Lola Montez Part 1

Lola Montez.

by Edmund B. d'Auvergne.

PREFACE

The story of a brave and beautiful woman, whose fame filled Europe and America within the memory of our parents, seems to be worth telling. The human note in history is never more thrilling than when it is struck in the key of love. In what were perhaps more virile ages, the great ones of the earth frankly acknowledged the irresistible power of pa.s.sion and the supreme desirability of beauty. Their followers thought none the less of them for being sons of Adam. Lola Montez was the last of that long and ill.u.s.trious line of women, reaching back beyond Cleopatra and Aspasia, before whom kings bent in homage, and by whose personality they openly confess themselves to be swayed. Since her time man has thrown off the spell of woman's beauty, and seems to dread still more the compet.i.tion of her intellect.

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 aesthetically minded sovereign in Europe worshipped her as a G.o.ddess; geniuses of coa.r.s.er fibre, such as Dumas, sought her society.

She a.s.sociated 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 circ.u.mstances 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-abas.e.m.e.nt and contrition that would have done credit to a Magdalen or Pelagia.

In my sympathy with this fascinating woman, it is possible that I have exaggerated the importance of her _role_; probable, also, that I have digressed too freely into reflections on her motives and on the forces with which she had to contend. Those who prefer a bare recital of the facts of her career, I refer at once to the admirable epitome to be found in the "Dictionary of National Biography." Here I have not hesitated to include all that seemed to me to throw light on the subject of my sketch, on the people around her, and on the influences that shaped her destiny.

EDMUND B. D'AUVERGNE.

I

CHILDHOOD

The year 1818 was, on the whole, a good starting-point in life for people with a taste and capacity for adventure. This was not suspected by those already born. They looked forward, after the tempest that had so lately ravaged Europe, to a golden age of slippered ease and general stagnation.

The volcanoes, they hoped, were all spent. "We have slumbered seven years, let us forget this ugly dream," complacently observed a German prince on resuming possession of his dominions; and "the old, blind, mad, despised, and dying king's" worthy regent expressed the same confidence when he gave the motto, "A sign of better times," to an order founded in this particular year. Yet the child that thus with royal encouragement began life in England at that time learned before he could toddle to tremble at the mysterious name of "Boney," and later on would thrill with fear, delight, and horror at his nurse's recital of the atrocities and final glorious undoing of that terrific ogre. Presently he would meet in his walks abroad, red-coated, bewhiskered veterans who had met the monster face to face (or said they had); who would recount stories of decapitated kings, dreadful uprisings, and threatened invasions; who had lost a leg or an arm or an eye at Waterloo or Salamanca; which victories (they a.s.sured him) were mainly due to their individual valour and generalship. As the child grew older he would begin to make a coherent story out of these strange happenings: he would realise through what a period of storm and stress the world had pa.s.sed immediately before his advent. He would listen eagerly at his father's table to more trustworthy relations of the great battles by men whose share in them his country was proud to acknowledge.

Waterloo, Trafalgar, the Nile, would be fought over again in the school playground. For the best part of his life he might expect to have as contemporaries, men who had seen Napoleon with their own eyes, and shaken Nelson by his one hand--men who had seen thrones that seemed as stable as the everlasting hills come crashing down, to be pieced together with a cement of blood and gunpowder. How often the boy, or, as in this particular case, the girl, must have longed for a recurrence of those brave days, and deprecated the peaceful present. But for him (or her) far more amazing things were in store. His it was to see society emerge from its worn-out feudal chrysalis, and to take the path which may yet lead to civilisation. Those born in 1818 could have the delightful distinction of being carried in the first railway train, of sending the first "wire," of boarding the first "penny 'bus." Born in the age of the coach and the hoy, they would die in the era of the locomotive and mail steamer. Theirs was an age of transition indeed, most curious to watch, most thrilling to traverse. And--most valuable privilege of all to those that loved to play a part in great affairs--they would be in good time to a.s.sist at the widest spread and most terrific upheaval Europe had known since the downfall of the Roman Empire. To have been thirty years of age in that year of years, 1848! Those who witnessed the great drama must have felt that to have come into the world more than three decades before would have been a mistake the most grievous.

Among the children fortunate enough, then, to be born when the nineteenth century was in its eighteenth year was the heroine of our history.

