Her death, at least, is certain: Eliza Haywood died on 25 February 1756. The obituary notices have her aged sixty, but David E. Baker's 1764 account has her sixty-three. Since no documentation of her birth has been found and Baker's death date is certainly off by three years – he places it in 1759 – the date of birth in standard accounts is a perpetually quizzical ‘1693?’. She was buried on 3 March in St. Margaret's churchyard, Westminster, but her residence at the time of death is uncertain, although some addresses have been proposed. Baker records that she was born in London and that her father was ‘in the Mercantile Way’ but otherwise has nothing to say about the specifics of her birth, parentage, family connections, position in the social scale, upbringing or education. ‘As to the Circumstances of Mrs. Heywood's Life’, he writes too truly, ‘very little Light seems to appear’. In a letter preserved in the British Library to a potential patron addressed only as ‘Sir’, Haywood gives her maiden name as Fowler – this is the only surviving reference to her Fowler origins – and describes herself as ‘nearly related to Sr Richard of the Grange’. Scholars agree in identifying ‘Sr Richard’ as Sir Richard Fowler of Harnage Grange, Shropshire, but how ‘near’ the relation is a matter of speculation. Presumably if Haywood were very nearly related – as a sister, say – she would have said so. Family pedigrees do give Sir Richard a younger sister named Elizabeth but of this Elizabeth nothing is known, and it is a very common name.