Tuesday, Feb 16, 2021 • 17min
Princess Susanna: The Colonial Con Woman (Short)
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Indentured Servant. Royal Family Member. When you're living in those wretched peasant backwaters known as the American colonies, what's the difference?
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Simon Whistler
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Simon Whistler
00:33
Welcome back to another short episode of The Casual Criminalist. This one is "Princess Susanna: The
Colonial
Con Woman". As always, I'm your host Simon. This episode has been written by Callum. I have it on my iPad here because I forgot to print it out again, so by me being forgetful and also being more environmentally friendly. Although I do like having the paper in my hand, but anyway.Share
00:56
I've not read this before, as always, I'm reading this along with you guys. Let's see what it's all about. If you're listening to this show, consider giving it a review wherever you get your podcasts. If you're watching this show, why not give it a like, why not hit that subscribe button? You'll get more good stuff like this. This is a short episode. We often do longer ones as well. So all good stuff. Let's carry on.
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01:23
Thanks to Yankee worldwide cultural dominance, everyone knows the American Dream. The deal goes that no matter where in the world you’re from, or how much money you have you can come to the grand old
US of A
, and become whoever you want to be. Today’s story proves that some people have taken that proposition a little more literally than others.Share
01:41
Also, it's definitely not the case anymore. The American- you can't just come to the
USA
and pursue your American dream. There are things like visas and immigration laws and stuff like that. It's hard to go and work in America
, but it wasn't always like this so maybe this is set far in the past,Share
01:59
This is a criminal case from the old days of
America
, when for some unlucky convicts the prospect of being shipped off to the East Coast colonies was more of a nightmare than a dream. Still, with a strong work ethic or just a major talent for bullshitting and deception, even those down at rock bottom could make something of themselves in the New World.Share
02:18
The greatest proof of that fact is the story of Princess Susana,
Colonial
con-woman extraordinaire.Share
02:26
Humble Beginnings.
Share
02:30
Princess Susana’s life didn’t have quite as royal a beginning as you might expect. And that’s not the only misleading thing about that moniker. Her name wasn’t even Susanna, it was Sarah Wilson. The story goes that Sarah was born to a poor family in rural Staffordshire in 1754. What a surprise. She's not really a princess.
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02:50
The lives of working class women were generally pretty tough back then, but Sarah managed to catch a lucky break. She was sent off by her family to find work in London and ended up in the service of Miss Caroline Vernon, herself a lady in waiting to the Queen.
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03:04
Lifted up out of relative poverty and into Downton Abbey-esque surroundings, young Sarah found herself serving at Queen Charlotte’s private residences on the site of modern day Buckingham Palace. She got a crash course in how to behave around nobility, and plenty of chances to watch Her Majesty go about her royal duties, a lot of fine dining and luxury parties on taxpayer money so nothing much has changed.
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03:30
But there’s only so long you can watch posh folk living it up without getting envious, and Charlotte soon decided that she wanted to take a little bit of that luxury for herself. Is she going to start stealing things?
Share
03:43
Trouble.
Share
03:48
She found herself inside the Queen’s living quarters one day without anyone else around. It was the perfect opportunity to snatch some pricey gear. I mean, the temptations right there, kind of obvious. A miniature portrait of Her Majesty, a dress, and a few pieces of jewelry. When someone has so much fancy stuff, surely they wouldn’t notice a few minor pieces missing. Well, she might not. Even if the Queen doesn't someone's going to be organising that shit and tidying it, they're going to notice.
Share
04:16
Unfortunately for Sarah though, Queen Charlotte did in fact notice that someone on her staff had gotten sticky fingers, and ordered a guard to keep an eye on the pilfered wardrobe. The thief made the mistake of going to the exact same place to grab more loot, and was caught red handed. Whoops a daisy.
Share
04:31
This led to a speedy trial on charges of theft and "violation of the royal privacy". Oh my! Back in those days, basically any offence against a royal meant death. Steal from them? Death. Chat shit about them? Death. Bump shoulders in the corridor? Death.
