade or their nationality.
Speaker 3: So there were recognized walks for like Virginia merchants.
Speaker 2: Okay, and flying in tobacco, yeah, those.
Speaker 3: Trade future with the levant and then Goldsmith's over here.
Speaker 3: So the upper galleries were called the pawn and they
Speaker 3: were lined with shops that were rented out to like Millner's, haberdashers, booksellers, apothecaries,
Speaker 3: dealers in luxury goods, and the retail spots were super
Speaker 3: fashionable and like commercially valuable, and they attracted this wealthy
Speaker 3: clientele and gave the exchange an additional revenue stream.
Speaker 2: Now are they selling direct to customers at.
Speaker 3: This place in the upstairs?
Speaker 2: Yeah, So it's like a bit more like a like
Speaker 2: a shopping market, but it's a nice like the level
Speaker 2: of like thoroughfare, bizarre style, got dealers going, look at
Speaker 2: my wares and you're like, that's some nice ass.
Speaker 3: I love that. That's that's awesome. Can I have some sure?
Speaker 2: How much for that? La?
Speaker 3: So there's this combination of like high commerce would be amazing.
Speaker 3: I was like, well, I can't dwell because now I'm
Speaker 3: just imagining what is the lace Like I'm kind of thinking,
Speaker 3: is it like a lace fezz or is it floppy
Speaker 3: like a flop?
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly covers the ears a little bit, it's harder.
Speaker 3: It's so there's this high commerce on the floor, retail
Speaker 3: up top. It made it into this like social and
Speaker 3: commercial hub. So gentlemen were there, noble women, visitors to
Speaker 3: the city. It was like a tourist attraction. And then
Speaker 3: it's this emerging culture of news and information comes out
Speaker 3: there because that's where booksellers in the pond were selling pamphlets, gazettes,
Speaker 3: news books, zines, So that's where you're getting all your
Speaker 3: information and.
Speaker 2: Paper ain't cheap. Then it was like an investment books
Speaker 2: is like man got a library.
Speaker 3: There's information about what's going on the world, and there's
Speaker 3: commercial intelligence because you've got like shipping arrivals, commodity price,
Speaker 3: political rumor, like you could get things going like in
Speaker 3: terms of movements, that gets traded, just like the commodities do.
Speaker 3: So it made sense that Mary would show up there.
Speaker 3: It's the place to see.
Speaker 2: In BC is and the money.
Speaker 3: Yeah, she walks into the tavern, but she's not alone.
Speaker 3: She has a parson with her. They'd met on the
Speaker 3: ferry in. They just pick them up. It's like it
Speaker 3: gets stuck on your shoe or something. They met on
Speaker 3: the ferry in from the port in Gravesend, and the
Speaker 3: parson was like sweet on her.
Speaker 2: Of course he wanted to.
Speaker 3: Get in them draws. He was like, let me see
Speaker 3: that lacey hat. Mary.
Speaker 2: He's kind of country too, I imagine, pretend to go
Speaker 2: in the city. I like you, Yeah, you're.
Speaker 3: So. Mary's like I'm not about that, Like I I'm
Speaker 3: operating at such a higher level, but.
Speaker 2: I'll take the social protection until we get to Yeah.
Speaker 3: Well though, she gets to the tavern and she asks
Speaker 3: the owner, mister King, like can you help me? I
Speaker 3: need a place to stay, but I also have to
Speaker 3: get away from this creepy parson, like he will not
Speaker 3: leave me alone. And King's like yeah, of course, And
Speaker 3: so he and his wife like they they they're scoping
Speaker 3: Mary out though, they like, get her set up in
Speaker 3: a room. They see, okay, she's got all these jewels,
Speaker 3: she has trunks of stuff. Oh yeah, so many, so
Speaker 3: many laces. So she moved in and she's like sending
Speaker 3: letters overseas and they're looking to see, like, oh, she's
Speaker 3: writing two and they wound up being no better than
Speaker 3: all the creeper dudes. They're like, you know what, you
Speaker 3: should totally meet missus King's brother. He's rad you would
Speaker 3: really love him. His name's John Carlton. He's a lord.
Speaker 3: Did you know that?
Speaker 2: He's a lord and the richest man they knew who
Speaker 2: was young enough to.
Speaker 3: My wife's brother. This doesn't make any sense, but okay,
Speaker 3: Mary is like, yeah, okay, you sing okay. So he
Speaker 3: jumped into action and wooed and wed Mary in the
Speaker 3: space of just a few weeks.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 3: And Rebecca Hess, writing for Mental Flaws, said, quote she
Speaker 3: met John Carlton, a well to do clerk, and spun
Speaker 3: a sad tale of misfortune, claiming she had escaped a
Speaker 3: forceful union with an elderly count. She forged elaborate letters
Speaker 3: quote proving she had an aristocratic family. At one point,
Speaker 3: Mary even conceded that if she were a man, she'd
Speaker 3: have been heir to the Danish throne. You know what,
Speaker 3: girls saying.
Speaker 2: Yeah, got reached for this, the royalty, you can claim.
Speaker 3: So the wedding had to be performed twice the first time.
Speaker 3: The first time that Carltons forgot to get a license,
Speaker 3: but they then they made it official.
Speaker 2: I don't know they had have licenses. Then I figured
Speaker 2: they did have like a church person signed up paper, the.
Speaker 3: Bands get it all signed. Mary was because she thinks
Speaker 3: she landed a rich guy. John is dote because he
Speaker 3: thinks he's landed a.
Speaker 2: Rich lady, aristocratic ow.
Speaker 3: So when Mary's wealth failed to materialize, John's family turned
Speaker 3: on her.
Speaker 2: What about all the jewelry? Can cock a little bit.
Speaker 3: They busted in and they took all her stuff, her
Speaker 3: clothes and jewelry included. Like they took all her clothes.