Limerick, the city of the broken treaty, was her birthplace, Maria Dolores Eliza Rosanna the names bestowed upon her in baptism. Only a year before (on 3rd July 1817) her father, Edward Gilbert, had been gazetted an ensign in the old 25th regiment of the line, now the King's Own Scottish Borderers. He may have been, as his daughter and only child afterwards claimed, the scion of a knightly house, but he could boast a far more honourable distinction--that he rose from the ranks and earned his commission by valour and good conduct in the long Napoleonic wars.[1]

Promotion it was, perhaps, that emboldened him to marry in the same year.

His wife was a girl of surpa.s.sing beauty, a Miss Oliver, of Castle Oliver, wherever that may be, and a descendant of the Count de Montalvo, a Spanish grandee, who had lost his immense estates in the wars. The ancestors of this unfortunate n.o.ble (we are told) were Moors, and came into Spain in the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, which was certainly the worst possible moment they could have chosen for so doing. For this account of Mrs. Gilbert's ancestry we are indebted to her daughter, whose names certainly suggest a Spanish origin. It was by her mournful second name, or rather by its lightsome diminutive, Lola, that she was ever afterwards known. Perhaps she was so called in remembrance of one of the proud Montalvos. At all events, she never ceased to cherish the belief in her half-Spanish blood. When she was a romantic young girl--for young girls _were_ romantic seventy years ago--Spain obsessed the Byronic caste of mind. It was regarded as the home of chivalry, romance, love, poetry, and adventure. To be ever so little Spanish was accounted a most enviable distinction. So it would be ungenerous of us to impugn Lola's claim to what she and her contemporaries considered an inestimable privilege. True or false, the idea was one she imbibed with her mother's milk--though I forgot to say that, according to her own statement, she was nourished at this early period by an Irish nurse. I wish I could say in what religion the new daughter of the regiment was educated. Somewhere she says that her mother eloped with her father from a convent. The strong dislike she manifested in after years for the Roman Catholic Church may have been inspired by this circ.u.mstance, and suggests, at any rate, in one not keenly sensible of nice theological distinctions, some personal motive arising from a bitter experience.

If the baby Lola gave promise of the woman, Edward Gilbert must have been proud of his child--as proud of her as of his pretty wife and his hard-won commission. But those years in troubled Ireland must have been anxious ones for him. There is no evidence that he possessed private means, and to support a wife and child on the pay of an ensign in a marching regiment would necessitate economies of the most painful description. In the East, now that Europe was at peace, lay the only hope of immediately increased pay and rapid promotion. The establishment of the King's Own Scottish Borderers was reduced, in August 1822, from ten to eight companies, and Gilbert was able to obtain, in consequence, a transfer to the 44th of the line, already under orders for India. His appointment to his new regiment--now the first battalion Ess.e.x regiment--is dated 10th October 1822. With his young wife and child he embarked, accordingly, for the land of promise. Probably the four-year-old Lola endured best of the three the unspeakable fatigue and tedium of that long, long journey round the Cape--a voyage which in those days it was no uncommon thing to prolong by a call at Rio de Janeiro. It was not till four months had been pa.s.sed at the mercy of wind and wave that our weary travellers set foot in Calcutta.

The regiment was stationed at Fort William, and there the ensign's hopes of speedy advancement early received encouragement. At one time seventeen of his brother officers lay sick with the fever, and before six months had fled, the last post was sounded over the graves of Major Guthrie, Captain O'Reilly, and Lieutenants Twinberrow and Sargent. The unspoken question on every one's lips was, Whose turn next? In this Indian pest-house there must have been moments when the young mother, fearful for her husband and child, longed fiercely for the rain-drenched streets of Limerick. At last the regiment was ordered to Dinapore. The journey was effected, as was usual in those days, by water, an element to which the Gilberts were now well accustomed. But here, instead of the monotonous expanse of ocean, they had slowly unfolded before them the strange and brightly-coloured panorama of the East--gorgeous, teeming cities, the dreadful, burning ghats, rank jungle, dense forests, rich rice-fields. As the flotilla travelled only 12 or 14 miles a day, the pa.s.sengers had ample time to stretch their limbs ash.o.r.e, and to visit the towns and villages pa.s.sed _en route_. The voyage, too, did not lack incident. On one occasion nine boats were swamped, and eight British redcoats went to swell the horrible procession of corpses which floats ever seaward down the Sacred River.

