Princesses Behaving Badly (21 page)

But political winds shift, and within a year and a half, the plan to make Christina the queen of Naples was shelved. She took out her anger and frustration
on one of her own: Gian-Rinaldo Monaldeschi, her master of the horse (an accurate appellation because she really did have just the one horse). While in France awaiting word from Mazarin about the Naples plan, Christina discovered that Monaldeschi was writing letters containing all kinds of evil gossip about her. On November 10, 1657, she pronounced him guilty of treason and ordered her men to execute him that same day. She may have been a queen without a country, but she was still a monarch and therefore had the right of judgment over her “subjects,” including Monaldeschi. Though his murder was legal, it was cruel and horrifying. The pope, once so pleased with his queenly convert, denounced her as a barbarian and refused to receive her in Rome.

At only 32 years old, Christina had worn out the goodwill of most of Europe’s political powers. Her occasional forays into world politics were met with smirks, and she ended up spending much of her time in a garden at her villa in Rome. By the end of her life, she cut a small, portly figure in her men’s clothing, short hair, and wispy lady whiskers. For a woman who desperately wanted to be taken seriously as an intellectual, a leader, and a political force, it must have been galling to know that she was viewed as faintly ridiculous.

That is, if she ever realized it. The somewhat admirable thing about Christina was that, throughout her life, she steadfastly believed the myth of her own importance. In her unfinished autobiography she wrote, “My talents and my virtues raise me above the rest of mankind.” When she died in April 1689, her will revealed just how inflated her ego truly was: she left legacies, jewels, and property to various servants, retainers, and ladies-in-waiting. In reality, little of it was hers to give.

In 1933, Greta Garbo starred in a black-and-white film about Christina’s life called
Queen Christina
. Though also Swedish, the lovely Garbo bears less than a passing resemblance to the hirsute Christina, and the plot bears a less than passing resemblance to the unvarnished truth. But Garbo’s representation of a defiant queen is, in its way, an accurate picture of a woman who never lost conviction in her own legend. It’s pure fiction, but it’s what Christina would have wanted to believe.

Caraboo (a.k.a. Mary Baker)

N
OVEMBER
23, 1791–D
ECEMBER
24, 1864
T
HE
(
FICTITIOUS
) M
ALAYSIAN COUNTRY OF
J
AVASU

O
n the night of April 3, 1817, the overseer of the poor in the English village of Almondsbury, a tiny cluster of houses near Bristol, encountered what must have been one of the weirdest things he’d seen in his entire provincial life. The local cobbler’s wife had come to him with a problem. Apparently, a “young Female” had walked uninvited into her cottage and indicated—by lying down on the sofa—“that
it was her wish to sleep under its roof.” She could have been just a vagrant, but she didn’t speak English or any language they’d ever heard. Stymied, the overseer and the cobbler’s wife thought it best to put the matter before their social betters. So the neighborhood gentry, Samuel Worrall, Esq., and his American wife, Elizabeth, trekked the mile into town to figure out what the heck was going on.

What they found was a girl wearing a black gown accessorized with a black and red shawl “loosely and tastefully put on in imitation of the Asiatic costume,” according to a contemporary account. She was petite, standing only about five-foot-two, “attractive and prepossessing,” with dark hair and eyes, and appeared to be around 25 years old. She had little in her possession to offer any clue to her identity, and she communicated largely by making signs. Her behavior was particularly strange. When shown into the parlor of the inn, she seemed affected by an engraving of a pineapple on the wall and communicated to her hosts that it was a “fruit of her own country.” She prayed before drinking her tea and didn’t seem to know what a bed was.

The Worralls decided to put her up for the night at the inn, after which she was taken to St. Peter’s Hospital for the poor and vagrant in Bristol. Local residents, having heard about the strange visitor, brought around other foreigners to try to talk to her. But no one spoke her language, and the woman’s spirits seemed to deteriorate; she refused to eat or drink and barely slept. Mrs. Worrall, moved by pity, rescued the woman and installed her in the family’s townhouse. Through a bit of pantomime, Mrs. Worrall managed to learn the unfortunate creature’s name: Caraboo.

Despite this breakthrough, the Worralls were still no closer to figuring out where Caraboo came from or what had happened to her. Finally, after two weeks, a piece of luck arrived: a Portuguese man, who just happened to be in the area and had been to Malaysia, heard about the lost young woman and stopped by to meet her. Miraculously, he could understand what she was trying to tell them.

Caraboo’s story unfolded in one long dramatic narrative, punctuated
by wild hand gestures and weeping. Her Chinese father was a man of rank; her Malaysian mother was murdered by cannibals. While walking in her gardens on her island home, Javasu in the East Indies, she was kidnapped by the crew of the horrible pirate captain Chee-min. Gagged and bound hand and foot, she was dragged aboard their filthy vessel; her father attempted to swim after it, and Caraboo herself fought like a tiger, killing one of Chee-min’s men and injuring another. But all to no avail. After eleven days aboard the pirate ship, she was sold to the captain of a brig making for Europe. Months later, the brig entered Bristol Channel, and she decided to make a swim for it. On dry land, she traded clothes with an Englishwoman and spent the next six weeks wandering the countryside before she was taken in by the kindly Worralls.

In the two months that followed this revelation, Princess Caraboo of Javasu was treated as a visiting royal, ensconced at the Worralls’ comfortable country home near Almondsbury. Her hosts continued to make every effort to learn more about her, and she obliged, divulging as many details as their limited shared language could allow. She recounted that her mother, before her untimely death at the hands (and teeth) of cannibals, wore a gold chain that extended from her pierced nose to her right temple; her father had three other wives, was carried on a sedan chair, and wore peacock feathers in his hat and a gold chain signifying his rank. The greeting customs of her land involved prostrating oneself; her father’s servants played a kind of clarinet with a built-in harp; the black cannibals, whom she called “Boogoos,” cut off the arms and heads of white people to roast and eat.