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04:47
Thankfully though, Sarah’s employer Mrs Vernon put in a plea on her behalf and the Queen had her sentence reduced to "
transportation
". This was a punishment so horrific, so severe and so outlandish that it doesn’t bear thinking about. Sarah would be sent to America
! God forbid!Share
05:04
I have to say like back in the day when
Britain
would just be like, "Oh, you've been a naughty boy, off you go to Australia". "Off you go to America
"
. I'll be like, okay. If my other option was just like 18th century prison, I'll be like, "Yeah, no, that does sound better. I know it's full of disease and criminals and the journey is probably going to be a nightmare, but I'd rather probably do that".Share
05:24
Or maybe I wouldn't, I don't really know much about it. All I know is I saw that play, "Our Country's Good" about the convicts over in Australia and they were not having a brilliant time.
Share
05:34
Exile.
Share
05:36
Yes,
Penal Transportation
meant being sent to one of the British colonies for some hard labour, the kind of work that nobody was signing up to do willingly. Sarah was sentenced to this in 1771 when America
was just a distant colony of the crown. One of a number of places that criminals could find themselves riding towards in a prison ship.Share
05:58
Sarah arrived via the port of
Baltimore
, Maryland and was swiftly led off to be auctioned to the highest bidder. Oh my. They really auctioned the prisoners off. That sounds a lot like something else. Slavery! Yes, these unlucky convicts were to be sold into Indentured Servitude
for the duration of their sentence, meaning anyone with a big enough bag of cash could own them.Share
06:18
The man who bought Sarah’s contract was one Mr William Devall who owned a plantation in
Frederick County
. She was supposed to serve him as a maid for seven years until her sentence was complete, but our heroine had other ideas.Share
06:31
She was able to break out of custody quickly and fled to Virginia.
Share
06:36
The Con.
Share
06:41
Now on the run from her master in a strange foreign country she was faced with the problem of finding some food and a place to sleep. She could hardly be content with some scullery maid gig in a dodgy inn after her time among royalty so she set her sights on a far more ambitious career path.
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06:58
Sarah already knew what every South English actor in Hollywood would teach most of us centuries later, if you have an English accent in
America
you’re either a villain, or an extremely sophisticated charmer. This is true. You watch movies and it's like "He's British. He's going to be the bad guy".Share
07:15
She understandably chose the latter role. The escaped convict used her inside knowledge of aristocratic life to cast herself as a noblewoman and thereby elicit favours from all kinds of wealthy and powerful people.
Share
07:27
Amazingly, she still had some of the Queen’s belongings with her which she used as props in her act. Wait. so they sent her off and they didn't check for all the stuff that she had stolen. Guys!
Share
07:37
Just like that, plain old Sarah Wilson became Princess Susanna Caroline Matilda, and you know the more middle names you have, at least in the UK, the posher you are, sister to Queen Charlotte herself. I told you she was ambitious. If you have two surnames in the UK, that is like double posh.
Share
07:55
Now whenever she rocked up at some rich person’s doorstep, they weren’t being bothered by a beggar, they were receiving a bona fide royal visit! Princess Susanna was wined and dined by governors and other powerful
Colonial
officials up and down the East Coast. Over candlelight dinners she told them how she was forced to leave England following a family scandal when she refused to marry the man that had been chosen for her.Share
08:19
Not to worry though, she would surely soon be able to return to her sister’s side in England and would certainly be willing to put in a good word for her new friends across the pond. if only they could provide her with some new clothes, a bit of cash and a couple bottles of wine for the road. She got her priorities right. "I need money, clothes and booze".
Share
08:37
Her Royal Highness gave the same story to shopkeepers too and managed to rack up huge amounts of credit through this old-timey identity theft, made all the more impressive since she was stealing an identity which never even really existed. It would only take a superficial knowledge of the British Royal Family tree to see through the whole thing but it’s likely the promise of some cushy government position helped pull the world over people’s eyes.