Another night the Colonel's boat took fire, and the flames, spreading to other vessels, consumed the regimental band's music and instruments, which were so sorely needed to revive the drooping spirits of the fever-stricken troops.

However, in the excitement of taking up their new quarters at Dinapore, these evil omens were, no doubt, forgotten. Pretty women were rare in India in those days, and Mrs. Gilbert received (from the men, at all events) a right royal welcome. She was acclaimed queen of the station, and, as her husband, the Ensign, became, of course, a person of consequence. This was better than Ireland, after all. Dinapore was a fairly lively spot, and regimental society was not overshadowed, as at Calcutta, by the magnates of Government House. So Lola's mother flirted and danced, while Lola herself was petted by grey-haired generals and callow subs., and Lola's father began to dream of a captaincy. One day, in the early part of 1824, his place at the mess-table was vacant. The doctor looked in, and said "Cholera," and a few faces blanched. Craigie, the Ensign's best friend, hurried to his bedside. The dying man was speechless, but conscious. Beckoning to his friend, he placed his weeping wife's hand in his, and, having thus conveyed his last wish, died.

Lola was left fatherless before she was seven years old. She and her mother, she tells us, were promptly taken charge of by the wife of General Brown.

"The hearts of a hundred officers, young and old, beat all at once with such violence, that the whole atmosphere for ten miles round fairly throbbed with the emotion. But in this instance the general fever did not last long, for Captain Craigie led the young widow Gilbert to the altar himself. He was a man of high intellectual accomplishments, and soon after this marriage his regiment was ordered back to Calcutta, and he was advanced to the rank of major."

We are thus able to identify Lola's stepfather with John Craigie of the Bengal Army, who was gazetted Captain on 11th May 1816, and Major, 18th May 1825. Four years later he attained the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel.[2]

He seems to have been a generous, warm-hearted man, who never forgot the trust placed in him by his dying friend at Dinapore. To him Lola was indebted for such education as she received in India. That was not of a very thorough character. With a mother who, we learn, was pa.s.sionately fond of society and amus.e.m.e.nt, little Miss Gilbert must have pa.s.sed most of her time in the company of ayahs and orderlies, picking up the native tongue with the facility which distinguished her in after life, and domineering tremendously over idolatrous sepoys and dignified khansamahs.

I can imagine her on the knees of veterans at her father's table, delighting them with her beauty, and still more with her boldness and childish ready wit. Of course, His Excellency (Lord William Bentinck) would take notice of the pretty, pert child of handsome Mrs. Craigie, and it is not to be wondered at that all her life she should hanker after the atmosphere of a court, remembering the vice-regal glories at Calcutta.

It seems to have dawned upon Mrs. Craigie, not very long after her second marriage, that her daughter was, to use a common expression, running wild.

A little discipline, it was felt, would do her good. It was decided to send her home to her stepfather's relatives at Montrose. With screams, sobs, and wild protests, the eight-year-old girl accordingly found herself torn from the redcoats and brown faces that she loved, once more to undertake that terrible four months' journey to a land which she had probably completely forgotten.

The contrast between Calcutta, the gorgeous city of palaces, and Montrose, the dour, wintry burgh among the sandhills by the northern sea, must have chilled the heart of the pa.s.sionate child. Yet she does not seem in after life to have thought with any bitterness of the place, and speaks with respect, if not affection, of her new guardian, Major Craigie's father.

She writes:--

"This venerable man had been provost of Montrose for nearly a quarter of a century, and the dignity of his profession, as well as the great respectability of his family, made every event connected with his household a matter of some public note, and the arrival of the queer, wayward, little East Indian girl was immediately known to all Montrose. The peculiarity of her dress, and I dare say not a little eccentricity in her manners, served to make her an object of curiosity and remark; and very likely she perceived that she was somewhat of a public character, and may have begun, even at this early age, to a.s.sume airs and customs of her own."

