Later gossip, originally in amusement and ridicule, first noted in print in 1770, but much embroidered in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries linked her name, although some eight years his senior, with the extremely shy fifteen-year-old Prince George.

After the death of her father she lived with her uncle Henry Wheeler, a linen draper in Market Lane, Westminster.

She married (apparently without the knowledge of her mother) outside her faith at Keith's Chapel, Curzon Street, Mayfair, on 11 December 1753, Isaac Axford, grocer, of St Martin Ludgate, London.

George III admired the simple goodness of the Quakers and there is an old story, first published in 1770 but much embellished in the nineteenth century, that, in amusement, linked his name, as an extremely shy teenager of fifteen, with that of Hannah Lightfoot, eight years his senior, who ran away from her husband in 1754 and disappeared.

[4] Just a month before the Testimony of Denial was issued against Hannah Lightfoot, the young Prince of Wales had seen a Quaker at a masquerade at Northumberland House.

However, the story gained strength and much dubious detail with the publication of the anonymous An Historical Fragment Relative to Her late Majesty Queen Caroline (1824), the anonymous Authentic Records of the Court of England (1831–2) and the Secret History of the Court of England (1832) in which it was stated that a marriage between Prince George and Hannah Lightfoot had taken place in the Curzon Street Chapel on 17 April 1759.

The imposter Olivia Serres, who claimed to be a legitimate child of the Duke, forged a succession of documents to prove these events, including this 1759 marriage.