Speaker 3: She had nothing, Oh damn. And so according to Mary quote,
Speaker 3: my husband's father cometh to my lodging in Durham Yard
Speaker 3: with Missus Clark and my husband and others called me
Speaker 3: cheat and Harlot violently stripped me of all my apparel
Speaker 3: and jewels, pulled off my silk stockings from my legs,
Speaker 3: cut the lace off my bodies, and scarce left me
Speaker 3: anything to cover my nakedness with. Hurried me before justice,
Speaker 3: where the father and son are bound to prosecute me
Speaker 3: for having two husbands. They pressed me to confess the
Speaker 3: truth I did, insist upon no other justification than my innocency.
Speaker 3: The witch, at last was my security refuge against there
Speaker 3: malicious and unnatural dealing with me.
Speaker 2: Man, she's got breath like a saxophone, players going, you're
Speaker 2: going she so wait a minute, this place. So do
Speaker 2: you think that because she's been somewhat of a con
Speaker 2: artist up till now, do we believe her account? Is
Speaker 2: she being a faithful narrator where she actually did get got.
Speaker 3: She's looking stuff.
Speaker 2: She might have promised some stuff and then they just
Speaker 2: took it to retired of being lied to when we
Speaker 2: had the stuff.
Speaker 3: I don't think she ever does an outward facing truth. Okay, Yeah,
Speaker 3: So she gets indicted on charges of bigamy at the
Speaker 3: Old Bailey in London in sixteen sixty three. You know
Speaker 3: that same old song and dance.
Speaker 2: She's like twenty twenty three years twenty one years old.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so this is the revel in sixty three. This
Speaker 3: is basically the revel.
Speaker 2: Sixteen forty two. She was born, so's twenty one years old.
Speaker 3: Twenty one years old, because remember she gets to London
Speaker 3: and it's within a few weeks that she marries. She's
Speaker 3: so busy her third fourth she is efficient, probably yes,
Speaker 3: and who knows how many we now have though the
Speaker 3: Revenge of the Canterbury Shoemaker and then also the guy
Speaker 3: in Dover, because they're still sort of marriage. She's just
Speaker 3: racking them up, So Laura Cole wrote, quote unofficially, she
Speaker 3: stood accused in the court of public opinion of a
Speaker 3: far more interesting cheat, impersonating a fabulously wealthy foreigner in
Speaker 3: order to lure the hapless Carleton, a lawyer's clerk eighteen
Speaker 3: years old, into marriage. Uh huh. Though Mary herself modestly
Speaker 3: claimed noble rather than royal birth, she became widely known
Speaker 3: as the German princess. So it was one month between
Speaker 3: her arrest and her trial. In that time, Yeah, she
Speaker 3: had almost five hundred visitors in that time.
Speaker 2: What, Yes, she's a celebrity.
Speaker 3: Oh, people were paying the jail to come and just
Speaker 3: look at her. They wanted to size her up see
Speaker 3: for themselves, Like what she's about see if the woman
Speaker 3: that they'd been reading about and god thinking about was
Speaker 3: anything like what they'd imagined.
Speaker 2: And is she getting or cut with the jailers. Oh,
Speaker 2: of course the jailers are just getting like opening the
Speaker 2: door and say show.
Speaker 3: One of the people who came to visit was Samuel Peeps,
Speaker 3: an English naval administrator, member of Parliament, but best known
Speaker 3: today for this crazy detailed diary that he kept between
Speaker 3: sixteen sixty and sixteen sixty nine.
Speaker 2: How we know a lot about this era, correct.
Speaker 3: So his diary is one of the most celebrated in
Speaker 3: the English language. It was written in his like personal shorthand,
Speaker 3: and it was vivid and candid. Had these intimate accounts
Speaker 3: of life and restoration in England, including eyewitness description of
Speaker 3: major historical events like the Great Plague of London, the
Speaker 3: Great Fire of London, and the Second Anglo Dutch War.
Speaker 3: So those are like the highlights in there. And then
Speaker 3: it's also that all these like you're saying, like really
Speaker 3: frank accounts of his personal life, his habits, his relationships,
Speaker 3: his emotions that give us the full picture of what
Speaker 3: it was like to live then. So it kind of
Speaker 3: makes sense that he went to check Mary out, like
Speaker 3: he wanted to be a witness.
Speaker 2: He's a chronic.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he wanted to see for himself the woman at
Speaker 3: the center of what people are calling the Case of
Speaker 3: the German Princess.
Speaker 2: And he's basically a journalist, so this is the biggest
Speaker 2: story going.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and he's got like, you know, he's a member
Speaker 3: of Parliament. He's known so. Kate Lily of the University
Speaker 3: of Sydney wrote, quote from first to last, the Case
Speaker 3: of the German Princess was in Fukut's famous phrase and
Speaker 3: incitement to discourse, the talk of London coffeehouses and taverns,
Speaker 3: and the subject of about thirty published texts of various
Speaker 3: kinds and sizes over the next ten years. Mary was
Speaker 3: resolute in her refusal to confess either bigamy or imposture,
Speaker 3: insisting that she was an aristocrat and a quote stranger,
Speaker 3: that is, an immigrant deserving of courtesy and assistance, and
Speaker 3: that she had never before been married.
Speaker 2: I like that you hear Kathleen Hannah in her story,
Speaker 2: whereas I hear Kim Kardashian and her story. You like,
Speaker 2: she's this masterful person who keeps moving through husbands and
Speaker 2: partners and bouncing her way up and inspires to be
Speaker 2: semi royalty. He gets up there where everybody knows her name.
Speaker 2: People were just paying to take a look at her.
Speaker 2: I mean like this, and also I mean like everyone
Speaker 2: wants to talk about her, but like, really, what is
Speaker 2: she offering. It's not like she's a you know, affecting
Speaker 2: world politics. There's all these wars going on, but she's
Speaker 2: just like this young girl who's just out there living
Speaker 2: her life. Like fully, people are like, tell me more
Speaker 2: about her.
Speaker 3: Feel like her whole thing is like what have I
Speaker 3: got to lose? Why not?
Speaker 4: Why?
Speaker 3: So back to court she goes she went hard on
Speaker 3: John for misrepresenting himself as a lord.
Speaker 2: Oh, by the way, I should say I never looked
Speaker 2: down on Kim Kardashy. A lot of people do. I'm not.
