How Lola Montez Took Down a King

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3:09Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manke. Listener discretion advised. Bavaria in the middle of the 19th century was a country in peril. The king, Ludwig I, had once been beloved, but now he was mired in a firestorm of controversy. His subjects were furious with him. Scandals piled up as rumors swirled that his judgment had been compromised, that he was being controlled by shadowy outside forces. High-ranking officials were dropping like flies, while citizens took to the streets in protest. By the middle of the 1840s, the demonstrations had reached a fever pitch.

4:00The cabinet, the people, and eventually even the rest of the royal family turned against Ludwig. It reached the point where Ludwig knew he couldn't continue to rule, at least not without undermining the institution of the monarchy itself. And so, on March 20, 1848, he abdicated the throne, allowing his son Maximilian to become the new king of Bavaria. What had caused King Ludwig's remarkable downfall? What had turned the people against him? Like any question in history, the answer is complicated and layered. but at the heart of it all in this case is an exotic dancer whom the king had made a countess, a woman named Lola Montes.

4:53I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood.

5:02Lola Montes blazed a trail throughout the Western world, rubbing elbows and more, with some of the greatest minds and most powerful men of the era. But her fiery spirit and insatiable lust for life turned out to be far too much for any one man, even a king, to handle. She was a master of reinvention, an opportunist whose motto was Courage and Shuffle the Cards. She wasn't, actually, as she claimed until her death, from Spain, nor was her real name Lola Montes, but for simplicity's sake, we'll call her Lola throughout the episode. She was born in Ireland and given the name Eliza Rosanna Gilbert.

5:50Her birth year was most likely 1821, although with all things Lola Montes, we should take it with a grain of salt. Her dad, Edward, was a British officer, and her mom the illegitimate daughter of a local politician. There were rumors that her mom was already pregnant when she got married, and that was in addition to the circling allegations that Lola's mother, and even her grandmother, were also illegitimate. Lola never stood a chance. She was just born into a scandalous life. In 1823, the family moved to India, where Edward's regiment was dispatched. Tragically, Edward died of cholera soon after their arrival.

6:38Lola's mother, Elizabeth, a widow at only 19 years old, remarried within the year to Lieutenant Patrick Craigie. Craigie was fond of his stepdaughter, but he was seriously concerned about her behavior. A childhood in a foreign land with a loving but laid-back Aya or nursemaid was fertile ground for young Lola's spirited nature to blossom into problem child territory. At age 10, Lola was sent away to live with Craigie's relatives, the idea being that sometime in England would groom the foreign wildness out of her. But it didn't work. Lola quickly earned a reputation as a troublemaker and was bounced from boarding school to boarding school, always leaving chaos in her wake.

7:33By the time Lola was 16, her mother was eager to marry her off. Elizabeth was an ambitious social climber and saw her daughter's marriage as the perfect way to elevate both the family's status and also make her daughter someone else's problem. Elizabeth showed up at Lola's school, at this point in Bath, and announced her plan. Lola would come back to India and marry Sir Abraham Lumley, a wealthy and powerful judge. Lola balked at the Union for many reasons, not least of which was that Lumley was 60 years old. Lola wanted nothing to do with that old man. She sought the advice of a young army lieutenant named Thomas James, whom her mother had befriended on her journey to Bath.

8:26Lola poured out her heart to this visiting stranger. And for the first time, but certainly not the last, a man found himself captivated by her. Lieutenant James was taken with the vibrant young girl and decided on the spot that he would be the one to save her. That very night, he took Lola to his family home in Ireland, where they were married days later. Lola's mother was apoplectic. Her carefully devised social climbing had ended in complete betrayal. But the marriage was doomed from the start. Lola was too young and inexperienced to understand what she'd committed to, and had mostly been focused on getting out of a bad situation.

9:14And here is where we cue Getaway Car by Taylor Swift. Thomas James did care for his young bride, but they were never really a good fit. Lola wrote of her time in Ireland, quote, I wished for nothing more intensely than to be abducted once more, but this time not by a potential husband, but by anything or anyone who could rescue me from the deadly monotony of this eternally repetitive life. From these cold English faces. No smiles, no friendly glances, no kind words. What started as verbal arguments escalated into physical abuse. Things improved slightly when the couple returned to India in 1838 and could enjoy some semblance of a social life, but they parted ways five years later.

