SYMHC Classics: Lola Montez

This 2021 episode covers Lola Montez, a figure whose life is hard to pin down. That's not because of a lack of documentation, but because that documentation repeats the completely fictional backstory she made up for herself.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Lola Montes is getting a quick name drop
in an upcoming episode, so we're bringing our episode on
her out for the folks who might say, wait, who
is that? Though this episode originally came out June fourteenth,
twenty twenty one, so enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Missed
in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome

(00:30):
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm a
Holly Frye listener. Rebecca sent us a note on Instagram
recently suggesting an episode on Lola Montes and I thought, Hey,
I remember her, because way back in twenty ten, previous
hosts Katie and Sarah did a podcast on Ludwig the

(00:51):
Second of Bavaria. We ran that as a Saturday classic
in twenty nineteen, and in that episode, Katie and Sarah
talk about Lude the Second's grandfather, Ludvig the First and
his scandalous relationship with this Lola Montes. I even remembered
that Katie described her as a trip and said they
were going to need to cover her on the show

(01:12):
at at some point. Now it's been more than a
decade since prior hosts of the show, who do not
even work here anymore. They were probably going to do
an episode on this subject. We've had other requests for
Lola Montes in addition to Rebecca's. I found some contradictory
advice about whether people said Montes with the accent on

(01:35):
the first syllable or the second. I don't know which
is right. So we're just gonna say Lola Montes. There
you go. And Lola Montes is one of those figures
whose life is quite hard to pin down, not because
of a lack of documentation, but because that documentation repeats
the completely fictional backstory they made up for themselves. In

(01:56):
the words of historian Ralph Friedman, quote, much of this
confusion can be traced to Lola herself. She changed her
background to suit the occasion, and there were many occasions
to suit. In her adult life, Lola Montes presented herself
as a Spanish dancer that was very exotic and enticing
in the eyes of the audiences and a lot of

(02:18):
the places she performed. In her autobiography, she said she
was descended from Count de Montalvo of Spain and had
Moorish ancestry, but had been born in Limerick. As Marie
Delores Eliza Rosanna Gilbert. She said her family had always
called her Dolores or Lola for short, and she told

(02:39):
King Ludwig the First of Bavaria that she had been
born on February fourteenth, eighteen twenty. None of that's true.
According to her baptismal certificate, she was born in Grange,
about one hundred and fifty five miles or two hundred
fifty kilometers north of Limerick. That was on February seventeenth,
eighteen twenty one. One. That to me is like the

(03:01):
big thing of like what a weird shift of a
few days one year, a few days off of the
date and a year where it just is a strange thing.
She was named Elizabeth Rosanna Gilbert after her mother, who
went by Eliza. That nickname, not Lola, is all over
family and school records. So although both these Elizabeths went

(03:23):
by Eliza in this first part of the episode, we're
going to call her mother Elizabeth in the future Lola
Montes Eliza for the sake of clarity. Elizabeth was the
daughter of Charles Silver Oliver, who was a member of parliament.
Charles had four children with Elizabeth's mother before marrying an heiress,

(03:43):
and although he did not legally acknowledge these four children
or marry their mother, he did provide them with some
financial support set them up with jobs as they got older.
Elizabeth trained as the assistant to a milliner, and then
she married British Army officer Edward Gilbert. About ten months later,
they had Eliza. In eighteen twenty three, when Eliza was

(04:05):
about two, Gilbert took the family to British India with
the hope of earning more money and climbing the military ranks,
but not long after they arrived, he contracted cholera and died.
Elizabeth was still in her late teens and at this
point had a young daughter to support, so she got
remarried pretty quickly to Lieutenant Patrick Craigie. Eliza didn't really

(04:27):
have a lot of structure or supervision in India, and
in eighteen twenty six, when she was about five, Elizabeth
and Patrick sent her to live with his parents in
Scotland with the hope that they could raise her into
a proper young woman. Eventually, Eliza was enrolled at Aldridge
Academy in Bath, where she stayed for about five years.

(04:47):
She developed a reputation for being spirited and stubborn, and
kind of different from her peers who were raised in Britain.
She would later claim that the character of Becky Sharp
and William Thackeray's Vanited was based on her and her
time in Bath. She's made lots of claims. In eighteen
thirty seven, when Eliza was sixteen, Elizabeth returned from India.

