Allegations
Just a month before the Testimony of Denial was issued against Hannah Lightfoot, the young Prince of Wales had seen a Quaker at a masquerade at Northumberland House. If noted and remarked upon at the time it may account for the story which then arose. In December 1759 the gossips were saying that the Prince had kept a beautiful Quaker for some years, that she had died, and that a child survived. When he visited Quakers in the City in 1761 the joke was that he had been 'thoroughly initiated and instructed by the fairest of the Quaker sisterhood'. And so the story grew. Hannah was advertised for in 1793, apparently without success.
However, the story gained strength and much dubious detail with the publication of the anonymous An Historical Fragment Relative to Her late Majesty Queen Caroline (1824), the anonymous Authentic Records of the Court of England (1831-2) and the Secret History of the Court of England (1832) in which it was stated that a marriage between Prince George and Hannah Lightfoot had taken place in the Curzon Street Chapel on 17 April 1759. Such a marriage would have bastardised the children of George III and given any child of his brother the Duke of Cumberland a claim to the throne. The imposter Olive Wilmot Serres "Olivia Serres" who claimed to be such a child forged a succession of documents to prove these events, including this 1759 marriage.
When Olive's daughter "Princess Lavinia", produced these documents in court in 1866 the case was dismissed, the Lord Chief Justice saying 'I believe them to be rank and gross forgeries' and the Attorney General declaring her action as 'a case of fraud, fabrication, and imposture from beginning to end'. The documents are now in The National Archives at Kew (reference J77/44). Such a marriage, had it occurred, would in any case have been bigamous, as Hannah Lightfoot was already married to Isaac Axford. Further, there could have been no progeny of that marriage, as Lightfoot is presumed to have died within months of the purported date of April 1759 based on her widowers' remarriage in December 1759.
Although not accepted by any academic historian these claims are sometimes still asserted: see Kreps in references below.
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