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09:01
By the time the princess made her way to Charlestown,
South Carolina
, she had pretty much perfected all aspects of her story. The town crier announced the arrival of "her Serene Highness" and her calendar quickly filled up with appointments with some of the most powerful people in town.Share
09:15
I didn't know we called people "her Serene Highness". I always thought it was "her Royal Highness". I've met a dude who was his Serene Highness. I met the the Crown Prince of Liechtenstein and yeah, I was given a briefing on how to address him. He was his Serene Highness. It was fun.
Share
09:33
As an edition of a magazine from the time, "Rivington’s New York Gazetteer" recounted, she made "astonishing impressions in many places, affecting the mode of royalty so inimitably, that many had the honour to kiss her hand" yet when I demanded the locals kiss my hand in Boston, all I got was a black eye. How does this work exactly?
Share
09:52
Callum! You've got to pretend that you're super posh, that you're some sort of royal. Although today, do people really care. I feel like maybe the Americans even care more about- You hear about, you know, I listen to a podcast and they're talking about like the British Royal Family. I'm like, "Oh my God, who cares? Who cares? No one cares. Please stop"?
Share
10:11
Even though Sarah was having better luck than me, her good fortune was soon set to run out. Talk of a royal touring the colonies began to spread like wildfire and eventually reached the ear of Mr Devall. He had been trying without any luck to track down his enslaved convict.
Share
10:26
Upon hearing a description of the royal princess in the autumn of 1773, he realized why. Sarah had managed to hide herself in plain sight while enjoying a life of luxury. He decided to take out an ad in the
South Carolina
papers informing the locals of Charlestown that this princess was in fact nothing but a lowborn maid on the run.Share
10:43
In the same ad he offered up a reward of five pistols. Really? I was like "is that some sort of currency"? and then I realised, no, he's probably just offering some guns. Okay. Which I’m pretty sure is still the standard reward for finding a lost cat in Texas. Yeah, he is in Texas right. He also sent one of his employees named Michael Dalton to go to Charlestown in person and bring her back.
Share
11:03
After asking around town, Dalton discovered his target was enjoying the hospitality of a plantation owner at his mansion outside of town. By the time the hunter arrived she was already gone, his princess was in another castle. Another plantation, actually, where he was finally able to snare her.
Share
11:19
Now, this is where the story gets a little bit murky
Share
11:22
See, the narrative which we’re currently knee deep in has plenty of cinematic appeal. Yeah, I'm like "Why is this not a movie? This is very compelling". And as we know, any time a story goes stateside it’s given the Hollywood treatment. Back before sketchy "based on a true story" films were a thing, it was the most popular magazines who played fast and loose with the truth.
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11:42
That’s why the most popular narrative around Princess Susanna states that she was at this point escorted back to her master’s mansion at gunpoint. He must have had so many guns! There she remained for a couple of years, until Mr Devall decided he had other matters to attend to, that was shooting Redcoats with muskets mostly.
Share
12:01
This was the start of the
American Revolutionary War
or as we Brits call it in history class "The Great Bloody Fuss of the Ungrateful Colony". I'm sorry Americans. We don't call it that but we do make a little bit of fun. The absence of her master and many of his taskmasters meant Sarah was once again able to give them the slip. Some even say that she managed this with the old switcheroo trick when a convict with the exact same name landed in Baltimore
.Share
12:26
If it sounds like the story is getting a bit ridiculous now, that’s because it is. In fact, there’s no real record of Sarah Wilson ever being taken back into servitude. After posting the ad and sending his personal manhunter after her, it seems like Mr Devall just gave up.
Share
12:39
Proper historians reckon that it’s likely Mr Dalton did actually catch up with the princess in Georgetown, but by this point she was already so flush with cash that she could pay her purchase price back to her master with a tasty bit of interest on top. This was a common way for indentured servants to cut their miserable contracts off early, provided they could somehow scrape together the cash.
