QUEEN VICTORIA'S EMPIRE : A PBS VIDEO : THE BEBEES

PBS ORG EMPIRES/ VICTORIA

The Bebees were the Indian women who became mistresses to Englishmen during Victoria's reign and a time when the English were in India, changing the culture. 

Here at Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot we look at the reasons why women become Mistresses, and class and racial differences in certain times and places prevented women from becoming Wives. Throughout history women in love with men who cannot marry them due to differences in class, wealth, color, or other aspects of their place in life have decided to be Mistresses - the woman with the smaller house, the extramarital children - who remains in the shadows.  

Lola Montez was a wife of an army man sent to India during the Victorian era.  As I understand it, one of Princess Diana's direct line female ancestors was a woman of at least partial Indian heritage.  That means that William and Harry have a touch of India in their DNA.

The entire series is available through various YouTube postings.  
Missy

FLAMENCO

I WASN'T SURPRISED WHEN MY FRIEND CHARLOTTE SAID YES TO A MISTRESS OFFER.

Charlotte (not her real name) and I used to sit together on dateless Friday nights, kick back with some wine and cheese, and talk about men and dating.  If ever there was someone - beautiful, terrific personality, smart, let's call her a "real catch," who should have had at least a decent boyfriend, if not an amazing husband, it was Charlotte. Yet she had some of the worst dates ever.  She attracted men like honey to the bee - that wasn't the issue.  She could go anywhere - art gallery openings - the grocer - the flower peddler - the mall - and some man would go up to her, introduce himself, and ask her out.  Charlotte must have met over a hundred men just for coffee. I never thought she was "too picky."  She would go, and sometimes there would be two or three dates. It was up to her, if she wanted to have sex or not.  Sometimes she did, sometimes she didn't.  It was good that she didn't feel obligated. After several years of this, Charlotte was burned out on dating.  She just didn't want to go.  She just wasn't meeting anyone who was a match for her. 

We did what some people do. We made lists, as if knowing for sure what we wanted in another person would magically draw them to us and fairly well matched too. 

Charlotte's family had been the "too picky" ones.  As she got older without a partner in life, her parents wanted her to just be with someone - anyone?  Charlotte worked but they were still buying her the finer things in life.  Was she materialistic?  More so than me but there were (and are) many more materialistic women. Was it too much to expect to live in a house when you were raised in one? 

So we'd sit and try to create humor out of a situation that was overall very wearing and difficult for her.

Charlotte started to work in a real estate office and that's when she met a man who eventually made her The Mistress Offer. They went out for coffee quite a bit before he did. The whole time she kept dating other men.  I want to say that rarely were these men she went out with "losers."  They just were not for her.  Her man, let's call him Jeff, just one day said this:

"Charlotte I'm not getting any younger and neither are you. We don't have to get married. You don't have to work, at least not as much as you do.  I need a companion and so do you.  You'll admit that to me, won't you?

Charlotte agreed. 

Jeff had been showing he cared by sending some of his friends to her when they wanted to buy houses.  He owned a nice house.  She didn't.  Bit by bit, Charlotte earned a substantial down payment on a house. Jeff provided the mortgage payments. She knew that if anything happened to Jeff, if he could not continue to do so, she could sell the house and that she had a year to do so.

Charlotte stopped dating. She didn't miss dating.  She focused instead on Jeff, learning about him and she did find herself slowly falling for him.  She could make lists of the things she liked about Jeff instead of lists of what she wanted in a man. 

Charlotte was much happier not dating and focusing on her work, as well as designing and decorating her house.  Today she is not rich but financially secure.  Jeff has retired and spends a lot of time with her, but he still does not live with her.  She likes it that way.

Charlotte says, "I wasted so much time looking for a love that wasn't going to happen for me. Now I have my focus!"

C 2018  Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot  All Rights Reserved Including International and Internet Rights

LOLA MONTEZ COTTAGE in GRASS VALLEY CALIFORNIA

SIERRA NEVADA TOURISM - LOLA MONTEZ COTTAGE GRASS VALLEY CALIFORNIA

Sadly, National Geographic allowed a substantial error to occur in this article, because it states that she MARRIED King Ludwig.  She did not. But she did have three marriages.  Never the less, this is one of several links to her home, which is California Historical Landmark No 292.

WILD WEST :

SORRY! The documentary I originally posted has expired

It was called Wild West Vices. It didn't mention Lola Montez or a single mistress, but I thought my readers would find it interesting.  It covered sex workers, sex trafficking, sex slaves,  peep shows, casual prostitution, opium dens, cocaine addictions. Cocaine was even put in a popular wine called CoCoWine.

I'm replacing it with the one below, May 2021 which is about Colorado....

