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James Wilmot (born at Warwick in 1726, died at Barton in 1807) was an English clergyman and scholar from Warwickshire. During his lifetime, he was apparently unknown beyond his immediate circle.
After Wilmot's death, his niece, Olivia Serres, claimed that he was the pseudonymous author of the famous Letters of Junius and an influential friend of major writers and politicians. She later also claimed that he had been secretly married to a Polish princess, fathering a daughter by her who had married into the British royal family. Serres asserted that she was the child of this marriage and therefore deserved the title "Princess Olivia".
Furthermore, in the early twentieth century a document was discovered which appeared to demonstrate that Wilmot was the earliest proponent of Baconian theory, the view that Francis Bacon was the author of Shakespeare's works.
All these claims about Wilmot have been disputed. Olivia Serres was a notorious impostor and forger. The manuscript on Shakespeare has no known provenance and was probably concocted in the early twentieth century. The earliest clearly documented suggestion that Bacon wrote Shakespeare's works dates from the mid-nineteenth century in the writings of Delia Bacon and William H Smith.
Career
James Wilmot studied at Trinity College, Oxford, where he received a Doctorate of Divinity, and of which he became a Fellow. He was appointed to a curacy at Kenilworth and later promoted to the position of rector of Barton-on-the-Heath, fifteen miles from Stratford, where he remained for the rest of his life and served as a Justice of the Peace.
Supposed Shakespeare research
Wilmot's Shakespeare research is said to have been communicated to the Ipswich Philosophic Society in 1805 by one James Corton Cowell, said to have been his friend. Evidence of these lectures is preserved in a two-part manuscript, "Some reflections on the life of William Shakespeare", which asserts that Wilmot had visited libraries of country houses within a fifty-mile radius looking for records of Shakespeare or for books he had owned. According to the "Reflections", by 1781, Wilmot finally concluded that Shakespeare could not have been the author of the works attributed to him and that Francis Bacon was the author of the Shakespearean canon. Nevertheless, concerned that his views might not be taken seriously, Wilmot destroyed all evidence of his thinking, confiding his findings only to Cowell.
In any case, later development of the Baconian theory during the 19th century owed nothing to Wilmot. Cowell's "Reflections" were made public only when they were published in 1932 by Allardyce Nicoll in the Times Literary Supplement.
The authenticity of Cowell's "Reflections" was at first accepted by Shakespearean scholars but has since been challenged by Daniel Wright and John Rollet, who assert that no records exist of either Cowell or of the Ipswich Philosophic Society at this date. Wright and Rollet suggest that the manuscript may have been forged by a Bacon supporter and added to the archive of Edwin Durning-Lawrence, a leading supporter of Bacon's authorship. James S. Shapiro has since provided linguistic evidence of the forgery and has suggested a similar motive.
Serres biography
Wilmot's biography was written in 1813 by his niece Olivia Serres, who had lived with her bachelor uncle as a child. Serres claimed that Wilmot was a pseudonymous author, having written the Letters of Junius, well-known Whig political tracts, whose authorship had been much debated. Serres also asserted that Samuel Johnson admired Wilmot to such a degree that he "submitted his writings to the perusal of Dr Wilmot before their going to the press", and that he was close to the poet laureate Thomas Warton, with whom he exchanged poems. Serres also said that Wilmot knew the novelist Laurence Sterne and influenced leading liberal political figures including John Wilkes and Edmund Burke.
According to Serres, Wilmot fell out with Burke over his treatment of Wilkes, and when Burke demanded that Wilmot burn all their correspondence, Wilmot scrupulously complied. Indeed Wilmot was so concerned to preserve confidences and his own anonymity that he burned all his papers just before his death, leaving no evidence of his literary and scholarly achievements. Despite this, Serres claimed to have later discovered papers written in "cyphers", which she destroyed, except for one book that contained memoranda proving "beyond contradiction" that Wilmot was Junius.
Serres did not mention any interest that Wilmot may had have in Shakespeare. Rather she asserted that Wilmot's favourite poet was John Milton and that he also admired Alexander Pope and John Dryden. Serres also claimed that Wilmot was a great admirer of Bacon, writing that "Lord Bacon's works were placed by our author in his niece's hands at a very early age and he desired her to read his essays very frequently. The editor has often imagined from many circumstances that her venerated uncle greatly resembled Lord Bacon in person and mind".
Alleged marriage
In 1817 Olivia Serres concocted an elaborate story to prove that she had royal ancestry. According to Serres, Wilmot had secretly married Princess Poniatowski, sister of King Stanislaus I of Poland, and thus Wilmot was actually her grandfather rather than her uncle. Wilmot had fathered a daughter, Olive, and had officiated at her secret marriage to Prince Henry, the Duke of Cumberland in 1767 at the London house of a nobleman. Serres produced a document signed by James Wilmot asserting that he had conducted this marriage.
Serres stated that she was the only child of this marriage and that her mother had died "of a broken heart" on the Duke of Cumberland's "second" and "bigamous" marriage to Lady Anne Horton. Serres managed to enlist the support of a Member of Parliament, and the issue was debated in the House of Commons, but her claims were dismissed. The documents produced by Serres were determined to be forgeries, and evidence was provided that Wilmot was in Oxford, as a Fellow of his college, at the time he was supposed to have conducted the marriage and signed the document. The Poniatowski family declared that none of King Stanislaus's sisters had ever been to England. Nevertheless, Serres daughter, Lavinia Ryves, continued to assert royal descent.
References
- ^ James Shapiro, "Forgery on Forgery," TLS (March 26, 2010), 14-15. Most modern scholars take the view that Philip Francis was the author of the Letters of Junius. Alan Frearson, The Identity of Junius, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Volume 7 Issue 2, Pages 211 - 227, Published Online: 1 Oct 2008.
- Alfred Harbage, Conceptions of Shakespeare, (Harvard University Press, 1966), 111; Mike LoMonico, Michael LoMonico, The Shakespeare book of lists: the ultimate guide to the Bard, (Career Press, 2001), 28; James Shapiro, "Forgery on Forgery," TLS (March 26, 2010), 14-15.
- Allardyce Nicoll, "The First Baconian", Times Literary Supplement, February 25, 1932, p. 128. Reply by William Jaggard, March 3, p. 155; response from Nicoll, March 10, p. 17. The "Reflections" were contained in a "thin quarto volume" donated by the widow of Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence (1837-1914) to London University in 1929.
- Brenda James, W. D. Rubinstein, The truth will out: unmasking the real Shakespeare, Pearson Education, 2005, p.313.
- Shapiro, James, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?, Faber, 2010, p.11-14.
- ^ Serres, O The Life of the Author of the Letters of Junius, the Reverend James Wilmot, MD, London, 1813, p.xxvi, p.45; p.116; p195-6. Serres also claimed that Wilmot wrote powerful sermons and "classical essays", which his friends expected to be published. Most modern scholars believe that Philip Francis was the author of the Letters of Junius. Alan Frearson, "The Identity of Junius," Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 7: 211 - 227, published online: 1 Oct 2008.
- "Olivia Princess of Cumberland"
- Thomas Curson Hansard, The Parliamentary debates, Volume 9, pp,1029-30.