Speaker 2: I'm I like her as a if you if you
Speaker 2: put it in the sense of like making your life
Speaker 2: into what you wanted to be.
Speaker 3: She's phenomenal, like her mother made her life.
Speaker 2: Well, sure, but I'm saying, but she continues, I do
Speaker 2: respect a person from like, Wow, I'm not going to
Speaker 2: say like anything about how I don't say like reality
Speaker 2: TV is worth it? I don't mean that. I'm just
Speaker 2: saying is like she done earned what she wanted to
Speaker 2: to attain, and so just like this woman, you know,
Speaker 2: conditions were being what they were. You have to keep
Speaker 2: the context in mind. How many options did she have?
Speaker 3: So I'm exactly so Mary, she's like to get political.
Speaker 3: Though I'm not the bad one. John's the bad one.
Speaker 3: He said I was. He said he was a lord.
Speaker 3: She said, quote, you told me you were a lord,
Speaker 3: and I told you I was a princess, and I
Speaker 3: think I fitted you. So back to Laura Cole, she said,
Speaker 3: she said. Quote. There she becomes the victim of a con,
Speaker 3: not its perpetrator. King and his in laws, the Carltons
Speaker 3: keep her semi imprisoned. Fearing that someone else will hear
Speaker 3: of this rich foreign lady and snatch her up, they
Speaker 3: set John to woo her in the guise of a lord.
Speaker 3: This ruse is complicated by the fact that it is
Speaker 3: only hatched after John and Mary had already met, but
Speaker 3: the Kings get around this by telling Mary that they
Speaker 3: had been in disguise as commoners during their first encounter.
Speaker 2: Everyone I'm I'm royalty, but not everyone knows.
Speaker 3: They're all just a bunch of working class folks pretending, pretending, attending,
Speaker 3: So who was better at pretending? So John? He told
Speaker 3: Mary all sorts of tall tales. He's talking about mansions,
Speaker 3: tons of land.
Speaker 2: I got to take you to my ancestral lands.
Speaker 3: And Mary was like, I'm willing to forgive him because
Speaker 3: I figured like he intended to get all of those
Speaker 3: things with the money that he thought she had, you know, like, oh,
Speaker 3: I'm going to be his vehicle to become better.
Speaker 2: Martha Washington.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the one that Mary really went after was John's father.
Speaker 3: She knew he was the driving force behind the bigamy
Speaker 3: charge now that he figured out that he didn't have
Speaker 3: a princess in the family. So she admits she lied
Speaker 3: about who she was, and she admits that she went
Speaker 3: out of her way to show off her jewelry and
Speaker 3: flash the letters she was writing to European big wigs.
Speaker 3: She said she wanted credit and she wanted respect. Those
Speaker 3: are two things she never would have gotten from anyone
Speaker 3: had she just been herself, no matter what she did. So,
Speaker 3: according to Laura coleb quote, as she tells it, greed
Speaker 3: drives their scheming, a native ingenuity and harmless love of
Speaker 3: mischief hers rather than censure. She deserves applause since quote,
Speaker 3: it was very difficult to personate greatness for so long
Speaker 3: a time without slips or mistakes. So she's like, look,
Speaker 3: I did this convincingly for so long. Like gott to
Speaker 3: give me respect. I'm an artist, Yeah exactly, she is.
Speaker 2: Look at my commitment to the bit I am these.
Speaker 3: Ginger rogers to his fred astaires. She's doing the same thing,
Speaker 3: but backwards it's even harder.
Speaker 2: Completely, and she was fully k fabe. She was like, look,
Speaker 2: I never broke character. Yes.
Speaker 3: So John didn't see it this way. He was the
Speaker 3: big victim. In his narrative. He was overwhelmed by Mary's
Speaker 3: love and her sophistication in Jena Sequa. He couldn't believe
Speaker 3: that a bodacious babe like her would go for a
Speaker 3: guy like him.
Speaker 2: You know, me really did like her, and his family
Speaker 2: was the one trying to get him to Connor who knows,
Speaker 2: And he was like, what, she's real beautiful.
Speaker 3: Yeah, who knows? Maybe maybe not, Maybe he's just as
Speaker 3: nasty as the rest of them. He said that he
Speaker 3: because he wrote his own book about all this later.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, everyone got a book out of this. He
Speaker 3: was nervous about this chasm in their social standing. She's
Speaker 3: a princess's commoner and a little brother at that like
Speaker 3: that was his other thing. It's like, I'm a younger brother.
Speaker 3: Really also ran.
Speaker 2: He order of course he's not going to inherit the
Speaker 2: land exactly. It wasn't just like oh I'm the kid.
Speaker 3: No, I'm just so. He called only one witness who
Speaker 3: wasn't very convincing, and he'd wanted to get Steedman there,
Speaker 3: but he I know right. Stedman was like, you got
Speaker 3: to pay for me to come out there. I'm not
Speaker 3: going to. And the Carlton's are like, never mind.
Speaker 2: Really yeah, So in the end, Mary, everybody broke his story.
Speaker 3: Mary convinced the judge and the jury. She got acquitted.
Speaker 2: Nice guy.
Speaker 3: There was a catch. She wasn't a bigamist, which meant
Speaker 3: that her marriage to Carlton stood, and that meant that
Speaker 3: everything she had belong to her husband, Jules and all.
Speaker 3: She played herself. So after her acquittal she started studying law.
Speaker 3: She was like, I have to figure this out and
Speaker 3: that makes sense, like it's gonna help her like craft
Speaker 3: future endeavors. She's like, I am not falling into any
Speaker 3: traps like this ever again, they just took all my worldly,
Speaker 3: ill gotten possessions. Lawyer, Let's take a break and when
Speaker 3: we come back more, Mary Zaren, Elizabeth, how you doing okay?
Speaker 3: So Mary Carlton, the public interest in her following her
Speaker 3: acquittal in June of sixteen sixty three was absolutely remarkable
Speaker 3: in its intensity. It was print on the stage and
Speaker 3: in person. She was like basic. She was the first
Speaker 3: true celebrity scandal of restoration England.
