Lectures of Lola Montez

Front matter

OF

Lola Montez

(Countess of Landsfeld)

Autobiography, Part I

The right of defining one's position seems to be a very sacred privilege in America, and I must avail myself of it, in entering upon the novel business of this lecture. Several leading and influential journals have more than once called for a lecture on Lola Montez, and as it is reasonably supposed that I am about as well acquainted with that "eccentric" individual (as the newspapers call her) as any lady in this country, the task of such an undertaking has fallen upon me.

It is not a pleasant duty for me to perform. For, however fearless, or if you please, however impudent I may be in asserting and maintaining my opinions and my rights, yet I must confess to a great deal of diffidence when I come to speak personally of one so nearly related to me as Lola Montez is, As Burns says, "we were girls together." The smiles and tears of our childhood, the joys and sorrows of our girlhood, and the riper and somewhat stormy events of womanhood, have all been shared with her. Therefore, you will perceive, that to speak of her, is the very next thing to speaking of myself.

But though we are friends of such long standing, I have not come to be the eulogist or apologist of Lola Montez; I am not quite sure that she would accept such a service even from her best friend.

A woman, like a man of true courage, instinctively prefers to face the public deeds of her life, rather than, by cowardly shifts, to skulk and hide away from her own historical presence.

Perhaps the noblest courage, after all, is to dare to meet one's self—to sit down face to face with one's own life, and confront all those deeds which may have influenced the mind or manners of society, for good or evil.

As applied to women, of course this remark can be true only of those who have, to some extent, performed tasks usually imposed upon men. That is, she must have performed some deeds which have left their mark upon society, before she can come within the rule.

An inane piece of human wax-work, whose life has consisted merely of powdering, drinking tea, going to the opera, flirting, and sleeping, has had no life to be taken into the count in this connexion. She may have been useful, as a pretty piece of statuary, to fill a nook in a private house, or as a pleasant piece of furniture for a drawing-room; but there are no rules of her moral and social being which can justly be applied to one whose more positive nature forces her out into the mighty field of the world, where the crowd and crush of opposing interests come together in the perpetual battle of life.

What can a woman do out there who cannot take her part! A good tea-drinker—a merely good drawing room flirt, would make a very sorry shift of it, I fear! She must have a due degree of the force of resistance to be able to stand in those tidal shocks of the world. Alas! for a woman whose circumstances, or whose natural propensities and powers push her forward beyond the line of the ordinary routine of female life, unless she possesses a saving amount of that force of resistance. Many a woman who has had strength to get outside of that line, has not possessed the strength to stand there; and the fatal result has been that she has been swept down into the gulf of irredeemable sin. The great misfortune was that there was too much of her to be held within the prescribed and safe limits allotted to woman; but there was not enough to enable her to stand securely beyond the shelter of conventional rules.

Within this little bit of philosophy there is a key which unlocks the dark secret of the fall and everlasting ruin of many of the most beautiful and naturally-gifted women in the world.

There was as much truth as wit in the old writer who said that "the woman of extraordinary beauty, who has also sufficient intellect to render her of an independent mind, ought also to be able to assume the quills of the porcupine in self-defence."

At any rate, such is the social and moral fabric of the world, that woman must be content with an exceedingly narrow sphere of action, or she must take the worst consequences of daring to be an innovator and a heretic. She must be either the servant or the spoiled plaything of man; or she must take the responsibility of making herself a target to be shot at by the most corrupt and cowardly of her own sex, and by the ill-natured and depraved of the opposite gender.

Daniel O'Connell used to be proud of being, as he said, "the best abused man in the world." I do not know whether Lola Montez has been the best abused woman in the world or not, but she has been pretty well abused at any rate; and has the honor, I believe, of having caused more newspaper paragraphs and more biographies than any woman living. I have, myself, seen twenty-three or twenty-four pretended biographies of Lola Montez; not one of which, however, came any nearer to being a biography of her, than it did to being an authentic history of the man in the moon. Seven cities claimed old Homer, but the biographers have given Lola Montez to more than three times seven cities. And a laughable thing is, that not one of all these biographers has yet hit upon the real place of her birth. One makes her born in Spain, another in Geneva, another in Cuba, another in India, another in Turkey, and so on. And at last, a certain fugitive from the gallows will have it, that she was born of a washerwoman in Scotland. And so of her parentage—one author makes her the child of a Spanish gipsy; another, the daughter of Lord Byron; another, of a native prince of India, and so on, until they have given her more fathers than there are signs in the zodiac.

