her letters that supposedly contained updates of family news. When her new landlady found and read them, she was convinced and became a matchmaker between Carleton and her nephew. Carleton arranged a new letter: it claimed that her brother was dead and he had left her all he had, including her father's forthcoming inheritance, but that her father intended marrying her to a suitor she detested. Her lover invited her to live with him but Carleton and an accomplice, disguised as a maid, stole his money. Over the following ten years Carleton used similar methods to defraud various other men and landlords, often with the aid of her maid. Some of the men were too embarrassed to reveal they had been duped. She was many times accused of theft but was jailed only briefly. Incarceration and execution 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. Naturally, she stole his money and left him. In December 1672, Carleton was captured when a turnkey from Newgate Prison, while searching for stolen loot at that time, recognized her. On 16 January 1673 she was tried in the Old Bailey. Because she had returned from penal transportation without permission, she was sentenced to death. She tried to plead the belly, but a jury of matrons was brought in to examine her, and found that this was not the case. 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. Carleton was hanged on 22 January 1673. She was buried at the St. Martin's Churchyard. Later, someone wrote on her grave: The German Princess here, against her will, lies underneath, and yet, oh strange! lies still. In 1673 Francis Kirkman wrote, and issued under his own name, The Counterfeit Lady Unveiled, a fictional autobiography. Further reading Mary Carleton - The Case of Madam Mary Carleton (1663) References External links Mary Carleton in the Newgate Calendar 1642 births 1673 deaths English fraudsters Executed English women Impostors People convicted of bigamy Executed people from