10:10Desperate to leave that chapter of her life behind, Lola sailed for London, a single woman now with her whole life before her. She was never one to be without a man for long, whether that was a matter of convenience or of genuine emotion and preference, we'll never know, although she most likely landed somewhere in the middle. Regardless of the reasons why exactly, upon her arrival in London, Lola immediately took up with the man she met on the ship. Between the money she had gotten from both her stepfather and her then-ex-husband, Lola arrived in London with around$10 ,000. But thanks to her extravagant spending, it didn't last long.

10:55Neither did that new relationship I alluded to. Now alone and broke, Eliza needed a new plan. For a single young woman in the 1840s, employment opportunities were scarce. Lola didn't have the right disposition to be a governess, and given her scandalous social life, she probably wouldn't have kept a position for too long. Besides, the other option was much more appealing to her. The stage. Lola started her training, but things didn't go perfectly well. Her voice was too weak for the theater, and she wasn't naturally gifted as a dancer either. but she had one big thing going for her. She was beautiful, with a magnetic presence and a killer body.

11:49Spanish dances were fashionable at the time and required much less in the way of technique, at least to English audiences. After a few months of training and a trip to Spain to study the language and customs, Lola reinvented herself completely as someone glamorous and quote-unquote exotic. She adopted the stage name Lola Montes, full name Donna Maria Dolores de Pores y Montes. She had learned just enough of the language and Spanish customs to seem authentic to the casual English observer. She started smoking thin black cigars and spun multiple invented, gloriously dramatic backstories for herself.

12:40She was ready to take the world by storm, but even Lola herself couldn't have imagined how far she'd go. You might be asking yourself, why Spanish? At this time, Spanish culture was very popular in Europe. It represented passion, mystery, sensuality, all the things that other cultures, especially early Victorian England, were sorely lacking. Spanish dancers had a reputation for being fiery and uninhibited, which, coincidentally, could provide excellent cover for a lack of technical prowess. It was the perfect persona for a woman looking to reinvent herself and stand out. In 1843, Lola had her stage debut.

13:34She went on a press tour where she posed as a genuine Spanish woman, telling stories in broken English. She charmed the press completely. Her reviews were nearly unanimous, although most critics did note that she was more style than substance, but they didn't seem to mind. But there was one problem. She was almost immediately recognized. People began to talk, and Lola Montez was outed as Mrs. James, and identified as most definitely not being actually Spanish. London was too close for Lola. If she wanted to make her new persona stick, she needed to put more distance between her old life and her new one.

14:25It's assumed that around this time, Lola was putting her natural charms to work as a means of supporting herself. Whether that was outright sex work or just keeping company with wealthy men who showered her with gifts, we can't say. But Lola was never shy about, let's say, maximizing her assets. Around this time, Lola met a rich, elderly German princeling who soon found himself entranced by the exotic young woman. He gave her money to pay off her debts and extended an offhand invitation to come visit his court if she were ever in his country. That was all the encouragement our girl needed, and she headed for the continent.

15:13Things didn't go well with the princeling. Lola's casual swearing and rejection of royal protocol rubbed everyone the wrong way. But Lola kept it moving, still trying to get a foothold as a performer. Lola's reception in Germany was basically the same as it had been in London. Some were entranced by her brash stage presence and gonzo performing style. But for most patrons, Lola was the inverse of that famous song from A Chorus Line. She was looks 10, dance 3. Again, Lola's temper also got her in trouble. She was almost thrown in prison for hitting an officer with a whip while trying to sneak into a state visit from Tsar Nicholas I of Russia.

16:06Lola, incidentally, loved a whip, and she needed little excuse to break it out. But with that, it was time for her to move on again. In Poland, Lola found new benefactors, including the composer Franz Liszt. More stage time brought more mixed reviews and more controversy. Then it was on to Paris, where Lola made her stage debut in an opera. But that didn't go particularly well either, and she soon found herself taken off lineups. People seemed to either love her or hate her, with no in-between. It can't really be a coincidence that the ones who loved her were usually predominantly wealthy, powerful men who were also happy to bankroll her lifestyle.

16:59Through a relationship with newspaper owner and drama critic Alexandre Dujarier, Lola was able to boost her performing career, and she continued to perform to wildly varying reviews. As always, her beauty and stage presence made up for her lack of real skill. She cared deeply for Dujarier and hoped to marry him someday, But he was killed in a duel, and Lola found herself once more without a protector. She moved from place to place and man to man, but no one could keep up with her. Finally, in 1846, Lola traveled to Munich, where she bagged her biggest catch yet, the King of Bavaria. Ludwig I was 60 years old when he met Lola.

