This entire series is fire, and it spans a few years. Here are some links if you want to go back and reread the setup for this article:
While riding in the car the other day, I discovered that Volbeats’s most popular song is about one of this story’s protagonists, which had me so excited I almost developed a love for Volbeat. That said, I was never much a fan of Roy Orbison, Glenn Danzig, or Elvis, so I’ll just let you guys enjoy it.
Lola Montez, Fighting Floozy of Ireland (1821-1861)
People are shockingly boring, so it’s unsurprising that they have zero ability to encapsulate the life of a person so interesting they seem to be a borderline folk hero in any way that actually belies the truth of their existence. Nowhere is that more true than in Encyclopedia Britannica’s summary of Lola Montez, which is as follows:
“Lola Montez, original name Elizabeth Rosanna Gilbert, (born February 17, 1821, Grange, County Sligo, Ireland—died January 17, 1861, New York, New York, U.S.), Irish adventuress and “Spanish” dancer who achieved international notoriety through her liaison with King Louis I (Ludwig I) of Bavaria.”
Not only does this not capture the true floridity of this woman’s life, which is analogous to a Melania Trump who’s also an action movie star trained by merc-of-mercs Doug Marcaida of Forged in Fire and an astronaut, all while being a lowkey political subversive working against the Saudi royal family, but it ignores the fact she was also so hot she was like a Industrial Age Helen of Troy, the fact that she was essentially the world’s first action star, and the fact that she dueled men in the street like she was Andrew Jackson in drag.
Biographer Edmund d’Auvergne penned an amazing TLDR of her life, if you prefer to read that than the lengthy bio that follows
“Lola Montez, some think, came a century too late; “in the eighteenth century,” said Claudin, “she would have played a great part.” The part she played was, at all events, stirring and strange enough. The most spiritually and æsthetically minded sovereign in Europe worshipped her as a goddess; geniuses of coarser fibre, such as Dumas, sought her society. She associated with the most highly gifted men of her time. Equipped only with the education of a pre-Victorian schoolgirl, she overthrew the ablest plotters and intriguers in Europe, foiled the policy of Metternich, and hoisted the standard of freedom in the very stronghold of Ultramontane and reactionary Germany.
Driven forth by a revolution, she wandered over the whole world, astonishing Society by her masculine courage, her adaptability to all circumstances and surroundings. She who had thwarted old Europe’s skilled diplomatists, knew how to horsewhip and to cow the bullies of young Australia’s mining camps. An indifferent actress, her beauty and sheer force of character drew thousands to gaze at her in every land she trod. So she flashed like a meteor from continent to continent, heard of now at St. Petersburg, now at New York, now at San Francisco, now at Sydney. She crammed enough experience into a career of forty-two years to have surfeited a centenarian. She had her moments of supreme exaltation, of exquisite felicity. Her vicissitudes were glorious and sordid. She was presented by a king to his whole court as his best friend; she was dragged to a London police-station on a charge of felony. But in prosperity she never lost her head, and in adversity she never lost her courage.
A splendid animal, always doing what she wished to do; a natural pagan in her delight in life and love and danger—she cherished all her life an unaccountable fondness for the most conventional puritanical forms of Christianity, dying at last in the bosom of the Protestant Church, with sentiments of self-abasement and contrition that would have done credit to a Magdalen or Pelagi” (d’Auvergne vi-vii).
The artist who would later be known as Lola Montez was born in 1820s Ireland, which was against all odds an even bigger shitpile than 1820s America. Ireland had spent 20 years under the horrific mismanagement of the British crown, and the quality of life was steadily dropping as the potato famine loomed on the horizon. Her father, a British army officer, found himself stationed in India when she turned two, and the family then travelled halfway around the world to the sweaty, fetid, curry-laden land of India, which was suffering even worse under British rule than the Irish. that man dropped dead almost immediately, leaving the family stranded until her mother remarried. Her mother did, in fact, and sent Lola back to England for schooling, where the girl found herself on the outs with the staid and dickheaded Brits who found the forward-thinking young Bohemian far too weird for them.
In an effort to help “normalize her daughter,” Lola’s mom attempted to marry her off to some ancient man in India, but Lola sidestepped her mother’s terrible plans by eloping with a British officer. As whirlwind romances invariably end up a shitshow, that relationship dissolved rather quickly, so the teenager decide to reinvent herself as a Spanish dancer, performing under the name by which we now know her. Though her performance as a dancer was at least passable, people immediately saw through her Spanish stage name, so Lola was forced to move to France for a less astute, if far more filthy crowd (France was basically filled with shit and garbage until Napoleon had a modern sewage system installed in 1852, and this was the decade prior, meaning it was a sanitation apocalypse when Lola lived there).
In Europe, Lola met the man who is widely regarded as the greatest pianist of all time, Franz Liztzt, who secured for her a role in an opera (her performance was panned hard enough that you’d think she was Rose Marie Tran and 19th century Paris was filled with nofap redditors), which led to her just becoming the pass-around girl for the rich bohemians in that city. When one of her beaus was shot by another in a duel, Lola fucked off to Bavaria, where she became the king’s consort in 1846.
“He gave her a large house and an annuity and made her Countess Marie von Landsfeld. She exerted great political influence; ministers are said to have risen and fallen at her bidding. The Bavarian aristocracy loathed her. In February 1848 there were riots against her interference and thousands marched on the palace to demand her expulsion [Editor: You’ll recall from the Friedrich Jahn article that 1848 was the year Germany and Austria exported all of their democratic ideals and lifters to the United States].
When presented with proof of her not-so-noble background and infidelities, Ludwig conceded and abdicated the throne. After a year in Switzerland, Montez moved to London, where she married a young Guards officer, George Trafford Heald. Within a month she was arrested on a charge of bigamy but released on bail. The couple fled to Spain, where Heald drowned in 1850″ (Collins).
As a disgraced king’s consort (which is a bizarre if accurate description) Lola Montez’s story is over as far as most of the world is concerned. The United States of 1851 was a disgusting backwater of a country (even by the standards of shit-and-trash-filled Paris), so Lola’s trip there was likely one of relative ignominy, even if the ship on which she travelled carried another progressive celebrity exiled from Europe- Lajos Kossuth, a Hungarian Revolutionary also exiled for his participation in the Turner-fueled 1848 revolution). Lola’s opinion, however, was that the United States was the world’s only bastion of democratic principles (at that time), and that it was easy to manipulate America’s “intensely puritanical people” by appealing “to their childlike national vanity,” once one adjusted to our “laughable self-righteousness,” a statement I’d say is still pretty accurate.
Thus, it was in America that Lola Montez decided to presage Liam Neeson’s career by abandoning her efforts at improving her acting skills in lieu of focusing on her serious physicality. Where Neeson accidentally became an action star at the age of 56 after taking a role in Taken simply to learn the SAS’s close quarters combat system, Montez seems to have been a hell of a lot more focused in her desires- she went to the greatest living swordsman to learn to fight because after getting called a whore her entire life, she was ready to smack some motherfuckers in their bitchmade mouths and make some money doing it.