LOLA MONTEZ GOES TO CALIFORNIA

In 1853, Lola Montez took a Pacific Mail Steamship from Panama to San Francisco. The Gold Rush that began a few years earlier had transformed the frontier and it was mostly rough hewn speculators who lived in the burgeoning city. Her arrival came as a complete surprise, unlike her arrival to New York City, but as theatre and entertainment were very new to the city and extremely welcome, she got booked. Though she was not esteemed as an actress, everyone wanted to see the Spider Dance.  The Tarantula dance had begun in Southern Italy, but her take on it, stomping on imaginary spiders until she became a spider herself, was considered erotic. Young men packed her performances.  San Francisco was forgiving of any moral issues in her past. Because she did charity events, she was thought to have a good heart. However, for the first time Lola Montez suffered being parodied and satirized and lampooned.  Another dancer performed as Mula Lolo of Bohemia.  A comedic biographical song was sung about her.

She went to Sacramento, then Marysville, and then Grass Valley, which was, despite its name, then the largest city in Nevada County, California, and a site known for quartz mining, the quartz having flecks of gold.  No longer a shanty town, it was bustling and prosperous and schools, churches, and gambling houses had been built.  "Spanish" women lived there ; likely prostitutes.

As her dancing became yesterday's news, according to author James F. Farley, Lola gave a private dance to a small circle of fans that might have been most revealing.

But then she married Patrick Purdy Hull, in 1853 at a Catholic Mission.  This was her second Catholic marriage, despite all those protests against Catholicism in Europe.  She had now married on three continents.  After a month she sought a divorce.  She suggested that Hull suffered from an "affliction"  but then she knew her first husband was alive after all. Did he give her syphilis or did she give him it?  Though she had many lovers, she never had children, yet, like Marilyn Monroe did, she was especially kind and generous to children.  (Hull died in 1858 after a stoke he never recovered from.)

By then Lola Montez was 35ish.  In Grass Valley she purchased a cottage with a garden and perhaps found contentment for the first time in her life.  She seemed to retire, to calm, as she humbly did the gardening herself.  She went hunting and riding, read and wrote her memoir, but it's speculated that what was really happening was that her health was in decline. She authored three books that were published in 1858 which were an autobiography, 125 love stories of classic couples, and a witty  beauty book which included advice to gentleman on how to deal with the ladies at a time when she was bitter about men.

In 1855 she closed up the cottage and went back to San Francisco to plan a comeback - a world tour.  She needed to earn.  It was a time of financial crashes and bank closures.  She got depressed.  She looked worn out.  She got into Spiritualism - contacting spirits to ask them questions.  Her world tour included small venues near the gold fields but she made it to Australia and back to New York.  Perhaps realizing she would die, she made a will favoring the children of her manager.

In her forties, Lola Montez got back into Protestantism while also a spiritualist.  As she got sicker she got more pious.  She visited the Magdalen Society asylum for former prostitutes and seems to have repented her life of sin.  But she said it was her mother who ruined her first.  She died on January 17, 1861 with a Minister at bedside reading the Bible.  Her tombstone says "Mrs. Eliza Gilbert."  Word of her death was spread by Pony Express.

Rumors of Romance always followed Lola.  As did rumors of children she might have had, perpetrated by people who claimed her as a mother - and King Ludwig I as a father.  (Three said so!)  After they divorced, Lola and Patrick Hull were also supposed to have had a little girl born about 1856.  And the tabloid press in England, as suggested by a man who had been her valet and servant,claimed she'd had a child with George Heald.  No evidence exists that any of this was true.

Book Review by Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot C 2019

LOLA MONTEZ - DANCER - 19th CENTURY RADICAL

According to this video, Lola Montez was a feminist and politically astute.  She was self employed - true.  SHE WAS THE FIRST WOMAN TO BE PHOTOGRAPHED SMOKING A CIGARETTE!

VICTORIAN ENGLISH VALENTINE

Valentine from the Museum of London

KING LUDWIG SCANDAL

This video in German displays some of the artistic and architectural efforts of King Ludwig I of Bavaria to make Munich a refined place full of fine art. The father of 9 had a tolerant Queen who knew he had affairs, but then along came Lola Montez.

*****

According to the book by James F. Varley,   King Ludwig I of Bavaria was Lola's greatest conquest.    He had been a bit deaf since his youth and was a bit of a wreck at 60 to her 29 years.  His wife, the Queen, Therese of Hildburghausen, knew he had affairs with singers and actresses and already had a life long "friend" named Marchesa Maria Florenzi.  Lola Montez, calling herself Senora Maria Dolores de Porris y Montez, proved to be a real threat.  She had shown up wearing black silk and lace and a few diamonds and had danced a hachucha and a fandango in October of 1846.

She called him Louis.  He called her Lolita.

She was offered 50,000 franks to leave the country.  She refused.  So the King figured she loved him.

Then Pope Pius IX and the Catholic Church told Ludwig to give her up.
He wasn't having it.

Though the King gave into the Pope and his advisors and the people, in the end he abdicated to Crown Prince Maximilian II in the spring of 1848.  And so, long before Wallis Simpson, Lola Montez, a King gave up his thrown for a mistress.  In this case one he would never see again.