17:53I'm guessing the royal title made him much more palatable than the 60-year-old her mother had tried to marry her off to back in India. Ludwig at this time was generally popular among his subjects. As a ruler, he had little political ability, content to leave the government in the hands of others while he focused on the arts and on beautiful women. For years, his subjects, as well as Queen Therese, had tolerated Ludwig's dalliances, knowing any fling would be short-lived and result in not much more than a new portrait for his gallery. There was no reason to think that this Spanish dancer would be any different.

18:39They had no idea just how different this one would be. Lola and Ludwig met in October 1846. There was a rumor that Ludwig asked her in public if her breasts were real, and she responded by tearing off enough of her garments to prove that they were. Whether or not that story is apocryphal, it's undeniable that Ludwig fell under her spell, and Lola immediately began to exercise her control. She started getting stage time, and audiences were once again divided between love her and hate her. What was obvious was Ludwig loved her. Within a month, she had a yearly allowance of 10 ,000 florins, five times as much as a university professor's salary, and nearly twice that of a cabinet minister.

19:37A couple weeks after that, Ludwig had Lola written into his will. By December, he had bought her a house, purchased in her name. This was both to keep the money trail clean and to help her establish residency. More than anything, Lola wanted Bavarian citizenship, as well as elevation to nobility, and she wasn't shy about letting the king know. Within just days of meeting her, Ludwig had presented Lola to his ministers. Gentlemen, you have the honor to meet my new best friend, he declared. Please oblige me by treating her at all times with the same respect you have always shown me. But Lola immediately recognized the stern men as potential enemies and boldly warned King Ludwig that his Jesuit-packed government controlled him.

20:34She singled out Prime Minister Karl von Abel as being particularly untrustworthy. Ludwig was stunned. She had identified in mere weeks what he had been questioning for years. In his eyes, that gave Lola enormous credibility. For her part, Lola truly believed that she was freeing the king's mind from outdated conventions. She saw herself as the people's liberator, symbolizing freedom in a new age. Ludwig was deaf to suggestions that she was manipulating him. The Jesuits called her the apocalyptic whore. Lola's stubbornness and temper were still on full display, making her extremely unpopular among the people.

21:24Ludwig was spending astronomical amounts of money on her, and despite his attempts to rein her in, she continued to blow past her allotted allowance. She was arrogant and often abusive to anyone who caught her at the wrong moment. She was seen with lots of other men. She was often scandalously underdressed. Despite opponents installing a spy in Lola's household and reporting back her erratic behavior, Ludwig couldn't accept the truth. Despite extreme oppositional pressure, Ludwig granted Lola Bavarian citizenship in February of 1847. The Minister of the Interior resigned in protest, and many of his colleagues followed suit.

22:14Protests erupted all over, including one outside Lola's house, where it is rumored that she, in characteristic fashion, flashed her breasts at the crowd. Ludwig was becoming a joke to his own people. He and Lola followed all the hallmarks of a toxic couple. Break up, get back together, cause chaos, repeat the cycle. Despite all the drama, on Ludwig's birthday, August 25, 1847, Ludwig made Lola the Countess of Landsfeld and Baroness of Rosenthal. He wrote her a letter asking her to please behave in accordance with her new title, essentially begging her not to embarrass him. Please, please, please.

23:05You won't be shocked to know it didn't work. Lola's elevation to nobility only increased her appetite for power. Her arrogance, her hatred of the Jesuits, her blatant greed were all the talk of Europe. Her public behavior was increasingly shocking. Spitting at a bishop, thrashing a worker, smashing a shop window, or breaking her parasol over the head of a nobleman who opposed her. On more than one occasion, she threatened an angry crowd with her whip, pistol, or dagger. One of her lovers was a university student, and she essentially turned his fraternity, the Alamannan, into her own private army.

23:54She partied with them, and they worshipped her. When Lola set her bulldog on a much-respected university professor of philosophy, who had done her no harm, she unwittingly set in motion her own downfall. The students were tremendously supportive of the professor. Munich University students revolted, with clashes erupting between the Alamnen and the rest of campus who hated her. Ludwig closed the university, which only escalated the situation. By March 1848, pressure was mounting. The specter of the French Revolution still hung over Europe decades later, and the very real threat of revolution was enough to knock some sense into Ludwig.