(05:10):
Army officer Thomas James, who was on convalescent leave, had
accompanied her during the sea voyage an Elizabeth's reunion with
Eliza did not go particularly well. They hadn't seen each
other in more than a decade at that point, and
one of Elizabeth's objectives was to prepare Eliza to get married.
Eliza claimed that her mother was planning to marry her

(05:31):
off to a widowed army officer who was in his sixties.
There's not really any documentation on who this might have been,
but the most likely candidate would be Patrick Craigie's commanding officer,
although he also had unmarried sons who were way closer
to Eliza's age, so it's possible that she either misunderstood

(05:52):
her mother's intent or deliberately misconstrued all this to make
the story more shocking. There's several possible options there, all
of which have a level of possibility and also a
level of problems. Yeah, Eliza turned to her mother's escort,
Thomas James, for help. He was in his early thirties,

(06:14):
and in her account, she saw him as something of
a father figure. On July twenty third, eighteen thirty seven,
the two of them eloped, with James's brother, who was
a vicar officiating the wedding. This was really not a
happy marriage. Thomas was about twice Eliza's age, and she
seemed to have believed that he had married her solely

(06:36):
to protect her from being married off to somebody who
was twice as old as that. But it quickly became
clear that he was expecting her to fulfill all the
duties of a wife, and he also may have been
abusive to her. When Thomas returned to India, he took
Eliza with him. He was stationed at a remote garrison,
where she didn't have much opportunity for his social life,

(06:57):
and where she probably also contracted malaye. She had recurring
illness for the rest of her life. Her happiest moments
in India were probably when she and her mother visited
a resort town at the foot of the Himalayas. Eventually
Eliza left Thomas. At first she tried to take refuge
with her mother, but Elizabeth really gave her a choice

(07:18):
of either going back to her husband or going back
to Britain. Eliza chose the latter, with the understanding that
she would once again live with the Craigies. Eliza was
about twenty when she left India, and on the ship
back to the UK, she struck up a relationship with
Lieutenant Charles Lennox, nephew of the Duke of Richmond. It

(07:38):
would have been hard to keep a romance secret on
board a ship, but they didn't really try. They were
not discreet about this at all, and once they got
back to Britain, Eliza decided to stay in London rather
than go live with the Craigies, and word about her
infidelity quickly made its way back to India. Thomas sued
Eliza for divorce on the grounds of adultery, and he

(07:58):
also sued Charles Lenni ex for damages, and there was
really no question about what had happened. Like the is,
there are letters written by other passengers who describe like
walking past her stateroom with the door open and clearly
for everyone to see what was happening between the two

(08:19):
of them. Divorces at this point were handled in ecclesiastical court,
and while Thomas's divorce was ultimately granted, the judgment also
specified that neither he nor Eliza could ever remarry while
the other one was still alive. And at this point,
the only way a divorce person in Britain could get

(08:39):
the right to remarry while their former spouse was still
living was through an Act of Parliament. So obviously that
required a lot of political connections and a lot of money.
So this was a huge scandal for Eliza and a
gigantic blot on her reputation. Marriage was the expected life
for a woman like her, but she was legally barred
from remarrying that divorcement. She wasn't considered appropriate for any

(09:03):
respectable work that might have been open to her. While
the people around her probably would have preferred she find
a sympathetic friend or a family member to stay with
and live out her days in quiet shame, she refused
to play by those rules. Eliza was pretty and vivacious
and clever, and she used that to support herself through
the generosity of interested men. It's likely that one of

(09:27):
these men funded a trip to Spain for her. Some
sources credit the Earl of Malmsbury, but in his account
he says he did not meet her until afterward, so
regardless of who paid for this trip, while she was
in Spain, she learned some Spanish and some Spanish style dance,
and a little bit about Spanish culture and customs. And

(09:47):
when she returned to England it was not as Eliza.
It was as Maria Dolores de Poris in Montez, better
known as Lola, and we're going to talk more about
that after we paused for a break. Lola Montes made

(10:11):
her stage debut in London on June third, eighteen forty three.
She performed a dance that was billed as El Olano
during the act break of a sold out performance of
The Barber of Seville, and reviewers described her as quote
the perfection of Spanish beauty. She was in a brightly
colored dress with a black bodice and doing a novel

(10:34):
dance with castanettes that seemed like a panamime of quote
some saucy fancy, including quote stamping pettishly with her foot. However,
someone recognized Lola Montes as Eliza Gilbert. Words started to spread,
and Montes claimed her mother heard about it and printed

(10:54):
up death notices for her. On June twelfth, the London
Morning Post printed an excerpt of a letter from Montes
saying she had been born in Seville and had learned
English from an Irish nurse. She said she had never
been in England except for a few months spent living
with a Catholic woman in Bath, and had never seen
London before she arrived for her performance. Not long after that, though,