Speaker 2: Wow, get it girl, right?
Speaker 5: And so this.
Speaker 3: Fascination actually preceded the acquittal itself. So remember, like all
Speaker 3: those people came to gawk at her in prison. The
Speaker 3: acquittal but like unleashed a flood of print. So within
Speaker 3: her time she was the subject of more than thirty
Speaker 3: pamphlets published between sixteen sixty three and sixteen seventy three.
Speaker 3: The bulk of like the initial burst, came out in
Speaker 3: the weeks and months immediately after the trial. In sixteen
Speaker 3: sixty three alone, there were more than a dozen pamphlets
Speaker 3: and broadsides written about the case, a pair of autobiographical
Speaker 3: self defenses by Mary herself to rebuttals by John.
Speaker 2: I can start to see the zine quality.
Speaker 3: Yeah, print reports of.
Speaker 2: Give me that box of type all of like.
Speaker 3: The transcripts from the trial. Everybody got a book deal
Speaker 3: out of this.
Speaker 2: Can you imagine when you imagine they're just using you know,
Speaker 2: movable text at this point, right, so you got like
Speaker 2: drawers of letters like like trying to like write out
Speaker 2: his thing. Imagine hopefully you wrote it out beforehand in
Speaker 2: long hand. He's not actually writing while he's like handy
Speaker 2: the key press, right exactly. So like the idea of
Speaker 2: like you doing your zine on a literal press and
Speaker 2: having to like you know, like impress your letters into this,
Speaker 2: you know, in the print.
Speaker 3: So like that's the pinnacle of hipster zine. Like if
Speaker 3: you had a letter press and then you'd have a
Speaker 3: handle our mustache and drive a fixie bicycle and you're
Speaker 3: like some weird way to brew your own coffee roast
Speaker 3: coffee beans, and you're.
Speaker 2: Like a roast battle. Basically that's what they're doing.
Speaker 3: It was they had a battle. There was like a
Speaker 3: genuine literary battle going on. Like both sides are publishing
Speaker 3: pamphlets to support their own story. So John Carlton's camp
Speaker 3: published the replication or certain vindicatory depositions. Yeah, so he's
Speaker 3: like trying to rehabilitate his image. Mary responded with his own,
Speaker 3: like richly embellished autobiographical piece, the Case of Madam Mary Carlton.
Speaker 3: So she puts it in her own name, but she
Speaker 3: wrote she wrote it as if she were directly addressing
Speaker 3: Prince Rupert, the British royal exile in Germany. But she's
Speaker 3: Mary Carlton, so she was.
Speaker 2: And all that.
Speaker 3: So this is like for her to write directly to
Speaker 3: a royal was bold and unusual. You know, no one
Speaker 3: from those kind of began or humble origins would do
Speaker 3: such a thing. And in the book she issued this
Speaker 3: critique of women's subordinate status in marriage, and she asserted
Speaker 3: herself as quote merely my own free agent, and she
Speaker 3: talked about like she connected her issues to contemporary political
Speaker 3: debates about self determination and contracts and property rights. So
Speaker 3: scholars have since recognized everything she's done as more than
Speaker 3: just scandal literature, that she was laying the groundwork for
Speaker 3: really important cultural changes in England.
Speaker 2: So it wasn't just distracts people might dismiss it. It
Speaker 2: was actually like riot girl level of critiquity.
Speaker 3: Yeah, of larger social critique, and it basically introduced feminist
Speaker 3: philosophical critique of domestic patriarchy in that time, political and
Speaker 3: social theories of human subjectivity. There was some of her
Speaker 3: stuff was about early capitalist ideology. And also it sort
Speaker 3: of is the rise of the novel because it's all
Speaker 3: this invention, her story. She's got something for everybody. So
Speaker 3: her fame quickly found its way to the theater. She
Speaker 3: starred in a play about her life. There were a
Speaker 3: couple plays that came out, and one of them she started.
Speaker 3: She did her own biopic. This was an incredible instance
Speaker 3: of a living figure playing herself on the stage. So
Speaker 3: it was called A Witty Combat or The Female Victor,
Speaker 3: and it was written by Thomas Porter, and it capitalized
Speaker 3: on this public appetite for her story and then the
Speaker 3: fascination with this persona and the fact that she could
Speaker 3: perform her own myth for a paying audience shows like
Speaker 3: how thoroughly her identity he had become kind of like
Speaker 3: commercial property.
Speaker 2: Totally the Kathleen Hamma and Kim Kardashian of it all.
Speaker 3: It's like a yes, So you want to know who
Speaker 3: went to see A Witty Combat Who Elizabeth Samuel Peeps.
Speaker 3: Of course, right, he went and he said he found
Speaker 3: a disappointing.
Speaker 2: Smart for that.
Speaker 3: So it got mixed reviews, but it also got her
Speaker 3: a bunch of new admirers who gave her gifts, rich
Speaker 3: young guys. She even married one of the dudes.
Speaker 2: Naturally, that's what.
Speaker 3: And then the pattern is pretty predictable, Like you know,
Speaker 3: she left him, took his money, his valuables, and his
Speaker 3: keys when he was drunk. She oh, yeah, completely. So
Speaker 3: then her next thing is she pretended you should have
Speaker 3: known who I wasn So then her next thing is
Speaker 3: that she pretended to be a rich virgin heiress fleeing
Speaker 3: and undesirable suitor that her father had arranged for her.
Speaker 2: I'm at this point waiting for her to flee to
Speaker 2: the colonies.
Speaker 3: Oh just wait, So this was like this is like
Speaker 3: her preferredm O, like this old gross guy wants.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, she keeps doing smith.
Speaker 3: So she builds up this fake identity that's you know,
Speaker 3: appealing to social aspirations, as we know. But she's focusing
Speaker 3: not really on aristocratic men, but like, I'm prosperous.
Speaker 2: That's why I said, yeah, rich and successful. By successful,
Speaker 2: I mean rik and like her.