24:48He reopened the university and abdicated, leaving his son Maximilian II to become the new king. Lola fled the country. In less than two years, Lola Montes had brought a country to its knees and permanently changed the geopolitical landscape. Not bad for a random girl from Ireland. Lola Montes found herself stripped of the power she had enjoyed and abused as King Ludwig's number one mistress. Without her benefactor and protector, she was suddenly Bavaria's public enemy number one. Lola fled to Switzerland, where she waited for Ludwig to come for her. He never did, but Lola didn't spend too much time tied up in grief.

25:39She dusted herself off and kept things moving. She moved to London in 1848 and, you guessed it, met another guy. George Heald was a 21-year-old officer with serious family money, as well as an apparent affinity for passionate dancer types. The two were married quickly, but soon ran into problems. Lola's separation from Thomas James, the ex that she had left back in India, contained terms that prohibited either of them from remarrying while the other was still alive. That meant that Lola and George had to leave the country to escape bigamy charges. The two lived in France and Spain for a while, but within two years, the marriage fell apart.

26:31At this point, Lola decided to do what so many before her also did, try her luck in America, where she was surprisingly successful in rehabilitating her image. For a time, at least. She threw in some acting with her dance performances, and her shows sold out across the country. At New York's Broadway Theater, she pulled in over$4 ,000 in a single week, a box office record for that venue. Lola was smart enough to know why audiences came. They wanted to see the king's scandalous mistress, the woman famous for her whip and pistol, the notorious bedroom adventurer. Americans showed up expecting a shameless, talentless royal plaything.

27:23Instead, they found someone surprisingly refined and tasteful, although she couldn't help herself from throwing in some of her old dances for good measure. She created a show called Lola Montes in Bavaria, where she played four versions of herself. It wasn't high art, probably more like a play based on the pages of Us Weekly, but audiences loved it. That legendary temper still made frequent appearances, especially during her dance performances, and some audiences would deliberately provoke her just to watch the show within a show. During her American sojourn, Lola had her own California adventure, which lasted a few years and was full of the highs and lows that defined her life.

28:15Rough crowds heckled her, sometimes chasing her offstage. There was another marriage and an attempt at domesticity, but her wild past threatened the new guy, and the union ultimately fell apart. In 1855, Lola sailed to Australia, reviving her career by performing for gold miners. As soon as she landed in Sydney, she started generating headlines. Her notorious spider dance, in which she lifted her skirts high enough for viewers to see that she wasn't wearing underwear, caused an uproar. A local newspaper declared her show, quote, utterly subversive to all ideas of public morality, and ticket sales tanked.

29:08In another town, Lola took the bad press into her own hands and attacked a newspaper editor with a whip. The editor was actually armed with a whip of his own, Lola's reputation having preceded her, and the altercation escalated into a full-blown fight. The stormy ups and downs with the Australian public continued, and after nearly a year down under, Lola headed back to the U.S. During the voyage back to San Francisco, her manager went overboard and drowned. Given Lola's legendary temper, it's been considered if he had any ill-timed, unwanted feedback for his client, and whether a whip had been involved in his untimely, accidental demise.

30:04Back in America, Lola tried repeatedly to resurrect her theatrical career, but nothing really took hold by this point. Ever the reinventor, Lola pivoted to image rehabilitation. In 1857, she began touring the country, giving lectures on, what else, morality, and doing charity work helping vulnerable women. Whether her late-stage religious awakening was sincere or just another performance is up for debate, But Lola brought the same fervor to this new chapter that she had to everything else she did. By 1860, advanced syphilis was destroying her body. She died on January 17, 1861, at just 39 years old, which seems almost astonishing given how much life she had lived.

31:05Lola Monta's international scandal is buried in Brooklyn's Greenwood Cemetery, with a headstone that reads simply, Mrs. Eliza Gilbert. It's ironic, but ultimately fitting, that the woman who tore across continents and came dangerously close to toppling an empire would be memorialized with her maiden name. It's probably for the best, because when it came to Lola, the man on her arm would always be the least interesting thing about her. Ludwig outlived her by seven years. After Lola exited his life and he'd transferred governing responsibilities to his son, he returned to his true passions—poetry, art, and beautiful young women.