Olive, PRINCESS, the title assumed in 1820 by an impudent pretender, Mrs Olivia Serres, who claimed to have been born at Warwick on 3d April 1772, the granddaughter of the Rev. Dr Wilmot, her mother being his only daughter, her father Henry Frederick, Duke of Cumberland, the youngest brother of George III. In 1791 she had married John Thomas Serres, painter, but had separated from him in 1803; and between 1805 and 1819 she had published ten trashy volumes of poetry and fiction. She resembled the royal family, and found some people ready to believe her to be really Princess of Cumberland and Duchess of Lancaster; but she died in poverty, within the 'rules' of the King's Bench, in November 1834. Lavinia, the elder of two daughters by her husband (there seems to have been at least one son by someone else), married Anthony Thomas Ryves, the adopted son of William Combe ('Dr Syntax'), only, however, also to separate. She died 7th December 1871, five years after a jury, in Ryves and Ryves v. the Attorney-general, had decided that Olive Serres was not the legitimate daughter of the Duke of
Cumberland, and that eighty-two documents produced in evidence were forgeries.
See the Life of John Thomas Serres (1826); Notes and Queries, passim; and an article by E. Walford in the Gentleman's Magazine for August 1873.