Speaker 3: Other thing that she would do is that she would
Speaker 3: kind of like win over the closest female relative first,
Speaker 3: smart to like plant the flag and like the get
Speaker 3: the money move. So in the one instance, she made
Speaker 3: it seem to her landlady like she had the fortune
Speaker 3: of one thousand pounds left to her by her uncle,
Speaker 3: all right, and then she let it slip that, oh, yeah,
Speaker 3: and my dad's also super rich. He has like way
Speaker 3: more than a grand Is.
Speaker 2: She establishing a credit line again inheritance to come?
Speaker 3: I wish, But she's like, I don't have access to
Speaker 3: the money because my dad tried to marry me off
Speaker 3: to someone I just couldn't stand. So I made a
Speaker 3: run for it. I left the countryside, I came to London.
Speaker 3: I'm trying to lay low. And then she faked a
Speaker 3: bunch of letters back and forth to old friends at home,
Speaker 3: who would like these fake friends would keep her posted
Speaker 3: as to like what was happening with her dad and stuff.
Speaker 2: So she's pulling a runaway bride and then sending fake
Speaker 2: letters as if she's wanting to find out is daddy upset?
Speaker 2: Is he going to send somebody for me?
Speaker 3: She'd leave the letters lying around a room like that
Speaker 3: nosy land lady. So the landlady is like, I have
Speaker 3: a rich nephew.
Speaker 2: This is a Spanish prisoner.
Speaker 3: She's like, you got to meet my nephew, Zaren. Close
Speaker 3: your eyes, I want you to picture it. You are
Speaker 3: a porter and an upscale lodging in London. A rich
Speaker 3: lady named Mary is staying there. You think she's off.
Speaker 3: There's something strange about her and slightly familiar, but whatever,
Speaker 3: what do you care. She's taken up with your boss's nephew.
Speaker 3: He is smitten. You can't tell if it's with the
Speaker 3: girl or her money, but you know both are pretty nice.
Speaker 3: You prefer a bustier, heartier wench, but that's just you.
Speaker 3: There's a knock at the door. It's the day's post.
Speaker 3: You open the door to the bustle of the street outside.
Speaker 3: You take in the one letter and close the door.
Speaker 3: You look at the address. It's to that Mary character.
Speaker 3: Luckily she's in the parlor with that dim wit nephew.
Speaker 3: You pad down the hall and stand in the doorway,
Speaker 3: clearing your throat. Mary and the nephew look up. You
Speaker 3: tell the miss that you have a letter for her
Speaker 3: and walk it over to her. She takes it and
Speaker 3: thanks you doesn't tip as she opens the letter. You
Speaker 3: step out into the hall, but you decide to have
Speaker 3: a seat in the chair just outside the doorway. You
Speaker 3: listen in on what they're saying. This has been a
Speaker 3: very slow day, and you are bored and nosy. You
Speaker 3: hear the tearing and then the shuffling of paper. There's
Speaker 3: a pause. The nephew ask what the letter says. Mary
Speaker 3: bursts into tears. You lean toward the doorway to get
Speaker 3: a better ear full of this. This is good good.
Speaker 3: She tells him that her brother has died. Here, she says,
Speaker 3: read the letter, and you hear him shuffle the pages
Speaker 3: a bit. You peek around the corner and he's staring
Speaker 3: at the paper, his lips moving as he reads. So
Speaker 3: does this mean your father's estate goes just to you know,
Speaker 3: when he dies? He asks. She tells him yes, but
Speaker 3: that in order to collect she has to marry the
Speaker 3: man her dad wanted to marry her off to. She
Speaker 3: has to collect herself. She says, she has to leave
Speaker 3: the lodgings because this letter means that both her dad
Speaker 3: and her intended groom now know where she is. Come
Speaker 3: stay in my lodging. The nephew says, you know where
Speaker 3: he's going with that offer. He wants to share a
Speaker 3: bed with that lass. You scoot your chair to get
Speaker 3: closer to the doorway, and it makes a loud screeping
Speaker 3: sound on the wood floor. You freeze. It's silent. Then
Speaker 3: you hear the nephew sneeze. The two continue talking. You
Speaker 3: don't think they noticed you in the hall. You quietly
Speaker 3: stand and head toward the back of the house. You
Speaker 3: freeze in your tracks. You know where you remember that
Speaker 3: lady from that's Mary Carlton. You want to go tell
Speaker 3: her not to worry that her secret is safe with you.
Speaker 3: You're looking forward to your boss's nephew getting everything stolen
Speaker 3: out from under him, which will be much easier now
Speaker 3: that she'll be staying at his place. You smirk and
Speaker 3: duck out the back door, already used the prisoner.
Speaker 2: Leave me on the squad.
Speaker 3: We'll give you your pricy So Mary kept running that
Speaker 3: con over and over again like she did. Indeed, rob
Speaker 3: the nephew and disappear like she moved into his place,
Speaker 3: took all the stuff, left his clothes.
Speaker 2: Her cost of living is so high that she's never satisfied.
Speaker 2: Nor can she create like an investment or like buy
Speaker 2: like an inch. Yeah, she's always I got to get
Speaker 2: through this.
Speaker 3: But then things caught up to her, and not the
Speaker 3: way you'd expect. See Mary returned to the public's attention
Speaker 3: in sixteen seventy one.
Speaker 2: Is it Quicksand Well she got her.
Speaker 3: Expect How did you?
Speaker 2: I guess she did expect it.
Speaker 3: She was arrested for stealing a silver tankard in Covent Garden.
Speaker 3: Oh no, so this elegant, thoughtful fraudster got pinched for that.
Speaker 2: In a small time one too, like swiping a glass
Speaker 2: and the court big glass glass.
Speaker 3: But the courts had pretty much exhausted their patience with
Speaker 3: her at this point, like the there was going to
Speaker 3: be no leniency, and at the following sessions.
Speaker 2: She was in it. They're like, marry all the guys
Speaker 2: you want, but if you steal a big.
Speaker 3: Well this was the thing.
Speaker 2: Is that that was?
