"Meerly my own free Agent": Liberty and Civility in The Case of Madam Mary Carleton

In her eponymous 1663 autobiography, The Case of Madam Mary Carleton, the popular Restoration figure commonly known as the "German Princess" promises readers that she will once and for all set the record straight and tell the truth about her "Birth, Education, and Fortunes."¹ Part romance narrative detailing her early life in Germany as an aristocratic adventuress, part exposé of her duplicitous husband John Carleton and his family and their attempts to exploit her, and part trial transcript, The Case describes in detail the events leading up to and including her trial and acquittal on charges of bigamy. It is in direct conversation with at least a dozen other pamphlets printed within weeks of the June 1663 trial, each offering different opinions about whether Mary Carleton impersonated a wealthy German gentlewoman to defraud her husband, or whether he and his family had hatched a scheme to trick her into marriage and secure her wealth.²

Though her real identity was hotly debated in her time, biographers now agree that Mary Carleton was born Mary Moders, daughter of a Canterbury chorister or fiddler, in or around 1642, although details of her history before she appeared in London in 1663 remain uncertain. We know that she fled her first husband, a shoemaker, and married a second man, a surgeon, and was arrested and tried for bigamy. She ran away again, likely to Germany, and when she returned to London in April 1663, it was as Maria de Wolway, a noble German woman forced to secretly flee an unwanted marriage.³

The Case is an expanded version of her first autobiography, An Historical Narrative of the German Princess (1663).⁴ In The Case, Carleton boldly asks, "What harme have I done in pretending to great Titles?"⁵ This question pervades Carleton's narrative. As she cannily argues, if John Carleton and his family have been persuaded by her successful imposture of a gentlewoman, that simply confirms her excellence and worth, attained through "great labour and industry," including an understanding of legal discourse, romance tropes and conventions, and multiple languages.⁶ In appealing to her readers' sympathies, she lays out in detail in this public print forum the "incivilities" and "miseries" she endures in marriage that are "irremediable by the Laws of this Kingdom made against Femes Covert."⁷ Under the English common law doctrine of coverture, women "make no laws, they consent to none, they abrogate none. All of them are understood either married or to bee married and their desires as subject to their husband."⁸ Thus a wife's legal identity was subsumed by her husband, denying her the right to hold property, receive rents, or claim an inheritance.⁹ Representing the English common law practice of coverture as an injustice, Carleton critiques English law as depriving her the right to secure "the ways to a better fortune."¹⁰ Essentially, Carleton argues that when unjust laws are remedied, and therefore unjust practices cease, she will be at liberty to live her best life.

Over the past few decades feminist scholars have explored the transgressive nature of Mary Carleton's self-representation in disrupting gender and class ideologies, and they have drawn connections to criminal and rogue biographies as well as the rise of the novel.¹¹ Mary Jo Kietzman has closely examined Mary Carleton's "self-serializations": the sustained "social practice that involved improvisatory performances of invented personages…[as] responses to the material conditions of her life."¹² Kietzman sees Carleton's adoption of multiple roles over the course of her adult life as part of a larger trend of self-styling by lower-class women at a time in history when competing social, political, and economic changes created opportunities for their expanded agency. More recently, Megan Matchinske has situated the Carleton debates within a Restoration culture of proliferating and competing oaths. She argues that readers of the pamphlets could recognize "a correlation between Carleton's multiple marriage relations and the by now serial oath taking of her countrymen."¹³ Matchinske asserts that Carleton's multiple...