(11:16):
Lola Montes left England for the continent, where she was
less likely to be recognized. In Berlin, a critic described
her performance this way, quote, her beauty of rare voluptuous
fullness is beyond any criticism. Her dancing, however, was no
dancing at all, but a physical invitation. If it is

(11:37):
said of Taglioni that she writes world history with her feet,
so it can be said of Donna Montes that she
writes Casanova's memoirs with her whole body. In Berlin, Montes
performed for King Frederick William of Prussia and his guest
Zar Nicholas the first. She also had one of her
first and most famous run ins with authority. While the

(11:59):
monarch were reviewing the troops, Montes tried to ride her
horse into an area that was reserved for military personnel.
When an officer tried to stop her, she struck him
with her horsewhip. A lot of the retellings of this
whole incident really make Montes sound like a wacky little
firebrand in this moment. But she was charged with assault,

(12:19):
and then when she tore up her summons for that charge,
she was charged with contempt. It does not seem like
either of these charges ever went to trial. Though, please
don't hit people with a horsewhip. There's gonna be a
lot more of that in this episode, Please don't, Please don't.
From there, Montes went to Dresden, where she met past

(12:40):
podcast subject From's List. Her autobiography, which is written in
the third person, describes it this way quote through the
management of influential friends, an opening was made for her
at the Royal Theater at Dresden in Saxony, where she
first met the celebrated pianist frownz List, who was then
creating such a furre in Dresden that when he dropped

(13:01):
his pocket handkerchief. It was seized by the ladies and
torn into rags, which they divided among themselves, each being
but too happy to get so much as a rag
which had belonged to the great artist. The furor created
by Lola Montes's appearance at the theater in Dresden was
quite as great among the gentlemen as was Lists among
the ladies. As Montes traveled with Lists, she met other

(13:24):
prominent people, including Rickard Wagner, who did not like her
much at all. The tracks, Yeah, Wagner generally disliked all
the sort of groupies who were always surrounding Fran's List.
We talked about that whole phenomenon in the Liz Domania episode.
He called Montes a quote heartless, demonic being, and Liszt

(13:50):
is rumored to have gotten tired of her as well,
locking her in a hotel room and paying the hotel
staff to keep her there just so he could escape.
There isn't any subtantiation for that story, though, and it
seems a little far fetched considering that they met up
later in Paris. He also gave her letters of introduction
and arranged her debut at the Paris Opera in eighteen

(14:10):
forty four, which was incredible considering that her entire stage
career had involved twenty or so performances total at that
point over the course of roughly a year. Yeah, the
Paris Opera was like one of the most exclusive stages
in Europe, and here comes Lola Montes who's been performing
in act breaks of other shows for the course of

(14:34):
like twenty performances. Audiences in Paris were skeptical of her.
Reviewers noted that Lola Montes could not dance, did not
speak Spanish very well, didn't look Spanish, and had a
terrible reputation for violence. One French critic gave this backhanded
praise to her quote, there is something lasciviously attractive, voluptuously

(14:56):
enticing in the poses she takes, and then she a pretty,
very pretty, extremely pretty person, and she throws you kisses
so complete that you applaud at once, only to ask
yourself afterwards if it was right or wrong to applaud.
Is that not the most French criticism you can imagine
it is. Yeah, she's very lovely in the moment, but

(15:20):
then you second guess yourself. In Paris, Montes met another
past podcast subject that was Alexandre Dumpire, but then she
fell in love with Alexandra Andre Dujarier, who was part
owner of the newspaper La Presse. They planned to marry,
but Dujarier was killed in a duel in March of

(15:41):
eighteen forty five. This duel, we should point out, had
nothing to do with Lola. It was over a gambling
debt that he owed to journalist Jean Baptiste Rosemond de Beauvallon,
compounded by his perceived rudeness on the night that he
racked up that debt. Montes had offered to teach Dujarier
to shoot a pistol when she learned that there might
be a duel, but he had turned her down. She

(16:04):
was terrified over this whole prospect. She was like, you
don't know how to use a gun and this man
is going to duel you. Please let me help, and
he was like, no, I got it. He didn't have it.
Though Montes left Paris after Dejarier's death, she had to
return to testify at Bouvillon's murder trial. Other witnesses at
that trial included both Alexandre Duma p Pere and Feists