Every day, the pretty princess became more theatrical. She carried a bow and arrow slung across her back, which she could fire off with great accuracy while at a full run, and a wooden stick at her right side in imitation of a sword. She prayed to “Allah Tallah” and worshipped the rising sun from the rooftops once a week, as well as the lake every time she passed it. She drank only water and ate only food that she’d prepared herself (she was “partial to curry”). She was extremely cautious around men, refusing to allow them to take her hand; if they brushed against her, she would change her clothes.

Caraboo taught the Worralls words in her language and wrote in a
script that seemed to resemble Chinese. She even showed her hosts how to dress in the Javasu style: a dress with a calf-length skirt, belted around the ribcage, and long wide sleeves. She topped it with a turban accessorized with a few peacock feathers stuck in at a jaunty angle and a pair of open sandals.

And all of it was, of course, a load of crap.

Caraboo didn’t hail from as far away as the East Indies—Javasu isn’t even a real place. In fact, she was from barely as far away as the next county. It seems that the more her rescuers and their friends tried to uncover her history, they more they helped create it. Thinking she neither spoke nor read English, they showed her books and images of her supposed homeland and talked openly about all the exotic “Oriental” customs they knew. Caraboo used those details to furnish her fiction, and she wasn’t picky about which ones—she was equally excited about a Chinese puzzle as she was for an Eskimo soapstone carving.

After that initial boost supplied by the Portuguese traveler, whose motivations remain unclear even today, she was off and running. It all must have been fascinating to hear, and she was very good at keeping up the pretense: “They never found her tripping or off her guard, either in her conversation or her general manners, always observing the custom of washing her tea cup, etc.,” a contemporary account claims. Even attempts at surprising her into giving herself away didn’t work. When two suspicious servants burst into her room shouting “Fire!” the princess just stared at them.

But by early June, keeping up appearances was increasingly difficult, especially after her story became known as far away as Scotland. Caraboo fled the Worralls and made for nearby Bath, a fashionable spa town. But if she meant to lie low and wait out the sensation her story had caused, she failed. When Mrs. Worrall found her runaway charge, she was “at the very pinnacle of her glory and ambition,” ensconced in the drawing room of some notable personage, surrounded by “fashionable visitants” all trying to make her acquaintance.

Caraboo managed to convince Mrs. Worrall that she’d only run away to try to get back to Javasu. Within days, however, her fiction began to unravel, undone by the public sensation she’d caused in Bath. At the same time her former landlady was telling Mrs. Worrall that the unfortunate princess bore a more than passing resemblance to an erstwhile and very English lodger, a young man surfaced who remembered Caraboo and added that “when in his company spirits and water were not quite so repugnant to her taste as they had been.”

Caraboo was caught. With no alternative, she told Mrs. Worrall the truth. Or something like it …

Caraboo of Javasu was in fact Mary Baker, née Willcocks, of Witheridge, Devonshire (now just Devon). At age 16, Mary was made a servant in a farmer’s household but left when they refused to give her a raise. After bouncing around a series of menial jobs, she found herself destitute and begging door to door. She didn’t want to return to her family in Devonshire and the tiny village where she was related to pretty much everyone. Eventually, she made her way to London, where she fell ill and spent months in the hospital before being taken in as a maid by a local family.

After a misunderstanding caused her to leave her post, a despondent Mary entered what she thought was a nunnery in Blackfriars. Turns out that Magdalen Hospital was a home for “penitent prostitutes,” and she was kicked out when it was discovered she hadn’t ever been a lady of the night. From there, she tried to get back home to Devonshire; along the way, she cut her hair short and dressed as a man to find work. She fell in with some highwaymen who hired her as a groom and an apprentice robber. That ruse fell apart after she was unable to fire a pistol, and the brigands forced her to promise on pain of death not to betray them.

Mary finally found her way back to her parents, who demanded that she find real work. But she lasted only a few months at everything she tried—she left the tanner’s because she was made to haul the hides out of the cart; she left her next job because she was forced to venture into a deep snow and nearly died of exposure; she left her post as a cook because “the fire did not agree with her.”

Back in London in 1814, Mary supposedly met and married a Frenchman, who left her shortly after she became pregnant. Unable to
support a baby and with no idea if her husband would ever return, she gave the boy up for adoption after his birth in 1816. When she found out the baby had died in the orphanage’s care, she left her servant position in London, wandered the countryside, and traveled with gypsies for a time. After leaving the gypsies, who’d begged her to become part of their clan, Mary began roaming the countryside trying to earn money for passage to America. Begging under the guise of a foreigner seemed a fast, easy, and exciting way to do it. And that, she said, was about when she made her way to Almondsbury and the kind ministrations of the Worralls.

It was as close to the truth as anyone was going to get. Some of her story was corroborated by her father, a perplexed Devonshire cobbler. He was of the opinion that his daughter, though clever, “was not right in her mind” and hadn’t been since she was struck by rheumatic fever at age 15.

Mary was not a con artist, not exactly. All accounts of her hoax note that she never stole or took anything that didn’t belong to her. So why did she do it? Initially, at least, her reason may have been to stay out of prison—English law at the time dealt harshly with beggars and vagrants. If she was discovered to be just a broke English girl, rather than a friendless foreign princess, she could have spent more than a year in jail.