I declare, if I were Lola Montez, I should begin to doubt whether I ever had a father, or whether I was ever born at all, except in some such fashion as Minerva was said to be—born of the brain of Jupiter.

Lola Montez has had a more difficult time to get born than even that, for she has had to be born over and over again of the separate brain of every man who has attempted to write her history.

Happily, however, I possess the means of settling this confused question, and of relieving the doubts of this unfortunate lady in relation to her parentage and birthplace; while I may at the same time gratify the curiosity of those who have honored me with their presence here to-night,

Lola Montez was then actually born in the city of Limerick, in the year of our Lord, 1824. I hope she will forgive me for telling her age. Her father was a son of Sir Edward Gilbert; and his mother, Lady Gilbert, was considered, I believe, one of the handsomest women of her time. The mother of Lola was an Oliver, of Castle Oliver, and her family name was of the Spanish noble family of Montalvo, descended from Count de Montalvo, who once possessed im- mense estates in Spain, all of which were lost in the wars with the French and other nations. The Montalvos were originally of Moorish blood, who came into Spain at the time of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic. So that the fountain-head of the blood which courses in the veins of the erratic Lola Montez is Irish and Moorish-Spanish—a somewhat combustible compound it must be confessed.

Her father, the young Gilbert, was made an ensign in the English army when he was seventeen years old, and before he was twenty, he was advanced to the rank of Captain of the 44th Regiment. He was but little more than twenty at the time of his marriage, and her mother was about fifteen. Lola was born during the second year of this marriage—making her little début upon this sublunary stage in the midst of the very honeymoon of the young people, and when they had hardly time to give a proper reception to so extraordinary a personage.

She was baptized by the name of Marie Dolores Eliza Rosanna Gilbert. She was always called Dolores, the diminutive of which is Lola.

Soon after the birth of this Dolores, the 44th Regiment, of which her father was a captain, was ordered to India. I have heard her mother say that the passage to India lasted about four months—that they landed at Calcutta, where they remained about three years, when the Governor-General, Lord Hastings, ordered the 44th Regiment to Dinapore, some distance in the interior, upon the Ganges. Soon after the army arrived at this spot, the cholera broke out with terrible violence, and her father was among its first victims. There was a young and gallant officer by the name of Craigie, whom her father loved, and when dying and too far gone to speak, he took his child and wife's hand and put them in the hand of this young officer, with an imploring look, that he would be kind to them when death had done its work.

The mother of Lola Montez was thus left a widow before she was eighteen years old; and she was confided to the care and protection of Mrs. General Brown. You can have but a faint conception of the responsibility of the charge of a handsome, young European widow in India.

The hearts of a hundred officers, young and old, beat all at once with such violence for her, 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.

At this time the child Lola was little more than six years old, when she was sent to Europe to the care of Major Craigie's father at Montrose, in Scotland. 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 the 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 the child perceived that she was somewhat of a public character, and may have begun, even at this early age, to assume airs and customs of her own.