(16:28):
French courts didn't typically convict people of murder if the
killing had happened during a duel, as long as the
rules of dueling had been followed, and Bouvillon was acquitted.
In eighteen forty six, Montes moved to Munich, where she
met Ludwig, King of Bavaria. She was twenty five at
this point and he was sixty and deeply enamored with

(16:49):
all things Spain, and in what's probably an apocryphal story,
Ludwig's first words to her were to point at her
chest and say nature or art, grabbed some scissors from
his desk, cut open the bodice of her dress, and
showed him. Although this story probably is not true, Lola
Montes had an incredibly dramatic and often extremely scandalous relationship

(17:14):
with the King of Bavaria for about eighteen months. He
commissioned her portrait for his Gallery of Beauties, which, as
its name suggests, was a gallery of portraits of the
most beautiful women he had ever met. He called her
Lolita and set her up in a luxurious home, buying
the property in her name so that she could be
eligible for Bavarian citizenship. He granted her an allowance of

(17:37):
ten thousand florins a year at a time when his
cabinet ministers are making more like six thousand florins. The
king kept a lot of this secret, but there was
really no way to disguise his total infatuation with her
or her influence over him. She publicly boasted about how
much sway she had, including bragging about convincing the king

(17:58):
to raise teachers pay a week before he was going
to announce it publicly. He was enamored with her feet,
and she gave him an alabaster model of one of them.
When he wrote to thank her for it, he said
he had quote covered it with fervent kisses. He later
gave her an alabaster model of his hand writing a
poem that was carved by the same sculptor. Meanwhile, Montes

(18:21):
was launching one scandal after another. Her behavior was just
not appropriate for somebody considered to be the king's favorite.
She entertained male visitors at all hours. Once, when a
man stood her up, she went to his apartment building
in the middle of the night to find him. She
didn't know which unit that he lived in, so she

(18:43):
rang the bell for everyone, waking up the entire building.
And basically advertising that she was there for a late
night rendezvous with a man. I want to say who
among us, but most of us have not. I would
hope uh. The Alamanan were a sort of fraternity at
Ludwig maximil University of Munich, and they became her bodyguard.

(19:03):
One night during a drunken party at her home, the
Alimanin were parading around dressed only in their shirts, carrying
Lola on their shoulders. When one of them ran her
into a low hanging chandelier, she got a concussion. She
also repeatedly got into physical confrontations with people, and this
was something that carried additional risks for her since she

(19:25):
wasn't a Bavarian citizen, like just go pick a bunch
of fies of people, maybe get deported. To deflect criticism,
she maintained that her enemies, especially Jesuits, were spreading lies
about her, even though her Spanish persona included pretending to
be Catholic. She frequently maintained that she was a victim

(19:45):
of just a massive Jesuit conspiracy against her. The King's
advisors tried to persuade him to distance himself from her.
When that didn't work, and Lola's behavior seemed to just
get even more over the top advisor and cabinet members
started resigning in protest. Montes took particular delight when the
people resigning were conservative Catholics. When Ludwig named Lola Countess

(20:10):
of Landsfield, which came with citizenship and a permanent income,
his entire cabinet resigned. Although Lola was extremely good at
convincing Ludwig that these indiscretions were just rumors and that
she loved only him, while also reminding him of how
much he loved her, all of this made the king

(20:31):
incredibly anxious. He was under so much stress that he
broke out in what sounds like hives. And all of
this happened alongside social and political unrest in Bavaria, including
intense disputes between conservative Catholic and more liberal Republican factions
at the university. This was compounded by Lola's scandalous association

(20:52):
with the Alamanin. In the hope of getting things under control,
Ludwig tried to shut the university down. This had worked
to quell descent in the past, but in this case
it just made everything worse. Public opinion about Lola Montes
waxed and waned in Bavaria, but by early eighteen forty
eight people were outraged that this notorious woman, who was

(21:16):
not even from there and who got into fights and
had indiscreet affairs with multiple men, had such a huge
influence on the king. In February of eighteen forty eight,
thousands of people took to the streets and Lola Montes
was driven out of Munich by a mob. Ludwig considered
sending in the army to restore order, but his minister

(21:37):
of war said that if he was ordered to do so,
he would excuse himself, go into the next room and
take his own life. On March twentieth, eighteen forty eight,
so not long after she was run out of town,
Ludwig the First abdicated and was succeeded by his son
Maximilian the Second, and sometimes Lola Montes as described as
being the one who convinced him to step down, while

