The Sligo woman who was the VICTORIAN MADONNA
She bewitched men so much a king even abdicated for her and she’s often credited with inventing the cult of celebrity. Meet Lola Montez...
SHE was, a San Francisco newspaper proclaimed, ‘a tigress — the very comet of her sex’, clearly leaving the writer as much in thrall as the famous authors and even a king who had been bewitched by her too.
To the world, she was Lola Montez, a Spaniard famed for her salacious Spider Dance, which led to a court application in Melbourne for a warrant to restrain her from ‘again perpetuating an outrage against common decency’.
In the course of a short life, ended by tertiary syphilis, she blazed a trail across four continents, and became the most famous courtesan of the age.
Her hold over King Ludwig I of Bavaria saw her elevated to nobility as the Countess of Landsfeld, before her interference in politics led to a revolution that forced Ludwig to abdicate and her to flee in disguise.
She eked out a living performing her dances in the goldfields of the American West and the Australian Outback before she died penniless in New York, a repentant soul who embraced religion with much the same gusto as she once had embraced famous men.
But Lola Montez was not Spanish at all. In fact, she was born in Grange, Co Sligo, 198 years ago tomorrow, and christened Marie Dolores Eliza Rosanna Gilbert, known to her family as Eliza. Her mother, Elizabeth Oliver, was the daughter of Charles Silver Oliver, a former High Sheriff of Cork and MP for Kilmallock in Co Limerick, the county to which Lola’s birth often has been wrongly attributed.
When Ensign Edward Gilbert arrived in the area with the 25th infantry regiment, the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, he and Elizabeth fell in love and married in 1820, and little Eliza arrived the following year. The family made their home in Boyle in Co Roscommon, until 1823, before departing on a four-month voyage to India via Liverpool, where Eliza was baptised in St Peter’s Church at the age of two.
It proved a disastrous move, because Edward died of cholera shortly after arrival. Elizabeth, still only 19 herself, married another soldier, Lieutenant Patrick Craigie, later to become adjutant-general of the British Army in India. Though he accepted the child as his own, he was the first to notice Eliza’s obstinate nature and sent her to his native Scotland to be educated. There, his family looked askance at the ‘queer, wayward little Indian girl’ who once ran through the streets naked.
One of her teachers later recalled how Eliza’s ‘beautiful countenance’ was in contrast to her ‘habitual expression of indomitable self-will’.
Life then became peripatetic, as Eliza completed her education first in Sunderland and then in Bath, before preparing to return to India. Her mother had marriage plans for her, as noted in a New York Times obituary after her death: ‘Mamma, with the usual foresight of her kind, had contracted a match for the budding Lola [still Eliza at that time], and had settled that young lady’s destinies in a business-like maternal way. The chosen swain was a very rich and very yellow Nabob [a highranking Muslim official], who had expressed a desire to have a young wife shipped to him, and expected her in due course with his next lot of blue pills and bitter beer.’
Eliza was having none of it — she described the man as ‘a gouty old rascal’ — and asked advice on what to do from a soldier friend. His response was effective, for he and Eliza eloped to Ireland when she was only 16 and she became Mrs Thomas James.
After moving to Simla in India, the couple separated after five years due to his adultery. As Eliza explained it, ‘runaway matches, like runaway horses, are almost sure to end in a smash-up’. She was forced to move back to her mother’s house, where she was locked up like a prisoner and suffered ill-health.
Eventually, it was decided she should return to England and Eliza, wilful as ever, intended to do so as a dancer. First though, she needed a new name and a new identity and, drawing on the Spanish heritage on her mother’s side of the family, she reinvented herself. Lola Montez, the Spanish dancer, was born.
Her career did not get off to a good start. On the London stage, she was recognised as Captain James’s wife, and also revealed to already be enjoying the favours of wealthy men. To escape the scandal, she sailed to France and performed in Paris, where her debut was met with scorn. Beauty, said one critic, is ‘merely an initial advantage; it has to be justified with talent’.
After settling in the French capital, she became the lover of, among many others, the composer Franz Liszt and Alexandre Dumas père, author of The Count Of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers. She also took up with Alexandre Dujarrier, who owned La Presse, the most successful newspaper in France, who met her through his role there as its drama critic. With his patronage, her stalling career reignited. They planned to marry but when Lola defied his instruction not to go to a party, Dujarrier followed her and, drunk, offended a man called JeanBaptiste Rosemond de Beauvallon. Challenged to a duel, Dujarrier unwisely accepted, and he was shot and killed.
Lola travelled to Munich in 1846, pretending to be Donna Lola Montez, a Spanish noblewoman, and there met King Ludwig I. A noted philanderer, he pointed to her breasts and asked: ‘Nature or art?’ In typical fashion, Lola is said to have ripped her dress open ‘to reveal Nature’s endowment’.