With this family, however, she remained but a short time, when her parents became somehow impressed with the idea that she was being petted and spoiled, and she was removed to the family of Sir Jasper Nichols, of London, commander-in-chief of the Bengal forces. His family remained in Paris for the sake of educating their daughters. After several years in Paris, Miss Fanny Nichols and the young Lola were sent to Bath for eighteen months to undergo the operation of what is properly called finishing their education. At the expiration of this finishing campaign, Lola's mother came from India for the purpose of taking her daughter back with her. She was then fourteen years old; and from the first moment of her mother's arrival, there was a great hubbub of new dresses, and all manner of extravagant queer-looking apparel, especially for the wardrobe of a young girl of fourteen years. The little Dolores made bold enough one day 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. But there was a Captain James of the army in India, who came out with her mother, who informed the young Lola that all this dressmaking business was for her own wedding clothes, that her mother had promised her in marriage to Sir Abraham Lumly, a rich and gouty old rascal of sixty years, and Judge of the Supreme Court in India. This put the first fire to the magazine. 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 assume of forcing a child to such alternatives. But the young Dolores sought the advice and assistance of her mother's friend, Captain James. He was twenty-seven years of age, and ought to have been capable of giving good and safe counsel. In tears and despair she appealed to him to save her from this detested marriage—a thing which he certainly did most effectually, by eloping with her the next day himself. The pair went to Ireland, to Captain James's family, where they had a great muss in trying to got married. No clergyman could be found who would marry so young a child without a mother's consent. The captain's sister put off for Bath, to try and get the mother's consent. At first she would not listen, but at last good sense so far prevailed as to mako 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. So in flying from that marriage with ghastly and gouty old age, the child lost her mother, and gained what proved to be only the outside shell of a husband, who had neither a brain which she could respect, nor a heart which it was possible for her to love. Runaway matches, like run-away horses, arc almost sure to end in a smash-up.

My advice to all young girls who contemplate taking such a step, is, that they had better hang or drown themselves just one hour before they start.

Captain James remained with his child-wife eight months in Ireland, when he joined his regiment in India. The first season of Lola's life in India was spent in the gay and fashionable city of Calcutta, after which time the regiment was ordered to Kurwal, in the interior.

The fashion of travelling in India I fancy can never be made agreeable to an American or a European certainly not to one of kind and humane feelings; for human beings are there used to perform the office of horses, carrying you on their shoulders in a palanquin. A palanquin is a kind of square box, handsomely painted outside, with soft cushions inside, and side-lamps like a carriage. To each palanquin there are usually eight bearers, four of whom are employed at a time. It is astonishing to see the amount of fatigue which these human horses will endure. But I have seen the poor creatures almost sink down with exhaustion, as they set down their burden after a long journey through the burning sun, that would almost kill a man to sit still in twenty minutes. But still, as human nature will somehow adapt itself to whatever circumstances may surround it, these hapless beings contrive to make a merry life among themselves. You will hear them sing their jolly songs under their heavy burdens. The chants of the palanquin bearers are sometimes very amusing, and will serve to give you an idea of the native genius of India. Though they keep all the time to the same sing-song tune, yet they generally invent the words as they go along. I will give you a sample, as well as it could be made out, of what I heard them sing, while carrying an English clergyman who could not have weighed less than two hundred and twenty-five pounds. I must premise that palkee is the Hindostanee word for palanquin, and each line of the following jargon was sung in a different voice:—

Oh, what a heavy bag! No; it is an elephant; He is an awful weight. Let's throw his palkee down— Let's set him in the mud— Let's leave him to his fate. No, for he'll be angry then; Ay, and he'll beat us then With a thick stick, Then let's make haste and get along, Jump along quick.

And off they started in a jog-trot, which must have shaken every bone in his reverence's body, keeping chorus all the time of "jump along quick, jump along quick," until they were obliged to stop for laughing.

They invariably suit these extempore chants to the weight and character of their burden. I remember to have been exceedingly amused one day at the merry chant of my human horses as they started off on the run, I must mention, that cabbada means "take care," and barbā means "young lady."

She's not heavy, Cabbada! Little barba, Cabbada! Carry her swiftly, Cabbada! Pretty barba, Cabbada!

And so they went on singing and extemporising for the whole hour and a half's journey. It is quite a common custom to give them four annas (or Engglish sixpence) apiece, at the end of every stage when fresh horses are put under the burden; but a gen- tleman of my acquaintance, who had been carried too slowly, as he thought, only gave them two annas apiece. The consequence was that during the next stage, the men not only went much faster, but they make him laugh with their characteristic song, the whole burden of which was, "He has only given them two annas, because they went slowly; Let us make haste and go along quickly, and then we shall get eight annas and have a good supper."