Speaker 3: That was a capital offence stealing a silver tanker. Yeah,
Speaker 3: she gets Yeah, she gets found guilty and condemned.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 3: But then she gets a reprieve and is ordered for transportation.
Speaker 3: She's like, whew, where am I going Australia? No, they
Speaker 3: sent her to Jamaica. Mom oh, yeah, she's going to Jamaica.
Speaker 3: So she gets sent to Port Royal, Jamaica in sixteen
Speaker 3: seventy one.
Speaker 2: Just too early.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah. Well when she got there, the opportunities for
Speaker 3: her were less than slim. Like, she did the only
Speaker 3: thing she could do and worked as a prostitute. Now,
Speaker 3: sixteen seventy one was a very interesting year in Port Royal.
Speaker 3: This was the town at its most vivid and raucous,
Speaker 3: and it was also the year for the earthquake. Well yeah,
Speaker 3: and it was the year that the tide began to
Speaker 3: turn against like the buccaneering the pirates.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally, this is the height of piracy.
Speaker 3: Yeah. A little about Port Royal. It was locate hit
Speaker 3: it at the mouth of Kingston Harbor in south southeastern Jamaica.
Speaker 3: It was once the largest and most prosperous city in
Speaker 3: the Caribbean, functioning as the center of shipping and commerce
Speaker 3: in the Caribbean Sea. For the riots, Yeah, It's proximity
Speaker 3: to like many of the only safe passages Heart giving
Speaker 3: access to the Spanish Maine from the Atlantic, made it
Speaker 3: like the ideal base for state sanctioned pirates.
Speaker 2: Yeah, buccaneer.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so the harbor was large enough to accommodate large ships.
Speaker 3: The shallow waters provided a place to like Korean and
Speaker 3: repair vessels. Port Royal was prosperous thanks to the proceeds
Speaker 3: of that that privateering. The state sanctioned piracy, and the
Speaker 3: returns were eyewatering. The three hundred men who accompanied Henry
Speaker 3: Morgan to Portobello in sixteen sixty eight came back into
Speaker 3: town with a prize of at least sixty pounds each
Speaker 3: and that was two or three times the usual annual
Speaker 3: plantation wage and so and that's just for one run.
Speaker 3: Port Royal was one of the wealthiest communities in the
Speaker 3: English territories of North America. And because the money went
Speaker 3: way beyond anything they were pulling for sugarcane. So whenever
Speaker 3: the buccaneers were successful, the town rejoiced. You know, all
Speaker 3: these citizens they had, like a lot of them, had
Speaker 3: invested in their ventures in exchange for a share of
Speaker 3: the spoils.
Speaker 2: Money flows through town when it hits Oh yeah.
Speaker 3: A tenth of the loot was claimed for the king,
Speaker 3: and then you know the rest off it went. So
Speaker 3: by sixteen seventy, God, you can take you got like, Yeah,
Speaker 3: sixteen seventy one, Port Royal was this like dense, intensely
Speaker 3: concentrated settlement. There's like ten thousand people living there, and
Speaker 3: so there are prostitutes and pirates, but there are also goldsmiths.
Speaker 3: There were forty four tavern keepers, all these artisans and merchants.
Speaker 3: There were two thousand buildings, and it was fifty one
Speaker 3: acres of real estate, so it was more densely packed
Speaker 3: than London. Drinking a culture alone was legendary, so there
Speaker 3: was one drinking house for every ten residents.
Speaker 2: Can you imagine all the doctors they need because of.
Speaker 3: The dagon Seriously, in July of sixteen sixty one, forty
Speaker 3: new licenses were granted to taverns, and the town's wealth
Speaker 3: was so huge that coins were preferred for payment over bartering.
Speaker 3: Like all the other colonies, bartering was everything. The high
Speaker 3: rollers in Port Royal dealt in cash, and the abstraction.
Speaker 2: Of cash as opposed to like, give me two healthy goats.
Speaker 3: Yeah exactly, I know.
Speaker 2: What I have.
Speaker 3: So this The defining event of sixteen seventy one in
Speaker 3: Port Royal was Henry Morgan's return from his most audacious
Speaker 3: expedition January sixteen seventy one, this buccaneer force led by
Speaker 3: Captain Morgan attacked and captured the port of Panama on
Speaker 3: the Spanish main. This is like the pinnacle of a
Speaker 3: pirate era Morgan. He had this fleet of like thirty ships.
Speaker 3: He had like two thousand men under his command.
Speaker 2: Army, yeah, army.
Speaker 3: So he seizes the fortress of San Lorenzo, hacked through
Speaker 3: the jungle of the Isthmus, swept aside all the Spanish defenders,
Speaker 3: sacked the city that had never before fallen. So he
Speaker 3: comes back to Jamaica. He gets there on March twelfth,
Speaker 3: sixteen seventy one. I don't think Mary was there yet,
Speaker 3: but she came later in the year. He got a
Speaker 3: hero's welcome. But the political oh my god, right, like
Speaker 3: to see them like coming into port and just everyone
Speaker 3: going nuts. The ground is shifting under his feet. Politically though, yes,
Speaker 3: because like only shortly after he'd left Port Royal, a
Speaker 3: message came to the governor there that a treaty had
Speaker 3: been signed between England and Spain. Yeah, so that meant
Speaker 3: that the pirates had attacked Panama during a time of peace.
Speaker 3: So the governor was already under arrest on his way
Speaker 3: back to England in June. Yeah, Morgan got arrested April
Speaker 3: the next year and sent to London for his attack
Speaker 3: on Panama, because like it's like exquisite irony, right, Like
Speaker 3: he gets arrested at the moment of his greatest triumph,
Speaker 3: not for what he had done, but like when he
Speaker 3: had done it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's purely it because it's it's the sliding legality
Speaker 2: of like they were our enemy, you can do whatever
Speaker 2: you want, there are total loyal ally how dare you exactly?
Speaker 2: And then you get punished as an example that they're
Speaker 2: loyalty each of course nobody does and it takes context.
Speaker 2: So then to beat this whole idea of like it
Speaker 2: should be more like when did you know? As opposed
Speaker 2: to when did it occur?
