Mary Carleton

[1] According to later accounts she married a journeyman shoemaker named Thomas Stedman and gave birth to two children who died in infancy.

She later left her husband to move to Dover where she married a surgeon by the name of Thomas Day, prompting her arrest and trial in Maidstone for bigamy.

She claimed that she was born in Cologne and that her father was Henry van Wolway, Lord of Holmstein and that she had fled a possessive lover.

In April 1663, she used this guise to marry a surgeon John Carleton, who was the brother-in-law of the landlord of the Exchange tavern which she frequented.

She was once arrested after stealing a silver tankard, and was sentenced to penal transportation and sent to Port Royal, Jamaica in 1671, where she worked as a prostitute.

However, in 1672, she either sneaked or conned her way aboard a ship and returned to London, again pretending to be a rich heiress and married an apothecary at Westminster.

In December 1672, Carleton was captured when a turnkey from Newgate Prison, while searching for stolen loot at that time, recognized her.

At the place of execution at Tyburn, she told the waiting crowd that she had been a very vain woman, yet she hoped God would forgive her, as she forgave her enemies.