For a year and a half, Princess Susanna was the social accessory in Virginia and the Carolinas, passed from house to house and put up in lavish comfort. So imagine everyone’s shock when the princess was revealed to be not a disgraced royal but an escaped convict.
Princess Susanna was in fact Sara Wilson, born in Staffordshire and hired in London as a maidservant to Caroline Vernon, one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting. After a short time in Vernon’s employ, it was discovered that Wilson had managed to steal a fine dress, a miniature portrait of the queen, and some jewels, among other things. She was tried and sentenced to death; thanks to Vernon’s kind intervention, her sentence was commuted to transportation to the colonies.
Wilson arrived in Baltimore in 1771 and was sold as an indentured servant to William Devall, a plantation owner in Mary6land. Somehow she escaped and ran away to Virginia, taking with her the ill-gotten dress, jewels, and portrait (which, incredibly and inexplicably, she’d managed to hang on to throughout her trial, sentencing, and transatlantic voyage). These items would serve her well in her new identity, as would the court gossip she’d picked up as a servant.
So furnished, Wilson became Princess Susanna for the excited locals, who put her up in their guest rooms and allowed her to hold court in their living rooms. She was, it appears, an exceptional actress: meticulous in her details, she had even embroidered little crowns with her monogram onto her linens. She adopted the attitude of an exiled aristocrat, letting it be known that she still had some influence in the royal houses of Europe and implying that kindness toward her might bring financial rewards. How long she decided to keep up the fiction is unclear, but in the meantime she was doing a brisk business in favors.
Word in the colonies didn’t travel fast, and it wasn’t until months after Wilson’s escape that Devall heard about the exiled princess. He sent one of his men down to South Carolina, where she was then residing, to bring her back into custody. The man found Wilson happily holding court at a local worthy’s house. After unmasking her true identity, he ushered her out the door at gunpoint.
Back in Devall’s service, Wilson spent two years as a humble servant until fate once again gave her an opportunity to escape. When another Sarah Wilson arrived in the colony, she managed to switch places with the woman. The erstwhile princess later married a British officer, and the couple set themselves up in a business using the money she’d amassed during her time as an exiled aristocrat. They lived happily ever after, growing a big family and enjoying life in postrevolutionary America.
Source:
McRobbie, Linda Rodriguez. “Six Ways to Fake Princesshood.” Princesses Behaving Badly: Real Stories From History-- Without the Fairy-Tale Endings. MJF Books, 2013. 172-73. Print.
Further Reading:
Sarah Wilson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Wilson_(impostor)
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I feel like she was probably hot, this reeks of the sort of things hot chicks can get away with.