(22:00):
she definitely encouraged him to abdicate. After her departure, Ludwig
really started to question his own judgment and what his
entanglement with her said about his abilities as king. He
was also just under a huge amount of pressure from
conservative Catholic elements of the nobility, the conservative faction at
the university. There was a lot going on besides just

(22:23):
her telling him that she thought he should step down.
Lola surrendered her Bavarian naturalization certificate, saying that she never
wanted to return. Then she went to London and tried
to plan a trip to Spain. This was complicated by
the fact that she was passing herself off as Spanish,
but she had no Spanish passport. She refused to reveal

(22:46):
who she really was in order to get a British one,
and although Ludwig was sending her money, he refused to
pull strings to get her a Bavarian passport. Then something
happened that resolved all of this. She married twenty one
year old Coronet George Trafford Healed, which made her eligible
for a British passport without disclosing her real identity. Since

(23:07):
she was pretending to be Catholic. They had both Catholic
and Church of England ceremonies. Ludwig had granted Lola a
pension under the condition that she never marry. She wrote
to tell him that she was considering marriage, but that
her husband to be had such a modest income that
she should be allowed to keep her pension. This was not,
in fact true. Healed was pretty comfortable, and when Ludwig

(23:30):
realized Lola had already gotten married before he could even
answer her letter, he was outraged. Another person who was
outraged was George's aunt, who did not trust Lola at
all and looked into her background, and it did not
take long to figure out that she was really divorcee
Eliza Gilbert, who could not marry while her ex husband

(23:51):
was still living. So Lola was charged with bigamy and
released on bail, and she and George went ahead with
their trip to Spain. They came back to London just
the head of her trial. Authorities had confirmed that James
was still living as of June thirteenth, but that wedding
had happened on July nineteenth, so Montez hoped to argue
that it was possible that he had died within that

(24:13):
few weeks, but while she was in Spain it had
been confirmed that Thomas James was alive on her wedding day.
A conviction for bigamy seemed inevitable, so she forfeited her
bail and she and George fled to France. This whole
scandal just added to Lola's infamy. This also wasn't really
what George had signed up for, even by marrying someone

(24:36):
as notorious as Lola Montes. He left Lola at a
couple of different points, and then in eighteen fifty when
he left her for good, he took a lot of
her possessions along with his own, and this included her
alabaster model of Ludwig's hand and her Bavarian certificate of
nobility and Ludwig's letters to her. Lola's correspondence with Ludwig

(24:57):
ended about a year later, which was also the life
last year that he sent her money. At one point,
either Lola or George, or maybe both, tried to extort
money from him by threatening to publish his very explicit
letters to her. In the end, those letters were returned
to the former monarch. Lola needed money, though, and in

(25:18):
eighteen fifty one she published an autobiography. She also met
a promoter who suggested she'd take a US tour. She
signed a contract with a manager for a series of
appearances in Europe, the Americas, and Africa, although she dumped
that manager and those plans before even finishing the European
leg of what they had arranged, But she did plan

(25:39):
to go to the US, and she set sale at
the US in November of eighteen fifty one. And we'll
talk about that after we have a sponsor break. By
the time Lola Montes was preparing for her US tour,
she was intern new nationally infamous. While reporting on rumors

(26:03):
that P. T. Barnum had hired her, the Brooklyn Daily
Eagle described her as quote quite a celebrity among the
profligates of Europe. On September twenty sixth, eighteen fifty one,
The New York Times had this to say, quote, we
shall be sadly disappointed if this creature has any degree
of success in the United States. She has no special

(26:24):
reputation as a dancer. She is known to the world
only as a shameless and abandoned woman. If such a
reputation shall prove attractive in this country, we have greatly
mistaken its character. Oh whoever wrote that, I hope they
never time travel Now I had the same thought. Oh,
oh friend. Most of Lola's performances in Europe had been

(26:47):
dances during the act breaks of other works, but her
US tour was built on much longer appearances. She commissioned
a play called Lola Montes in Bavaria, in which she,
of course played herself. The text of this play has
been lost, but it presented Montes as introducing all kinds
of liberal advances to Bavaria before fleeing in the wake

(27:09):
of a counter revolution. Yeah, a lot of the accounts
of how much how much liberalizing influence she had over
the king seems to have come from people interpreting descriptions
of this play as being definitely grounded in reality, maybe somewhat,

(27:32):
but yeah, it's she. This was both a touring piece
for her and self promotion. Montees had reworked her Spanish
inspired dance at several points over the years, and she
had picked up new styles. A suggestive pantomime involving stomping
on a spider seems to have been there from the

