Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe (56 page)

Unfortunately, he never sent the letter.

Back in England, her stepfather’s former commanding officer Sir Jasper Nicolls, who had been largely responsible for Lola’s upbringing there, gloated over the newspaper clipping from the
Times
announcing her deportation from Bavaria. He pasted the article in his scrapbook, scribbling beneath it, “What a hold this miserable witch has obtained over this old, adulterous idiot Sovereign. Wretched country to be ruled by such a shameless rogue—but I must remember that Munich is the most abandoned capital in Europe.”

On February 25, Lola arrived in Switzerland. Instead of going to Lausanne, she traveled to Berne after receiving a letter from former flame Robert Peel to rendezvous with him there. In early March, while Ludwig was still pathetically focused on meeting Lola across the border and avenging themselves on their enemies, his advisers were informing him that his position on the throne was fatally weak. The subject of abdication was on the table.

Troops were called into Munich on March 6. The mob warned Ludwig that if he continued to resist their demands, the palace would be torched. At eleven a.m., he capitulated to every request, leading to a two-day period of law and order.

But on March 8, the foolhardy Lola was apprehended in Munich, having sneaked back into the capital disguised as a man. She was taken to police headquarters, where she insisted on seeing the king. On Ludwig’s arrival she once again urged him to flee with her to Switzerland. Instead, she was ushered into a carriage, which departed the city at dawn. The Bavarians lost track of her after the conveyance reached Landsburg.

Ludwig returned to the palace and spent the next few days penning lovesick notes to his mistress. “These three hours talking together with you were worth a year,” and, “I picked out your vest to
put on and in the presence of my servants couldn’t resist giving it a kiss.”

On March 15, he was compelled to revoke Lola’s Bavarian citizenship, although she was permitted to retain her title as Countess of Landsfeld. How humiliating it was to write to his beloved Lolitta with the unhappy news, beneath his dignity for an autocrat to have to capitulate to his ministers. Ludwig felt he had betrayed her.

He told the queen on March 16 that he was against abdicating, and wrote as much to Lola the following day. On the eighteenth, it was proposed that he appoint the crown prince as coregent, but the idea fell flat.

On March 19, 1858, Ludwig I of Bavaria abdicated his throne in the presence of his sons, although, to save face, he had negotiated a palatable deal. He would still retain the form of address “His Majesty, King Ludwig of Bavaria,” as well as his real estate, and he would have an annual income of five hundred thousand florins. But he would have to endure a temporary exile.

He penned his farewell speech and then wrote to Lola to tell her he could meet her in April in Vevey. “God knows when I would have been able to see my Lolitta without this…. I put down the crown, but Lola I could not leave.”

Lola Montez may not have been entirely responsible for the downfall of King Ludwig, but for eighteen months she was the perceived power behind the throne, inspiring him to carry out long-overdue reforms. If he had not given her his heart, soul, and the keys to the kingdom, Ludwig I might have ruled Bavaria until his death, content with the status quo Ultramontane policies of his Jesuit ministers. But the unpalatable combination of the unpopular reforms, the grasping and volatile Lola, and the king’s obsession with her proved fatal for his sovereignty.

Munich’s burghers had threatened that Ludwig would lose his income and risk permanent exile if he visited Lola. The year 1848 had already seen revolutions in other parts of central Europe. He had forfeited his reign, but his kingdom remained. If Ludwig were to quit Bavaria to visit his mistress, his monarchy, too, might be the next to fall.

From Switzerland, where she swanned about with her coterie of
male admirers, Lola wrote to Ludwig, asking for money. But the king himself was in financial straits. When he offered her the interest on a bank deposit instead of hard cash, Lola accused him of punishing her. “[I]f you don’t help me I will kill myself and go mad [in that order],” she threatened. “This is what I get for my sacrifices in Munich. I hope this letter will touch your heart.”

Her infatuated ex-monarch sent her enough to live on for another few weeks, even as Lola added more men to her collection. But Ludwig had grown jealous, and she had to tantalize him with the promise that she would give herself to him when next they met. He asked if she would
besar
him [which literally means “to kiss,” but he intended it more crudely], admitting that for the time being he had to content himself with dreams of sucking her toes.