That is, indeed, very likely. Further information concerning our heroine's stay at Montrose we have little. She does not seem to have retained any very vivid impressions of her childhood. One of the few events in the meagre history of the little Scots town she was privileged to witness--the erection of the suspension bridge from Inchbrayock over the Esk. Here it was, too, that she formed that friendship with the girl, afterwards Mrs.

Buchanan, which was destined to form her greatest consolation in the evening of her days. The Craigies were strict Calvinists, and some of her biographers have a.s.sumed, in consequence, that they must have treated the child with rigour and inspired her with a distaste for religion. She never said so, as far as I can ascertain. On the contrary, throughout her life she evinced a marked bias in favour of Protestantism, which is quite as compatible with an erotic temperament as was the zeal for Catholicism displayed by the favourite mistress of Charles II.

Her parents, says Lola, being somehow impressed with the idea that she was being petted and spoiled (by the gloomy Calvinists aforesaid), she was removed to the family of Sir Jasper Nicolls, of London. It is to be observed that neither now nor after do we hear of her father's relatives, who one would suppose to have been her proper guardians. This circ.u.mstance certainly discountenances the theory of Edward Gilbert's exalted parentage. Sir Jasper Nicolls, K.C.B., Major-General, was succeeded by Major-General Watson in the command of the Meerut Division in 1831, in which year it may be presumed he returned to England, and took his friend Craigie's stepdaughter under his wing. Like most Indian officers, he preferred to spend his pension out of England, and gladly hurried his girls off to Paris to complete their education. They missed the July Revolution by a year; but all France was presently ringing with the exploits of the brave d.u.c.h.esse de Berry, who became the idol of the _pensionnats_. To Lola, no doubt, she seemed a heroine worthier of imitation than the young Princess Alexandrina Victoria, who was just then touring her uncle's dominions. The romantic fever was at its height in Paris. To her schoolfellows the beautiful Anglo-Indian girl, with her Spanish name and ancestry, must have appeared a new edition of De Musset's "Andalouse." The influences about her at this time tended to stimulate all that was romantic and adventurous in her temperament, and determined, perhaps, her action in the first great crisis of her life.

II

A RUNAWAY MATCH

It was now fifteen years since Mrs. Craigie had visited England, and rather more than ten since she had seen her daughter. She had been made aware that Lola's beauty far exceeded the promise of her childish years, and this she took care to make known to all the eligible bachelors of Bengal. The charms of the erstwhile pet of the 44th were eagerly discussed by men who had never seen her. Lonely writers in up-country stations brooded on her perfections, as advertised by Mrs. Craigie, and came to the conclusion that she was precisely the woman wanted to convert their secluded establishments into homes. It was difficult to get a wife of the plainest description in the India of William IV.'s day, and the compet.i.tion for the hand of the unknown beauty oversea was proportionately keen. If marriage by proxy were recognised by English law Lola's fate would have been sealed long before she was aware of it. From a worldly point of view the most desirable of these ardent suitors was Sir Abraham Lumley, whom our heroine unkindly describes as a rich and gouty old rascal of sixty years, and Judge of the Supreme Court in India. We see that in that rude age it was not the custom to speak of s.e.xagenarians as in the prime of life. To the venerable magistrate Mrs. Craigie promised her daughter in marriage. Remembering the hard times she had gone through with her first husband, the penniless ensign, and forgetting, as we do when past thirty, how those hardships were lightened by love, she no doubt felt that she had acted extremely well by her daughter. Women's ideas on the subject of marriage are usually absolutely conventional, and since unions between men of sixty and girls of eighteen are not condemned by the official exponents of religion, you would never have persuaded Mrs.

Craigie that they were immoral. Outside the Decalogue (and the Police Regulations) all things are lawful. Well pleased with herself, the still handsome Anglo-Indian lady sailed for home in the early part of the year 1837, proposing to bring her daughter back with her to the bosom of Abraham.

She found Lola at Bath, whither she had been sent from Paris with f.a.n.n.y Nicolls "to undergo the operation of what is properly called finishing their education." I do not suppose the meeting between mother and daughter was especially cordial, considering the temperament of the former and the long period of separation, but Mrs. Craigie was delighted to find that report had nowise exaggerated the young girl's charms. This was also the private opinion of Mr. Thomas James, a lieutenant in the 21st regiment of Native Infantry (Bengal), a young officer who had attached himself to Mrs.