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12:58
Either way, Princess Susanna was now free to continue on her merry way.
Share
13:02
She continued onwards to fresh pastures in
New York
, pulling the same old trick with dozens of new chumps on the way. She never actually faced any consequences for her impressive campaign of impersonation as far as we can tell. As for what did actually happen to her in the end, nobody can quite say for sure.Share
13:18
Some magazines wrote that she married a man serving in
the Light Dragoons
of the UK military, come to receive a good thrashing from the rebel colonists. After hooking up with the young officer in New York
Princess Susanna decided to settle down there with him after the war, starting a business and family in the Bowery.Share
13:34
That ending, however, is most likely a load of nonsense. A more credible version is one backed up by an obituary from
Berwick
, Maine. Not sure of the pronunciation there, I mean not of Maine. I know how to pronounce Maine, but Berwick
, Bowick in the year 1780.Share
13:48
"Departed this life on Wednesday morning last, at the house of Mr John Costelloe of this town a strange lady, who called herself the Duchess of Cronenburg, but is supposed to be one Sarah Wilson, a convict. The generosity of Mr Costelloe in taking in this distressed person after she was forsaken by everyone, is really worthy of being noticed".
Share
14:10
In plain English that basically means Sarah fell upon hard times and was taken in by a kind couple who saw her in her dying days, even calling her by fake name for the sake of preserving her dignity. A happy ending? I’m not really sure.
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14:22
At any rate, we’ll never know how accurate this is. The truth is that the story of Princess Susanna Caroline Matilda mostly just disappears from the history books, leaving room for you to imagine whatever kind of ending you think she deserves.
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14:34
This seems like, I know she conned a few people of a bit of money, but this mostly seems like harmless.
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14:42
Romance versus Reality.
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14:45
In that regard, the magazines are already well ahead of you. This is a story on which journalists have been flexing their creative muscles on for centuries, so there’s just one lasting to do before we finish up for the day, a much-needed bit of myth-busting.
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14:58
Yeah, one thing I don't really want journalists to do is flex their creative muscles. What I'd like journalists to do is report the truth, but I mean, that is really asking a lot.
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15:07
As it turns out, one of the most fundamental facts in the case is actually a work of fiction, the reason for Sarah’s conviction. "Rivington’s New York Gazetteer" was the publication that popularised the story about her serving in the household of the Queen, but the reality is a tad less glamorous.
Share
15:23
Historic documents in the UK actually prove she was just a kitchen servant at the house of a man named George Lewis-Scott. She wasn’t arrested for robbing the Queen either, there’s no record of any such theft. Really, she was brought to court for doing what she did best, swindling a woman out of a dress. Wow, okay. So it was all a lie?
Share
15:42
A 1867 newspaper from Wiltshire reported that by her mid teens she had already got an extensive track record of assuming fake noble titles across England. She’d play the victim and tell her marks she had been cast out by her family for being the sole Protestant among a tribe of Catholics, among other tall tales. As it turns out, the reality is more impressive than the fiction.
Share
16:02
It’s an inspiring story. It is? Testament to just how far you can go with nothing but a silver tongue and questionable moral compass. Callum, I don't think we should describe that as "inspiring". If you're a person who completely lacks morals you can be successful. That is inspiring. I'll work on not having a moral compass.
Share
16:19
Although I am a little bit torn on the whole impersonating a royal thing, me being a true nobleman and all. I’ve been keeping it hush hush though, cause I don’t like to brag, but I’m actually the Duke of Canterbury. It's not a big deal.
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16:30
On an unrelated note, if there are any luxury yacht parties happening this weekend, I’m available. Well Callum, I'll let you know. This has been another episode of The Casual Criminalist. A short one.
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16:41
I hope you enjoyed it. If you did. And you're listening, please leave us a review. If you're watching, please hit that thumbs up button and subscribe to this channel, and as always, I'll see you in the next one.
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