James Wilmot (1726 in Warwick – 1807 in Barton) 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, a document discovered in the early twentieth century appeared to demonstrate that Wilmot had been the earliest proponent of the Baconian theory, the view that Francis Bacon was the author of Shakespeare's works.[1]
All posthumous claims about Wilmot have been disputed. Olivia Serres was a notorious impostor and forger. The manuscript concerning Shakespeare has no known provenance and was probably concocted during the early twentieth century.[2]
- ^ 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.
- ^ 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, pp. 211–227, Published Online: 1 Oct 2008.