(27:52):
very beginning. I mean that first review doesn't give a
play by play of what she was doing, but there's
this whole like sauciness and stamping pettishly in the description.
It was really in the United States, though, that her
most famous dance became known as the Spider Dance and
also gained a reputation for being absolutely scandalous, so this

(28:14):
pantomime hinged on the idea that a spider was crawling
into Lola's dress. Audiences would see flashes of her skin
as she tried to get rid of the spider, although
exactly how much skin and how much she was wearing
under her skirts kind of depends on which account you read.
Newspapers in the US started describing this as indecent, which

(28:35):
prompted Montez to write angry letters to their editors, while
also making the dance even more risky. Lola, Montes and
Bavaria ran on Broadway, and then she toured around the
eastern part of North America. Her last stop was in
New Orleans, and while she was there, she got into
a dispute with her lady's maid. Her lady's maid had

(28:55):
decided she wanted to stay in New Orleans and leave
Lola's service. Lola struck her, and when the police arrived
to arrest Lola for battery, she drew her dagger and
tried to fight them before drinking the contents of a
vial that was labeled as poison, so something that she
said she always carried on her person in case she

(29:16):
needed to escape a truly impossible situation, but she miraculously recovered.
There are many ways to interpret this, and the one
I'm sticking with is that she had a fake poison
vile to be dramatic. Uh huh, it's probably full of
sugar water. In eighteen fifty three, Montes left New Orleans
bound for San Francisco by sea, with a land crossing

(29:39):
in Panama. Along the way, she met newspaper editor Patrick
Purdy Hull, and they married about six weeks after arriving
in California. This marriage was stormy and brief. At one point,
Lola threw all of his possessions out a hotel window,
and not long after that she threw him out of
the home she had bought in Grass Valley. There are

(29:59):
also that a German doctor who was named in the
divorce suit was mysteriously shot. All of that is a
little bit murky, since its unclear whether divorce papers were
ever actually filed. Montes had become tired of quote splendor
and fast living, and she's spent about the next two
years living in Grass Valley. Before this, she'd always had

(30:21):
a lapdog, but now she indulged her love of animals,
with a personal menagerie that included a parrot, two dogs,
and a grizzly bear cub. Really, grizzly bear cubs do
not make good pets, and after this one mauled her,
she put it up for sale. I'm sure that bear

(30:41):
is long gone, but I worry for it just the
same me too. I could not figure out the ultimate
fate of the bear. Oh, I know how that stuff goes.
In Grass Valley, Montes doted on her neighbor's children, including
a lot of crabtree, who Lola encouraged in her acting
and dancing. She also started studying spiritualism and reading the Bible.

(31:04):
This time was not all harmonious, though. When the Grass
Valley Telegraph criticized a dancer who she knew, Lola whipped
its editor, Henry Shipley, in the street. In eighteen fifty five,
Montes decided to tour Australia. She hired Noel Fallen, who
used the stage name Noel fall End with a d

(31:25):
as a manager. He was estranged from his wife and
children in New York, but he was financially supporting them.
Montes performed to full houses in Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide,
and she appeared on stage around Australia's gold fields, where
she encouraged her audiences to tip her by tossing gold
nuggets at her. This tour was just as full of

(31:47):
drama and strife as all of her earlier tours had been.
Various parties tried to shut down her shows for their indecency.
In Melbourne, she had a running feud with the Reverend
John Lawrence Milton after the baler at times ran an
unflattering letter about her. She got into a fight with
editor Henry Seacamp, with the two of them whipping each

(32:07):
other until onlookers physically separated them. Did everyone carry a whip? Well,
she did like to ride and was reportedly a very
good rider, and apparently Henry Seacamp also equipped with a whip. Yeah.
I think a lot of people who rode horses had
horsewhips with them. Montes experienced recurring illnesses throughout her life.

(32:29):
Like we said earlier, she probably got malaria while she
was in India, and she was sick a lot. While
in Australia. She started describing her spider dance as involving
being bitten by the spider to explain away any swooning
or fatigue that she showed on stage. Eventually, she cut
the tour short and she disbanded the company that had
traveled with her from California. Their contracts had included passage

(32:54):
back to the United States, so the actors tried to
take her to court. When the authorities try to arrest her,
she argued that their warrant was not in her real name,
and because she was married, legal action also had to
go through her husband. This was an argument that she
made more than once. When somebody, would, you know, offer

(33:15):
give her a summons that said Lola Montes, She'd be like, Ah,
that's not my name though, so that's not valid. Then
she left town, basically leaving her performers with no recourse.
Montes and Fallen left for the US in May of
eighteen fifty five. Their ship back to San Francisco stopped
in Hawaii, and shortly after setting sail again, Noel Fallen