All through the summer the couple corresponded, their plans to rendezvous always changing, as Lola played a game of round-robin with her lovers—former, current, and some new flames—all the while demanding funds from Ludwig like a child asking for her allowance. After passing an unhappy sixty-second birthday on August 25, he enclosed some money with the following note:

The drawing in your letter that is meant to represent your mouth (each time I give it a kiss), I took at first to represent your
cuño
, and my
jarajo
began to get erect. As much pleasure as your mouth has given me, your
cuño
would have pleased me greatly. I give kisses to the one and to the other.

In her reply, Lola ignored his sex talk and instead complained that his family was conspiring to keep them apart. She fretted that he had not forwarded her diamonds to her, per a previous request, and she didn’t even have the grace to acknowledge his birthday.

On November 28, she set out for England, after sending Ludwig yet another request for money. By this time the story of her royal romance was being dramatized on the London stage. Written by some British hack, it was probably not half as sensational as the actual events.

In 1849, a con man named Papon whom Lola had met in Switzerland began to blackmail Ludwig, threatening to publish his memoirs
that allegedly contained the deposed king’s correspondence with Lola. Ludwig tried to retrieve the letters and paid Papon ten thousand francs, but the swindler published the volumes anyway.

That July, Lola obtained a false French passport under the name of Mademoiselle Marie Marie, with the intention of traveling to Seville. Instead, within four days she met and married twenty-one-year-old George Trafford Heald, a handsome, slightly effete cornet in the 2nd Life Guards, after convincing Heald that she was not Mrs. James. The name she inscribed in the parish register was Maria de los Dolores de Landsfeld. She was still receiving her allowance from Ludwig.

When the long arm of the law caught up with her for bigamy, Lola insisted that she had been granted a divorce by Lord Brougham, the former lord chancellor (who may also have been a lover). She jumped bail and fled to the continent, writing to her “
querido Luis
” in despair over her marital mistake.

…How after knowing you, can I give my love to another, and this other man is without spirit, ignorant, a quasi-lunatic who is incapable of taking a step by himself…. My soul is yours forever and ever—I can love no other but you—believe my words they are written in affliction far from you—if I have one wish, it is to see you again
mi querido
Louis—once more I beg you to write to me—it is my consolation—I love you more in my unhappiness than when I was happy—Goodbye dear Louis, I am still the same Lolitta of heart and soul, loving you more than ever—Your Lolitta, yours unto death.

By Christmas of 1849, the marriage was over. Heald returned to England, while Lola went to Boulogne and reproached Ludwig for abandoning her while she was in ill health. For the next half year he paid her monthly allowance, but felt that Lola was blackmailing him over their love letters. She appeared to be threatening, just as Pabon had done, to publish their correspondence if Ludwig did not continue to subsidize her, as he as promised to do, “with the little pension you swore to give me all my life.”

On June 1, 1851, Ludwig sent her three thousand francs, the last Lola ever got from him. The aging former monarch had finally had enough of the fickle, hot-tempered gold digger. He subsequently learned that she had never been ailing, and the intermediary she had dispatched to negotiate for their love letters was her latest conquest.

Lola traveled through Western Europe, securing engagements because of her notoriety, rather than her talent. On December 5, 1851, having heard there was money to be made in America, she sailed for New York, where she made her debut on the twenty-ninth of the month. By 1853, in addition to the dances that had brought her renown, she was performing in a repertoire of plays: classics, new works, and those she claimed to have written or translated herself, some of which were autobiographical. Her notices as an actress were fairly passable, and she was even lauded for her interpretation of Lady Teazle in Sheridan’s comedy of manners
The School for Scandal
.

On July 2, 1853, although Heald and James still lived, Lola wed a thirty-three-year-old San Francisco newspaperman, Patrick Purdy Hull, because she claimed he was the best raconteur she’d ever known. They moved to the gold-mining town of Grass Valley, California. By mid-September, it was rumored that Lola had filed for divorce.

