James Morton charts the eventful career of a bogus princess who appeared in a variety of guises and went on to captivate the Central Criminal Court with her misdemeanours

One of the most engaging con-women at the turn of the last century was Princess Soltykoff, who received two sentences for fraud in the early 1900s. When she appeared at the Central Criminal Court charged with a variety of offences of obtaining goods by false pretences, at least one journalist was entranced by her appearance.


On 6 February 1906, she was described by the Morning Leader as ‘entertainingly beautiful’ when it was alleged that, as Lady Muriel Paget, she had been defrauding shops and stores in the West End. The writer for the Leader was clearly half in love with her ‘rich complexion, medium height, commanding presence, mass of beautiful brown hair, elegantly dressed and full of Southern fire, her mouth is the work of an actress and her manner – even in moments of excitement – is quite the manner of the old nobility’.


Unfortunately the prosecution’s case, led by George Elliott, was that she was ‘no more the princess, let alone Lady Muriel, than he was a Mohammedan’. She was, he said, the fifth daughter of a Liverpool joiner, James McKillem.


The princess had first struck by obtaining a miniature of her ‘cousin’, the Marquess of Angelsey, and had then conducted operations with addresses such as the fine-sounding Winwick Hall, Haydock (a lunatic asylum), Portslade (where she had been a probationary nurse) and the Metropole in Brighton. It was also alleged that the hat she was wearing so fashionably in the dock had been obtained by fraud.


Her trial was an entertaining one. The real Lady Muriel Paget, wearing furs (although the court was suffocatingly hot), gave evidence that she was the one and only Lady P, and had never met the princess. Then, after a sister had given evidence of the princess's lowly birth, into the witness box went the lady herself.


She looked a tragedy queen in a long red ‘wrapper’ reaching from neck to feet and produced a large family bible which she kissed. 


Asked her name, she replied Nina Olga Trew-Prebble. Asked where she was born, Judge Rentoul interrupted, to laughter: ‘Surely that is hearsay.’ She said she had been educated at Liverpool College and Windsor College at the expense of Major Paget (the Hon Alfred).


It was at this point in her evidence that, unlike Elliott, the usher decided that she was indeed a Mohammedan and therefore had taken the oath incorrectly. Now she had to take off her boots and slippers, place one hand on the Koran and one on her forehead. Would she mind taking off her boots?


‘We’ll look the other way,’ said Elliott. ‘I don’t mind,’ replied the princess. But, reported the Leader, no one did look the other way.


Once correctly sworn, she said she had changed her name in 1892 to Slolterfoht. Who was he? A boy who had made lucky investments for her. She had changed her name to Paget two years later when she was stranded in Paris.


She had wanted to study medicine and had once run a bakery in Everton before she went on the stage, which she left to marry Prince Alexis Soltykoff. They had tried to marry in Scotland. They had married in St Petersburg. Unfortunately, she had given the marriage papers to a woman she had met in a convent and had never seen them again. She had left the prince in St Petersburg and had returned to England ‘under the guardianship of an old gentleman’.


She had then learned that Alexis had died in a Russian prison and, using the name Slolterfoht, she had married a man named Prebble who had been ‘at the Varsity’ and was studying medicine at Guy’s Hospital in London when funds ran out and he had joined the army. The prosecution thought that Prebble was in fact a corporal. It was never clear whether he had joined up simply to escape the princess.


Summing up, Rentoul, acting on the belief that the working classes cannot have intelligent children, was clearly captivated by her. ‘A person of undoubted ability, particularly so when it is considered that she is the daughter of a joiner.’ The jury took half an hour to find her guilty.


Inspector ‘Tricky’ Drew told the court about her. She had left home in 1893 after her mother had made ‘an accusation’. Mother was right, because the princess-to-be had given birth to Annette Tarbett McKillem in April 1894 in Liverpool. She had been a children’s nurse in Wales and was apparently well-thought-of and was out of trouble before a kindly clergyman did his Christian duty and travelled to Wales to denounce her to the family. On her credit side, she had saved a child trapped in a fire in an upstairs tenement room.


What, the judge wanted to know, was the truth of the marriage? Soltykoff’s father had denied any union. ‘Couldn’t it have been a secret marriage?’ asked the judge and anyway where was Soltykoff fils? Dead. So that mystery was never explained.


Previous? Fifteen months at Suffolk Assizes for fraud in August 1902 in not very dissimilar circumstances. In 1901 in Southwold, she had been the widow of Prince Alexis and the unfortunate Prebble had, without his knowledge, been commissioned and was now a major. That escapade had ended when she had gone to London and run up another hotel bill.


Rentoul thought it was worth five years but instead he sentenced her to 18 months with hard labour. ‘She will probably be doing the same thing over again,’ he observed. But there does not seem to be any further record of her misdemeanours.



James Morton is a former criminal law specialist solicitor and now a freelance journalist