Speaker 3: Right, So, by the time Mary Carlton arrived as a
Speaker 3: transported convict in sixteen seventy one, she's like washing up
Speaker 3: on the shores that were already starting to change. So
Speaker 3: Captain Morgan's been arrested, the governor has been arrested. London
Speaker 3: is like we're reining it in here, Yeah, we want
Speaker 3: this is like the free for all era in Port
Speaker 3: Royal is like entering its twilight. And so I mean
Speaker 3: Henry Morgan eventually gets appointed as Lieutenant governor.
Speaker 2: The reason why she's on a liquor bottle exactly capt.
Speaker 3: Pirates are no longer needed to defend the city. And
Speaker 3: then you know what takes its place in importance is
Speaker 3: the selling of enslaved people. So even from Jamaica, though
Speaker 3: Mary couldn't resist like selling her myth. So this new
Speaker 3: pamphlet starts to circulate a zine claiming to have been
Speaker 3: written by Mary quote to her fellow sufferers in Newgate
Speaker 3: in the prison. So the pamphlet had her claiming to
Speaker 3: have been received and accommodated on princis, So the German
Speaker 3: Princess persona had not died. This is from the pamphlet
Speaker 3: quote in gratitude is the blackest of crimes, and forgetfulness
Speaker 3: in a friend is more than a venial sin to
Speaker 3: avoid both, though our noble extraction and the eximonious of
Speaker 3: our birth and state might apologize for either, I send
Speaker 3: this missive to inform you of my condition. Since I
Speaker 3: was exiled the British shore, which is this health and
Speaker 3: success still waits upon me, and I cordially wish you
Speaker 3: the same attendance. So she's like, they sent me out here.
Speaker 3: I'm doing great, guys, I hope you're doing well.
Speaker 2: And she's sending this uh bis letter back to Port Royal. Yes,
Speaker 2: she lets people just see it.
Speaker 3: Uh look what they've done to your princess. So she
Speaker 3: eventually returned to England illegally. She snuck back to all right,
Speaker 3: they banished her Central Yeah. Yeah, so this is a
Speaker 3: super bold move because like she was sent there as
Speaker 3: an alternative to hanging.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. It has to be like a life of exile, right,
Speaker 2: and that's the kindness.
Speaker 3: She wasn't the only transported convict to risk, you know,
Speaker 3: coming back instead of life in the colonies like for her. Okay,
Speaker 3: the gallows are a known risk, but there's this anonymity.
Speaker 3: Death by anonymity in Jamaica is like unthinkable.
Speaker 2: She'd rather face.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So she wasted no time reverting to the only
Speaker 3: life she knew. She set up again as a rich
Speaker 3: heiress and she got married to a really rich apothecary
Speaker 3: in Westminster apothecary.
Speaker 2: Okay, she was gonna get a planter's self.
Speaker 3: Well, then she robbed him of more than three hundred
Speaker 3: pounds and left him.
Speaker 2: Oh, that's bad on an island three hundred No, this
Speaker 2: was back in England.
Speaker 3: Sorry, so then okay, so she's back the apothecary in Westminster.
Speaker 3: Three hundred pounds was a huge amount of money, like
Speaker 3: several years wages for a skilled trades set. So her
Speaker 3: luck finally ran out December of sixteen seventy two. She
Speaker 3: got busted when a turnkey from Newgate Prison was searching
Speaker 3: for stolen property and then recognized her. So it wasn't
Speaker 3: a magistrate or a wronged husband or like an officer
Speaker 3: of the law. It was a prison warden looking for
Speaker 3: someone else's stolen property who happened to know her face.
Speaker 3: So she was kept in jail until January sixteenth, sixteen
Speaker 3: seventy three. She was thirty years old.
Speaker 2: He basically it's just doing his like you know whatever,
Speaker 2: like not a raid, but like his rounds, like he's
Speaker 2: been told to go check this place, checked upon, like
Speaker 2: he does like a don't I know you? And she
Speaker 2: was like yeah, And then at that point does not
Speaker 2: that her sentence gets basically reinstated, But is it up
Speaker 2: to him to decide?
Speaker 3: Like he's got a dragon in front of the court.
Speaker 2: Okay, so he takes possession of her legally and he's like,
Speaker 2: oh yeah, coming back to.
Speaker 3: Prison, into jail. She's thirty at this point.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: She was brought by writ of habeas corpus to the
Speaker 3: old Bailey and asked whether or not she was the
Speaker 3: woman who usually went by the name of Mary Carlton.
Speaker 3: She was honest and answered that yes she was. There's
Speaker 3: no point denying it. So the court then demanded to
Speaker 3: know why she was back so soon from Jamaica. So
Speaker 3: she stalled, she performed, she lied, she maneuvered, she was
Speaker 3: married basically, and then she tried everything. Nothing would work,
Speaker 3: so then she did what they called, quote pleading her belly.
Speaker 3: She said she was pregnant. Oh wow, so by this
Speaker 3: long legal custom that would stay the death sentence until yeah,
Speaker 3: but they called in this jury of matrons and they
Speaker 3: announced that she was quote not quick with child. So
Speaker 3: like she's lying. So on the last day of the
Speaker 3: sessions she gets the death penalty, and it was noted
Speaker 3: in the record that she took the sentence without flinching.
Speaker 2: Really yeah, So once she was condemned rested.
Speaker 3: People start wanting a visit her again. Before the hanging
Speaker 3: they couldn't get enough clergy come by. The curious well
Speaker 3: wishers are all coming through the prison and the weeks
Speaker 3: between the sentencing and the execution.
Speaker 2: She's just thirty years old, so she still looks real young,
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, even though she's been in rough places like
Speaker 2: part Royal.
Speaker 3: So she was hanged at Tyburn and January twenty second,
Speaker 3: sixteen seventy three, died as she had lived, performing to
Speaker 3: a crowd. So if anything like death amplified her fame,
Speaker 3: more pamphlets came out in the years after her death.
Speaker 3: It turned her into this folk here zines I'm telling you.