The native princes of India generally possessed great wealth, as I may illustrate by a description of the grand reception given by Runjeet Singh of Sind, to Lord Auckland and the British army on its way to Cabul. Runjeet Singh was one of the richest and most powerful of the native princes of India, and this grand reception took place at his chief city of Lahore, on the banks of the Indus.

This prince had tents erected to receive the whole British army. My father, who was Adjutant-General of the army in India, was there with my mother. The tents erected for the officers were lined with gold and silver trimmings, and with the richest cashmere shawls. The Indian prince gave an audience to the British officers in a palace, the walls of which were studded with agates, cornelians, turquoises, and every kind of precious stone; and the officers, servants, and even elephants of the prince were also covered with jewels. My mother, with several other wives of the British officers, was present at this magnificent audience. After the consultation, the prince, dressed in a perfectly white muslin, with no jewels except those in his turban, took his seat on a throne of gold, and Lord Auckland was placed on another golden throne representing the throne of England.

After this ceremony came in, according to the custom of the country, the rich presents for the English officers, which were distributed with strict reference to the rank of each officer. These presents consisted of trays full of the most precious stones and jewels. My mother described what a lapful of these precious things was presented to her—every one of which, however, she had to give up to the government—for I ought to tell you that every British officer in India is obliged to take an oath that he will faithfully give up to government all presents that may be given him by the native princes. Every month there is a public sale of all such gifts, which has been an immense wealth to the East India Company.

Well, after all these splendid gifts from the Indian prince, Lord Auckland ordered in the presents which the English had provided for the prince and his officers, which consisted of imitation gold and silver ornaments, swords, rusty old pistols, and all sorts of trumpery, which Runjeet Singh received without moving a muscle of his face.

But the most extraordinary gift of the great prince was yet to come. He gave a splendid dance in the evening to the British officers, at which the most beautiful dancing girls of his harem were presented. These beautiful girls were all Circassian and Georgian slaves of the prince. There were just as many of them present as there were British officers, and each girl had a fortune of jewels and precious stones on her person. At the conclusion of the dance, the prince presented each of her majesty's officers with one of these richly loaded girls as a present—giving the richest and most beautiful one to the highest officers, and so down the regular gradations of rank.

The peculiar looks on the faces of the English officers that followed this scene, I shall not attempt to describe. But I can easily imagine with what a sad countenance old Lord Auckland informed the prince that English law and English civilization did not quite allow her majesty's officers to receive such a peculiar kind of presents, and I am afraid that the young officers—no—the gentlemen who hear me can so much better appreciate their disappointment than I can, that it will be folly for me to attempt to describe it.

As a singular example of the romance often found in the history of the native rulers of India, I may refer to a famous queen of a province near Merut, who by her great tact and diplomacy managed to keep her possessions, and obtain many favors from the English government. She began life as a dancing girl, and one of the commonest of her profession at that. But she was very beautiful, it was said, when young. The old king of the province had a grand dance, and among five hundred girls she appeared, and so won the admiration of the monarch, that he had her engaged to sing and dance regularly at his court. Little by little she won his heart until he married her, and raised her to the queenly dignity. For some time all went on well, the bewitching young queen really being the king herself. At length there came into that little kingdom an adventurer, a European, by the name of Dyce Sombre, who entered the army of the Indian king. He was young and very handsome, and the charming queen took a fancy to him, which soon ripened into an intrigue, and she at once set about a plan to get the old king out of the way. With daring ingenuity she projected a revolution, and fired the old king up with most desperate determinations in resisting it, at the same time telling him she was determined not to survive his defeat, and she assured him that if the battle was lost, she would send him a handkerchief soaked in her blood; and she did dip the handkerchief in somebody's blood, and sent it to her despairing lord, who himself preferred death to defeat, and did what he supposed was following his queen to the other world. But she had prudently, though most wickedly, stayed behind, in the company of the handsome foreigner. She afterwards had a son, who was acknowledged by the English government as heir to her throne. She grew to be very jealous of her husband, and when she one day caught him looking at a beautiful young girl, she instantly sent for some workmen, and had a deep hole dug under her footstool, and into this she had the young girl plunged and buried alive. When I saw this remarkable woman, she was shrivelled up a little, dressed in plain white, without a single jewel or ornament upon her person. On her death, the British government abolished her throne and pensioned her son, which was the way it kept its promise to the queen.