(33:39):
fell overboard and drowned. It's not clear exactly what happened,
but Montes blamed herself for his death. She personally notified
his family and tried to support them financially, including selling
her jewelry and property. She owned in San Francisco to
send them the proceeds with the note that she wanted
his children to be educated in Spa spiritualism. Around the

(34:02):
same time, Montes also learned that George Healed had died.
She became more focused on spiritualism and she joined the
Episcopal Church. After making one last visit to Grass Valley,
she sold her property there and then did another brief
tour of the East Coast, performing Lola Montes in Bavaria
again and also visiting Nolfallen's stepmother. In eighteen fifty seven,

(34:26):
at the age of thirty six, Lola Montes changed directions
and became a lecturer. While she still went by the
name Lola Montes, she mostly dropped the pretense that she
was Spanish and Catholic. Her lecture, titled Gallantry, was about
the gallantry of men, including King Ludwig. The First Wits
and Women of Paris, was a tour of notable people

(34:47):
she had met in Paris, including Alexandra Dumatpier and George
sand Romanism was a vehement condemnation of the Catholic Church.
Sometimes people described Montes as an early feminist, but her
lecture heroines and strong minded women of history makes it
clear that she did not have a high opinion of feminism.

(35:09):
It's at least feminism in terms of how she saw
it in the nineteenth century world. She described suffragists and
activists for women's rights as scolds and convention women, before
walking through historical examples of women, warriors and monarchs, who
she saw as real examples of women's strengths, not those

(35:32):
complainers who were having conventions to say how victimized they were.
Montesa's first book was a collection of these lectures, along
with an autobiography. And this autobiography is kind of weird.
We mentioned before. It's written in the third person, it's
sometimes credited to Charles Chauncey Burr, and often it's actually
not flattering of her at all. At times she has

(35:54):
depicted almost as a child, throwing tantrums to get her
way among wealthy and powerful men. And when I read it,
I was like, who who wrote this? And why did
they hate you? I mean, I can see many reasons
why somebody would have a negative impression of Lola Montes,
but I was like, this is your autobiography in your book,
and it is making you sound like a petulant like

(36:17):
Immature Terror. Montes published two other books after that lecture collection.
They were The Arts of Beauty or Secrets of a
Lady's Toilet with Hints to Gentlemen on the art of
Fascinating and Anecdotes of Love, being a true account of
the most remarkable events connected with the history of love

(36:39):
in all ages and among all nations. Like other beauty
books that we have talked about on the show before,
Montese notes that beauty is totally subjective and that standards
of beauty have varied around the world and throughout history.
And then she moves into twenty eight chapters on how
to be beautiful, including how to obtain a handsome form,

(37:00):
habits which destroy the complexion, a beautiful bosom, and beauty
of dress. This book drops a lot of names of
notable people that she's met in places that she's traveled.
It also includes a lot of recipes, with Montez advising
readers to make their own cosmetics, since commercially available products
are often full of poisons, they often were full of bosons,

(37:24):
so that part, that part mostly makes sense. The Arts
of Beauty ends, as we said, with fifty rules for
the art of fascinating and This is a tongue in
cheeks satire written as tips for men, but for the
amusement of the women reading the book. So, for example,
rule the tenth is quote. If you are invited to dine,

(37:46):
go at least an hour or an hour and a
half before the time for then the lady will be
sure never to forget you, as the attentive and polite
gentleman who allowed her neither time to dress nor to
superintend her dinner, Like its name suggests, Anecdotes of Love
is a collection of famous historical love stories, including past

(38:08):
podcast subjects of Spasia and Pericles and Abalard and Eloise.
In eighteen fifty seven, Montes briefly considered marrying again, this
time to Prince Ludwig Johann Sukalski of Austria. He was
one of the many royals she had met while she
was in Europe. We did not name all of these royals.
Before he had fled Austria in the wake of the

(38:32):
revolutions of eighteen forty eight. Montes sailed to Paris, believing
that he was going to meet her there, but it
turned out he was already married. And this whole thing
was a giant hoax. I'm debating over whether I feel
like this is a taste of her own medicine or not,
but I had the same I had the same response, honestly.
In eighteen fifty eight, Montes return to the UK. She

(38:55):
gave another lecture tour, and in London she gave a
speech on the institution of slave in the US. Her
argument here was kind of a tangle. She described slavery
as an enormous national sin and lynch law as a
terror we can all agree with, but she also claimed
that enslaved people on southern plantations were content and that

