James Wilmot

Who was James Wilmot?

James Wilmot 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.

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.