Speaker 2: Oh and they died young James deaned out.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah. They were full of tall tales too. In one,
Speaker 3: she seduced the son of a rich man, got him
Speaker 3: dead drunk, and took his money and sold him into
Speaker 3: slavery on a ship bound for Barbados, taking little elements
Speaker 3: of stuff.
Speaker 2: Because you know, like in the the the era of
Speaker 2: like say the eighteen seventy basically the post Civil War era,
Speaker 2: you start getting all these letters back from the West
Speaker 2: telling the selling the stories of the cowboys to people
Speaker 2: in Philadelphia and Baltimore and Boston so forth, and it's
Speaker 2: all pamphlet style stuff about full books. They're getting like
Speaker 2: these little like basically chat books. You're doing the same
Speaker 2: thing in England, but it's with the colonies, especially Jamaica,
Speaker 2: where it's like, now she's part of the great ending
Speaker 2: of the piracy era. Did they tie her into that
Speaker 2: as like a pirate queen?
Speaker 3: Yeah? And then another had her earning her freedom in
Speaker 3: Jamaica after foiling a plot to murder the captain of
Speaker 3: the ship that was taking her there and then charming
Speaker 3: the governor. So yeah, they make her a character in
Speaker 3: all of these events. The public needed her to be
Speaker 3: larger than the historical record, and the writers are like,
Speaker 3: oh you got it. Oh yeah, what's your ridiculous takeaway?
Speaker 2: It's not that ridiculous. I have to ad met Elizabeth
Speaker 2: because I'm very impressed with your Kathleen Hannah Kimagardashian like
Speaker 2: meld of this woman who's basically we spend like, you know,
Speaker 2: what is it like a few years with her. I
Speaker 2: know we started when thirteen fourteen, yeah, up to thirty,
Speaker 2: but basically it's most of her adulthood that we really
Speaker 2: focused on her life, and she did a heck of
Speaker 2: a lot bounced around, saw a lot. Even though she
Speaker 2: was sent places on like prison bar or prison ships.
Speaker 2: It wasn't like, oh the luxurious I took the liner.
Speaker 2: But for where she started and with a few simple
Speaker 2: lives in mythosis, she was able to make herself like,
Speaker 2: make real out of make believe a great life.
Speaker 3: Well and think about it too. Samuel Peeps is like
Speaker 3: this witness to history, but she just as much, if
Speaker 3: not more so, because the actor she's going, she's seeing,
Speaker 3: like the England that she's born into and the Europe
Speaker 3: that she travels through, the things that she must have
Speaker 3: heard and seen, and then to you know, to be
Speaker 3: in London when she's in London, and then to go
Speaker 3: to Jamaica and see what's happening there, and to be
Speaker 3: to live it. You know, what she witnessed in history
Speaker 3: is absolutely remarkable in those you know, those brief adult years.
Speaker 2: I don't want to like, uh, I'm reluctant to do this,
Speaker 2: but we don't really have it now. I guess we
Speaker 2: do with Joan Diddyon. So but and I was gonna
Speaker 2: say Hunter S. Thompson will say Joan Didion is the
Speaker 2: person who lives the story. And then writes about it
Speaker 2: and basically writes themselves into better stories in the sense yeah,
Speaker 2: like and makes their mythos part of what people then
Speaker 2: start responding to. So now she's living inside of the
Speaker 2: stories other people are helping her to write. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 2: so she really nails that kind of like gonzo journalism
Speaker 2: California cool before it was a thing in terms of like,
Speaker 2: I live on my myth and I don't have to
Speaker 2: fight or kill anyone to do it. Yeah, exactly, because
Speaker 2: Peemes is like, he's like, what do you call it?
Speaker 2: The observer? The observer? Right, you got to be both
Speaker 2: observer and exactly.
Speaker 3: And it's a shame she didn't get to really comment
Speaker 3: on what she had observed.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I would have liked to see.
Speaker 3: Yeah exactly. I think after that I need to talk back.
Speaker 2: What about saying, girl, let's do it. Dave? Oh god,
Speaker 2: I went cheat.
Speaker 4: Hi ridiculousness. I wanted Daren to know that due to
Speaker 4: his pocket contents, he if you were a bird, would
Speaker 4: be a magpie, and Elizabeth, because of the characteristic traits
Speaker 4: with which you share, you would be a white like
Speaker 4: horned chicken. Please enjoy googling what their characteristic traits are
Speaker 4: and I hope you get a chuckle and if you don't,
Speaker 4: who knows?
Speaker 5: Who cares?
Speaker 3: Okay, you're you are magic.
Speaker 2: I love that. Oh that's pretty.
Speaker 3: And I'm a chigall.
Speaker 2: Exactly.
Speaker 3: I'll say that's it for today. You can find us
Speaker 3: online at ridiculous Crime dot com. We're also at Ridiculous
Speaker 3: Crime on both Blue Sky and Instagram, and we're on
Speaker 3: YouTube at Ridiculous Crime Pod. Email us at ridiculous Crime
Speaker 3: at gmail dot com leave a talkback on the iHeart
Speaker 3: app reach out. Ridiculous Crime is hosted by Elizabeth Dutton
Speaker 3: and Zaren Burnett, produced and edited by Princess Dave Cousten
Speaker 3: Nay Carlton, starring Anilic's Rutger Mis Judith. Research is by
Speaker 3: Renaissance investigative journalist Murssa Brown and Suspicious innkeeper Jabari Davis.
Speaker 3: The theme song is by Celebrity Bards, now performing at
Speaker 3: the Globe Theater and their two man show What It Do,
Speaker 3: Thy Fair Maiden Thomas Lee and Travis Dutton. Host wardrobe
Speaker 3: is provided by Botany five hundred. Guest hair and makeup
Speaker 3: by Sparkleshot and mister Andre. Executive producers are Jamaican goldsmith
Speaker 3: Ben boll And, Jamaican cobbler Noel.
Speaker 5: Brown, Ridicous Crime, Say It one More Time Piquious Crime.
Speaker 1: Ridiculous Crime is a production of iHeartRadio. Four more podcasts
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