I have dwelt upon this little episode of kingly love, because it illustrates the fact, that the native princes of India sometimes continue to imitate the more refined manners of civilized courts.

The native princes of India were generally slaves to their senses, and many of them were ruled by the will or caprice of their fair and fascinating ladies. The powerful Raja of Jypur became such a slave to an infatuated attachment to a beautiful Mahomedan dancing girl, that he lost nearly all his hereditary possessions; and what was spared, was from the sufferance of Ameer Khan.

There was another instance in Tulasi Bai, a woman of low extraction, whose beauty captured and enslaved the mind of Malhar Rao; and so well did she play her cards, that after the death of the prince she was made Regent to his successor, the young Holkar. Her regency gave the British government, and the British army, the greatest embarrassments. It was through her instrumentality that a general confederacy was made against the English. But the fortunes of war threw this female general into their hands, and so much were her skill and power dreaded, that she was carried immediately to the banks of a river, where her head was severed from her body, and her body thrown into the stream, as if determined to make it doubly sure that she was really out of the way. This beautiful and powerful woman was not thirty years of age at the time of her death.

The respectable women of the natives never appear in public—never go to parties—never look upon the face of a man, except a member of their family. They consider it an irreparable disgrace if their faces should be seen by a stranger.

If a stranger visits a family, he may converse with the lady on the other side of a thickly wadded curtain—but that is considered a mark of great favor to a visitor. I have known some of the more liberal allow their wives to shake hands with a particular friend, through a hole!

These native women of India are often very beautiful. And you may have a curiosity to know if they ever have any intrigues? You can judge for your selves what chance there can be. Such a thing, if found out, would be instant death. The natives of India are not much like that amiable American who told an affectionate neighbor, that if he ever caught him kissing his wife again, there would be a coolness grow up between them. But the women of India do sometimes elude the vigilance of their jealous lords. Still, as a general thing, India in this particular gives the lie to the old proverb that, "Where there is a will there is a way."

The jewels worn by these native women are of great beauty and cost; and those well to do in the world, will have a different dress for every day in the year. Docs not that beat Fifth Avenue? I may add that these women are horribly jealous, and very vindictive, as all orientals are. It would take a missionary his lifetime to make one of them understand the motives of a fashionable European or an Ameri- can lady, who will often take a great deal of pains to get her husband into an actual flirtation with some other woman. The women of India do not exactly understand the philosophical principle involved in the proposition that a husband cannot see two ways at once.

The European and American women are so much better educated than their sisters in India.

But we left Lola Montez on her journey to Karwal, where, after some little general pleasure-riding, she was taken to visit a Mrs. Lomer—a pretty woman, who was about thirty-three years of age, and was a great admirer of Capt. James. Her husband was a blind fool enough; and though Captain James's little wife, Lola, was not exactly a fool, yet it is quite likely she did not care enough about him to keep a look-out upon what was going on between himself and Mrs. Lomer. So she used to be peacefully sleeping every morning when the Captain and Mrs. Lomer were off to a sociable ride on horseback. In this way things went on for a long time, when one morning Captain James and Mrs. Lomer did not get back to breakfast—and so the little Mrs. James and Mr. Lomer breakfasted alone, wondering what had become of the morning riders.

But all doubts were soon cleared up by the fact coming fully to light, that they had really eloped to Neilghery Hills. Poor Lomer stormed, and raved, and tore himself to pieces, not having the courage to attack anybody else. And little Lola wondered, cried a little, and laughed a good deal, especially at Lomer's rage. Finally, all the officers' wives got together and held a consultation over her, as to what was to be done with her. At first she was confided to the care of a Mrs. Palmer. Then it was afterwards resolved that it was best to send her to her mother at Calcutta. This was a bitter necessity for her, for she dreaded her mother; she knew that she had never been forgiven the elopement, and now to be sent to her after the fatal fruits of that folly were so apparent, was indeed a bitter necessity.