(39:16):
the institution would somehow just disappear on its own. British
abolitionists criticized this lecture heavily, and Montes countered that this
reaction was hypocritical, considering the British Empire's treatment of the
native peoples of the places it was colonizing, including India.
Montes returned to New York in the fall of eighteen
fifty nine and continued to lecture around the US. On

(39:40):
June thirtieth, eighteen sixty, she had a stroke. Her mother
came to the United States to see her. In some cases,
this was to take care of her and in others
it was more to try to get money from her.
Either way, their reunion doesn't seem to have gone very well,
and her mother didn't stay long. Lola Montes seemed to
be recovering well, but then she contracted pneumonia. She died

(40:02):
on January seventeenth, eighteen sixty one, at the age of
thirty nine. Yeah, there's been various speculation about what could
have caused her to have a stroke at such a
relatively young age, with explanations anywhere from the malaria that
she pretty clearly had for her whole life to syphilis.

(40:24):
But again that's like very speculative based on the fact
that somebody had a stroke at a pretty young age,
then one would typically think of someone having a stroke.
When Lola Montes died, Ludwig the First of Bavaria was
seventy four. He had not seen her in thirteen years,
and he learned of her death through news reports. Later on,

(40:46):
he got a letter from her friend Maria E. Buchanan,
which was sent to Lola's request, and this letter expressed
Lola's sincere regard for him and said that she had
died as a true penitent. Ludwig to appreciate this, he
wrote back, and it was a nice little note. And
then Maria later wrote to him again, suggesting that he

(41:07):
might pay to have a fence put around her grave
at Brooklyn's Greenwood Cemetery. Invig did not answer that one.
Lola's first husband, Thomas James, also outlived her. He died
in eighteen seventy one, so he could have gotten remarried.
He sure could. I One of the biographies that I

(41:27):
read of her was called Lola Montes, a Life by
Bruce Seymour, and I think he traced what happens to
Thomas James afterward, and I don't remember off the top
of my head. Lola Montes's notoriety continued for decades after
her death, with fictional characters based on her, and plays
and movies fictionalizing her exploits. More recently, she inspired the

(41:49):
song whatever Lola Wants Lola Gets from the nineteen fifty
five Broadway musical Damn Yankees. I could sing that by heart.
And there is a running bit about her in season
of Dickinson on Apple Plus that as a show I
was watching before I started working on this episode, and
when I learned there was a Lola Montees running bit.

(42:11):
I was like, oh, gotta stop what else I'm watching
and catch up and see this? Yeah, In Damn Yankees?
Do you know the story? In Damn Yankees, she's basically
now packed with the devil and becomes involved with the
lead character when he makes a similar pact, and it's
sort of their story. She's not so violent in that

(42:36):
and is much more of a winsome character. She is
not physically present on screen anywhere on Dickinson, but it's
a running joke that spans over multiple episodes. Today. Mount
Lola in the Sierra Nevada is named for her, as
are two Lakes and Tahoe National Forest. Her home in

(42:58):
Grass Valley, California is a State Historic Landmark. That is
Lola Montez. I don't know, having referenced all this, if
I would actually call her a trip. However, most of
the things that would make me maybe not call her
that are things that aren't usually covered in quick writeups
of her, like like striking her lady's maid when her

(43:20):
lady's maid try to leave her service, and leaving her
touring company stranded in Australia. Like, I can't get behind
any of that I can. You know, I often take
some glee in people who push against societal norms, and
then that way, she's kind of a trip, But in
other ways, I'm like, you're more of a mess to me.

(43:41):
See now, I'm like, what does a trip mean to you?
Because to me, those all factor in.

Speaker 2 (43:45):
Oh yeah, okay, but I think that's just one of
those like colloquial vernacular things that probably has no clear
definition anyway, right, sure, yeah, yeah, I think in my
head I would describe somebody who was a trip as
a little less harmless than Lola.

Speaker 1 (44:06):
See. To me, part of it is a juxtaposition of oh,
she was a super like fun, love and party gal
but also very violent. What a trip? But oh, I see,
like the journey from one to the other. This is
so interesting to me. Thanks so much for joining us

(44:29):
on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive,
if you heard an email address or a Facebook RL
or something similar over the course of the show, that
could be obsolete. Now. Our current email address is History
Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can find us all
over social media at missed in History, and you can
subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts. The

(44:52):
iHeartRadio app and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff
you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.