Ludwig, like so many before him, was smitten, and said he was filled with ‘a great, passionate love for her’. Not everyone was entranced, because Lola soon used her influence over the king to encourage him to limit the power of the Catholic clergy and to introduce liberal social reforms. One of his generals said bluntly of her: ‘I have never seen such a demon’.
When some of his ministers protested Ludwig’s elevation of Lola to the rank of countess, the king dismissed the minister of the Interior, and provoked a rebellion among students at the University of Munich, which at Lola’s urging the king promptly closed.
In 1848, a year of revolution across Europe, street riots broke out protesting her political sway, and thousands marched on Ludwig’s palace to demand her expulsion.
After learning of her true identity and past infidelities, the king capitulated and abdicated. Lola was stripped of her Bavarian rights and fled, to Switzerland and then France, and never saw the king again.
In 1848, she moved to London and married George Trafford Heald, who recently had come into an inheritance. Unfortunately, the terms of her divorce from Captain James specified neither could remarry so long as the other was still alive, and Heald’s family, horrified by his marriage to a notorious courtesan, launched an action against her for bigamy.
The couple fled to France and Spain, where Heald died two years later in mysterious circumstances.
In 1851, Lola sailed for the United States where she debuted her famous Spider, or Tarantula, Dance, ‘raising her skirts so high that the audience could see she wore no underclothing at all’, as she shook spiders to the ground. In fact, they were handmade contraptions fashioned of rubber, cork and whalebone.
His family looked askance at the ‘queer Indian girl’ Street riots broke out protesting her political sway
In The Gentle Tamers: Women of the Old West, author Dee Brown, who also wrote the classic Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, described her allure. ‘No western stage performer ever equalled the glamorous Lola Montez in creating an aura of seductive mystery and exquisite scandal around her personality,’ he wrote. ‘Whether or not Lola was an actress is debatable — she was more in the class of modern burlesque queens — but the dubious legends of delicious sinfulness which she deliberately spread abroad and carefully nourished have spun down through the years until they are a part of the fabric of western history.
‘Lola burst upon San Francisco like a bombshell, making excellent copy for the newspapers with stories of her many marriages and her claim that she was the illegitimate daughter of Lord Byron. Offstage she dressed in the Byronic mode, wearing black jackets and wide rolling collars.
‘Bronze-skinned, blue-eyed, she made a striking appearance strolling along the San Francisco streets, with two greyhounds on a leash and an enormous parrot upon her shoulder. She constantly smoked small cigars, forced her way into gambling saloons forbidden to women, and played tenpins with any male daring enough to take her on.’
After a benefit performance for the San Francisco Fire Department, the audience ‘showered the stage with their fancy helmets and almost smothered her with enormous bouquets of flowers’.
Soon after, Lola travelled to Australia and the frosty reception in Melbourne, but proved more successful in Adelaide and Sydney, before moving on to Ballarat, the heart of the goldmining boom. When her performance was slated by The Ballarat Times — it was wrong, the paper thundered, ‘to make much of a woman whose disregard of moral right has been of the strongest and most public kind’ — Lola responded by assaulting the editor, Henry Seekamp, outside the United States Hotel.
An eyewitness said: ‘She took a whip and laid it on with a hearty good will. Mr Seekamp retaliated with a riding whip, and before long the combatants had each other literally by the hair’. When Seekamp published another critical article, Lola sued for criminal libel, but failed to appear at the trial because she had been assaulted by the wife of the impresario who booked her — we can only guess why.
After performances in Bendigo, Castlemaine and other Victorian towns, she sailed with her manager for San Francisco.
Somewhere near Fiji, he disappeared, the latest in a long line of men in Lola’s life to depart in mysterious circumstances.
By now, the clock was ticking for her. Already showing signs of the effects of syphilis, her comeback performances in America were failures, and she decided instead to deliver a series of morality lectures written by Rev Charles Chauncy Burr, before retreating from public view for her short final years. The New York Times obituary summed her up perfectly. ‘The minor events of this remarkable woman’s career would supply material for a dozen romances. Her life has been a turbulent one, but its end was peaceful. For some time past, she has devoted herself almost exclusively to the subject of religion, and with a singleness of heart which has left nothing to be doubted. ‘She was generous and hightempered to a fault; irritable, too, as such natures are apt to be, but forgiving and affectionate. ‘Her natural talents were of the highest order; her accomplishments manifold, and in some respects, marvellous.’ From remote Co Sligo to Empireera India, from the salons of Paris to the palaces of Bavaria, from the dusty wilds of America to the scorching Outback of Australia, Lola Montez lived a life like few before her. She died in New York on January 17, 1861, a month short of her 40th birthday, and was buried in Brooklyn’s Greenwood cemetery. Of Lola Montez, the strongwilled and tempestuous Irish lover of soldiers, authors, composer and a king, there is no trace. The headstone memorialised her only as Mrs Eliza Gilbert.
She sported an enormous parrot on her shoulder