Olive, "Princess of Cumberland" (Olivia Serres).

with two poems on the death of Princess Charlotte of Wales, two poems written "in captivity", two poems addressed to Rev. Rowland Hill, hymns and religious meditations, text on rectos only, 38 pages, c.1829, with a printed broadside The Princess Olive of Cumberland to the English Nation (London, 1829) and a manuscript note "The Red Book which you will find was once the Lamented Princess Charlotte Coburghs Book" tipped in, 4to, in contemporary maroon straight-grained morocco with gilt and blind border, rebacked with new endpapers



An apparently unpublished collection of poems by one of the most extraordinary and persistent royal imposters of the nineteenth century, the self-styled Princess of Cumberland.  

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Olivia Serres (1772-1835) was a writer, teacher, and painter - at one time serving as landscape painter to the Prince of Wales. It was, however, her claim to royalty that brought her celebrity from 1817 onwards: she was, she said, the legitimate daughter of George III's brother, Henry Frederick Duke of Cumberland, who had secretly married her mother (apparently a Polish princess who had been brought up in Warwickshire) in 1767. She produced copious supporting documentation, including a purported will of George III leaving her £15,000, had the royal arms painted on her carriage, had herself rechristened, and when she was arrested for debt claimed that, as a royal, she was beyond civil jurisdiction. Her case, not surprisingly, attracted considerable interest and was even discussed on the floor of the Commons - where she was quickly exposed as an imposter. Olive spent much of the later 1820s imprisoned for debt (several of the poems in this collection were written in debtor's prison) but not only did she maintain her claim to the end of her life, it was also taken up by her daughter, self-styled Princess Lavinia of Cumberland and duchess of Lancaster, who made a protracted legal claim for the £15,000.

"Princess Olive" was a prolific author, and a number of other poems and collections are known in both manuscript and print - see M. Pendered and J. Mallett, Princess or pretender? (1939), pp.234-51.