In 1855, she formed a theatrical troupe and set off on a tour of Australia. Predictably, there were a number of violent incidents, just as there had been during the 1840s, when she traveled through Europe. While she was in Australia, she learned that George Trafford Heald had died at the age of twenty-eight, after a long illness. During her return voyage in May 1856, her costar and lover, Frank Folland, either committed suicide or was pushed over the side of the ship.

Folland’s death marked a literal sea change in Lola’s life. She cleaned up her act, jettisoning “narcotics and stimulants,” as well as her lifelong habit of chain-smoking cigars and cigarettes. In 1858, her autobiography was published to great acclaim in the United States. By then she had reinvented herself one more time, as an articulate and entertaining lecturer on such subjects as “The Arts of Beauty,” “Fashion,” and “Heroines and strong-minded women of history.” She spoke to packed houses about American culture in Europe, and
English and continental culture in America. Her faux Spanish accent was almost entirely gone. She became a critical and financial success until her plans to open a boardinghouse in London bankrupted her.

Later that year she turned another corner and found God, embracing the Episcopalian beliefs of New York clergyman Reverend Ralph Hoyt, whom she met after his church was destroyed by fire. A New York City resident during the final two years of her life, Lola was genuinely devout. A stroke on June 30, 1860, left her legs partially paralyzed; after she learned how to walk again, Lola volunteered at the Magdalen Hospital for repentant prostitutes.

While she was out walking on Christmas Day, Lola caught a cold that developed into pneumonia. She died on January 17, 1861, at the age of forty, and was buried two days later in the Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn under the name Eliza Gilbert. After shaving years off her age all her life, she would have been mortified had she known that her original headstone claimed she was forty-two. Her biographer Bruce Seymour, whose winnings on the game show
Jeopardy!
afforded him the opportunity to spend several years researching Lola’s life, funded a new headstone that was unveiled on April 25, 1999. It reads, E
LIZA
G
ILBERT
, on one side and, L
OLA
M
ONTEZ
, C
OUNTESS
OF
L
ANDSFELD
, on the other.

Ludwig died in Nice at the age of eighty-one. He had been permitted to return to Munich following his abdication, although he admitted, “It needs a great deal of endurance to stay in this capital where my word was law for twenty-three years…to be a nonentity, and at the same time to keep cheerful.”

G
EORGE
VI

1895–1952

R
ULED
E
NGLAND
: 1936–1952

B
orn Albert Frederick Arthur George (and known within the family as Bertie), the second son of King George V and younger brother of Edward VIII grew up overshadowed by his glamorous and outgoing sibling, and cowed by a gruff, hypercritical father and a cruel nanny, who were insensitive to the painfully shy little prince. They were so dictatorial that the medical issues Bertie suffered as a youth (his knock-knees and rickety legs, his intestinal problems, and a profound stammer) manifested themselves emotionally as well as physically. Being a younger son, he was expected to be a sailor prince like his father (who was himself a second son), but his naval career was curtailed by his physical woes, including an operation for a duodenal ulcer.

He did, however, grow up to be a good-looking man. Bertie was short, sandy haired, and blue eyed, with chiseled features and a slight, although athletically trim, build.

When he was twenty-two years old, the royal family changed its name. Because of rampant anti-German sentiment during the First World War, his father jettisoned the house’s name of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha inherited from Prince Albert, the consort of Bertie’s grandmother Queen Victoria. In its stead the family created a new identity that sounded one hundred percent English, and on July 17, 1917, after a massive brainstorming session to rebrand the dynasty, George V’s Privy Council announced that henceforth the royal family would be known as the House of Windsor.

In the early 1920s, Bertie, then Duke of York, fell in love with a pretty young Scottish aristocrat, Elizabeth Bowes Lyon, the vivacious
daughter of the 14th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne. They were wed in Westminster Abbey on April 26, 1923. Elizabeth was the first commoner (meaning anyone of nonroyal blood) to marry into the House of Windsor, but she was hardly “common,” boasting a noble lineage that descended from Irish and Scots monarchs.