Craigie on the voyage and accompanied her to Bath. The mother thought him quite safe, as he had told her that he was betrothed, and had consulted her about his prospects, or, rather, the want of them. The married ladies of India have always been full of maternal solicitude for poor young subalterns, who frequently repay their kindness with touching devotion.

It was probably the wish to be useful to his benefactress that had drawn Mr. James to Bath. Or it may have been that he wished to drink the waters, for I forgot to say that he had been ill during the voyage, and owed his recovery to Mrs. Craigie's careful nursing.

Lola was staggered by the kindness and liberality of her mother. Visits to the milliner's and the dressmaker's succeeded each other with startling rapidity; jewellery, _lingerie_, all sorts of delightful things were showered upon her in bewildering profusion. Lieutenant James was kept on his legs all day, escorting the ladies to the _modistes_ and running errands to Madame Jupon and Mademoiselle Euphrosine. At last the girl began to suspect that there must be some other motive for this excessive interest in her personal appearance than maternal fondness. She made bold one day (she tells us) to ask her mother what this was all about, and received for an answer that it did not concern her--that children should not be inquisitive, nor ask idle questions. (Lola is the only girl on record who protested that too much money was being spent on her wardrobe.) Her suspicions naturally increased tenfold. In her perplexity she sought information from the Lieutenant, of whose interest in her she had probably become conscious. Then she learnt the horrible truth. The wardrobe so fast acc.u.mulating was her _trousseau_, and she was the promised bride of a man in India old enough to be her grandfather. For a moment Lola was stunned.

For a full-blooded, pa.s.sionate girl of eighteen the prospect was hideous.

We may be sure, too, that her informant did not understate the personal disadvantages of Sir Abraham Lumley. Neither did he neglect this favourable opportunity to declare his own pa.s.sion for the proposed victim, and to press his suit. An interview with Mrs. Craigie followed.

"The little madcap cried and stormed alternately. The mother was determined--so was her child; the mother was inflexible--so was her child; and in the wildest language of defiance she told her that she never would be thus thrown alive into the jaws of death.

"Here, then, was one of those fatal family quarrels, where the child is forced to disobey parental authority, or to throw herself away into irredeemable wretchedness and ruin. It is certainly a fearful responsibility for a parent to a.s.sume of forcing a child to such alternatives. But the young Dolores sought the advice and a.s.sistance of her mother's friend...."

She was probably a little in love with that friend, who was a fine-looking fellow, about a dozen years older than herself, and who had certainly conceived a violent pa.s.sion for her. The situation was conventionally romantic. The books of that time were full of distressed damsels being forced into hateful unions. Lola, it is safe to say, relished her new _role_ of heroine not a little. So when her lover proposed a runaway match, she felt that she was bound to comply with the usual stage directions. After all, what could be more delightful?--an elopement in a post-chaise with a dashing young officer, an angry mamma in pursuit, and, happily, no angry papa, armed with pistols or horse-whip.

Away they went. Lola has left us no particulars of the flight. The runaways reappear, in the first month of Queen Victoria's reign, in the girl's native land, where she was placed under the protection of her lover's family. "They had a great muss [_sic_] in trying to get married."

Lola was under age, and her mother's consent was indispensable. James sent his sister to Bath to intercede with Mrs. Craigie. The lady was furious.

Not only had her daughter upset her most cherished project, but had run off with her most devoted friend and admirer. Mrs. Craigie was a prey to the most mortifying reflections. No doubt she asked Miss James what had become of the young lady to whom her brother had declared he was affianced. She probably said some very unkind things about the Lieutenant.

At last, however, "good sense so far prevailed as to make her see that nothing but evil and sorrow could come of her refusal, and she consented, but would neither be present at the wedding, nor send her blessing." We are not told if she sent the voluminous _trousseau_, which had been the cause of all the mischief. She returned soon after, I gather, to India, to announce to the unfortunate Sir Abraham the collapse of his matrimonial scheme.

Miss James returned to Ireland with the necessary authority, and Thomas James, Lieutenant, and Maria Dolores Eliza Rosanna Gilbert, spinster, were made man and wife in County Meath on the 23rd July 1837. The bride's reflections on this event are worth quoting:--