An apology for the conduct of Mrs. Teresia Constantia Phillips

£3,500 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

ESTC T91602. On the title of Vol. 1 the words “Dutch Merchant” are in Black Letter. . The self-published memoirs of the complex life and affairs of the courtesan and serial monogamist, if not bigamist, Teresia Constantia Phillips (1709-65). These Memoirs were a sensation at the time of publication. Philips was raped by a man she identified here as “Thomas Grimes” but was possibly Thomas Lumley, later 3rd Earl of Scarbrough (one of the two dedicatees of the work) and abandoned after two months as his mistress due to which she underwent a sham marriage with a Francis Delafield or Devall, who was already married, in November 1722 and an apparently legitimate marriage in February 1724 to Henry Muilman, the elder son of an Amsterdam merchant. Muilman soon decided to sue for an annulment of the marriage which was granted but his failure to pay her the promised annuity of £200 resulted in prolonged and complicated law-suits and, for her, periods of imprisonment for debt, of escape to a convent in France, and voyages to Jamaica around 1739/40 in pursuit of a man she named “Worthy” but who was probably Henry Nedham, the son of a plantation and slave owner, and where she fell dangerously ill, and to Boston, as related in Vol. 3, p. 105ff. Following the publication of the Apology , which must have been fairly lucrative for her, Mrs Muilman spent her last years back in Jamaica where she worked through the fortunes of three further ‘husbands’ before dying in poverty on 2 February1765,“unl

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