James Wilmot

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.

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.

James Wilmot studied at Trinity College, Oxford, where he received a Doctorate of Divinity, and of which he became a Fellow. He was appointed to a curacy at Kenilworth and later promoted to the position of rector of Barton-on-the-Heath, fifteen miles from Stratford-upon-Avon, where he remained for the rest of his life and served as a Justice of the Peace.

Wilmot's Shakespeare research is said to have been reported in two lectures to the Ipswich Philosophic Society in 1805 by his friend, James Corton Cowell, preserved in a two-part manuscript, "Some reflections on the life of William Shakespeare". The lectures, contained in a "thin quarto volume", were donated to the University of London in 1929 by the widow of the prominent Baconian Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence (1837–1914) and first made public in 1932. They tell of Wilmot's search for Shakespeare's books or records in country manor libraries within a radius of 50 miles (80 km) of Stratford. According to the "Reflections", by 1781, Wilmot had concluded that Shakespeare could not have authored the works attributed to him and that Sir Francis Bacon had. Nevertheless, concerned that his views might not be taken seriously, Wilmot destroyed all evidence of his theory, confiding his findings only to Cowell.

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