James Wilmot
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James Wilmot (born at Warwick in 1726, died at Barton in 1808) was a Warwickshire clergyman and scholar. In 1780 Wilmot looked into records in Stratford on Avon relating to William Shakespeare. His failure to find much evidence led him to suggest that Francis Bacon was the author of Shakespeare's works.
Wilmot studied at Trinity College, Oxford. After graduating he was appointed to a curacy at Kenilworth. He was later promoted to the position of rector of Barton-on-the-Heath, which is 15 miles from Stratford.
[edit] Shakespeare research
When researching Shakespeare, Wilmot travelled extensively around Stratford, visiting the libraries of country houses within a radius of fifty miles looking for records or correspondence connected with Shakespeare or books that had been owned by him. By 1781, Wilmot had become so appalled at the lack of evidence for Shakespeare that he finally concluded he could not be the author of the works. Since Wilmot was familiar with the writings of Francis Bacon he was the first to form the opinion that Bacon was more likely the real author of the Shakespearean canon. He confided this to one James Cowell. Cowell disclosed it in a paper read to the Ipswich Philosophical Society in 1805. However, the later development of Baconian theory owed nothing to Wilmot; such was the obscurity of the publication that Cowell's paper was only rediscovered in 1932.
[edit] Alleged marriage
Wilmot's biography was written by his niece Olivia Serres, who makes no mention of his Shakespeare research, but instead claims that he was himself a pseudonymous author, having written the Letters of Junius, well-known political tracts whose authorship was much debated.
Olivia had lived with her bachelor uncle as a child. After his death, Olivia concocted an elaborate story to prove that she had royal ancestry. She claimed that James Wilmot was her grandfather, not her uncle. According to Olivia, Wilmot had secretly married Princess Poniatowski, sister of King Stanislaus I of Poland, and their daughter had married the Duke of Cumberland in 1767 at the London house of a nobleman.[1] Olivia stated that she was the only child of this latter marriage, and that her mother had died "of a broken heart" on the Duke of Cumberland's "second" and "bigamous" marriage to Anne Horton. She forged documents to prove this tale, which was even debated in Parliament, but her claims were dismissed.
[edit] References
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