LOLA MONTEZ - A RAVEN HAIRED BLUE EYED BEAUTY

VICTORIAN LACE VALENTINE

SPIDER DANCE of LOLA MONTEZ

Scandalous? The videos I had originally placed here regarding Lola Montez's Spider Dance have expired and so I chose this one as a replacement June 2021 I love being able to further the interests of YouTube posters, however, videos do expire or are taken down, requiring contemplation on what else to post. Presented by Sovereign Hill Outdoor Museum. This film forms part of Goldfields Stories: Lola Montez, Star Attraction on the Culture Victoria.

 

BAVARIAN CUCKOO CLOCK

LOLA MONTEZ : VOLATILE TEMPTRESS and MISTRESS OF KING LUDWIG I of BAVARIA WHO CHANGED HISTORY

youthful image from Wikipedia - Public Domain -
 artist Joseph Heigel painted before 1840

Eliza Rosanna Gilbert -  Lola Montez

born possibly 1818 -1821- death 1861

Also called  Senora Maria Dolores de Porris y Montez 
and a few other names.

A femme fatale of the Victorian age who gained world wide infamy,  the woman most likely born illegitimate to a fifteen year old mother in 1818 as Eliza Rosanna Watson - or Gilbert - in Ireland, was a victim of fake news and gossip like certain celebrities today, even as she caused much real ruckus herself. It seems her nature to have been a spitfire and willing to use notoriety to work her way up to the attentions of a King.  Affairs with Franz Liszt the composer, Andre Dumas Sr., who had left a lot of women with fatherless children, and many others, are probably facts but of short duration. Perhaps "mercurial" or "whimsical" would best describe a woman with a hot temper who would eventually die - most likely - of complications of syphilis.  "Word had it she had taken so many lovers that a centipede couldn't count them on its legs." (page 14)

She was, like many of the women elected Mistress of the Month here at Mistress Manifesto Blogspot, using what she had - beauty - at a time when someone coming from her origins had little opportunity to be more than a wife. Her clear blue eyes were said to shift shades of color and her white skin and black hair were quite the contrast. Considered a great beauty, in some paintings she is, in some images she isn't. Certainly her beauty and youth must have been what captivated her first husband, Lt. Thomas James, whom she married in July 1837 as a sixteen year old (?)who went to live with him in Dublin, then to India. Theirs was a Catholic union that may have never been quite dissolved and could have been a marriage arranged for her by others.

Of this marriage she would come to be quoted thus: "Runaway matches, like runaway horses, are almost sure to end in a smash up."

The author of the book below, James F. Varley, doesn't say how beautiful or desperate her mother may have been, but by 1840 Lola was shipped home to England and said to be locked up in a room.  She had a full on affair with Lt. Charles Lennox of several months duration on the way home.  In 1841, off ship, they went off to London boardinghouse to continue.  But the affair ended.

 Primary reference for posts 
on Lola Montez is this book by James F. Varley.

Later in this month I'll get to her California Adventures, for Lola is considered to be part of the history of California and the Wild Wild West in San Francisco and Grass Valley, once a prosperous boom town, but for this first post, I'll focus on what happened in Europe before she decided to travel to the new country. 

Wanting and needing to become financially independent, and inspired by a famous dancer at the time who did "Latin" dances, Lola decided to give dance a try, studying in London with a Spaniard and then going off to Spain, where she called herself Dona Lola Montez, and claimed Maria de Los Dolores was her real name.  She would change names many times in her life in attempts to reinvent herself. She put on a Spanish accent.  She claimed to be a widow.  But by 1848 she was back in England with a story of being widowed in Spain and selling mantillas. Possibly then she was kept by the Earl of Malmesbury. Too bad for her, an audience member outed her as just plain Betty James, the runaway wife of an army man.

She went to Berlin. There she attended a review held by King Frederick William to honor Nicholas I of Russia.  Did her horse bolt right into the parade because of gun fire or did she ride him there to gain attention?  Well, instead of being arrested, she was invited to visit Saint Petersburg. 

Then there was Warsaw, where she met Liszt.  (He already had a mistress for nine years, Comtesse d'Agoult, but Lola had a passionate week with him.)

Then off to Paris, where she was accused of doing a strip tease of sorts by throwing her garters and other clothing items to men. Her affair with Alexandre Dumas Sr, took place there.

She was still considered an amorist rather than a cold hearted man eater at this point. In Paris she even got herself engaged.  But her fiancee soon died in a duel that wasn't even about her.  She mourned.  She testified.  She brawled with another girl in a theater. She moved on.

In 1846, Lola traveled to the Grand Duchy of Baden and met Henry LXXII of Reuss.  They were lovers but she got thrown out for the offense of having walked across his flower bed! Never mind. Soon King Ludwig I of Bavaria, the married father of nine children, then 60 years old to her 29 years, would become her greatest conquest.  It was a conquest that changed history.

Lola was outspoken and let her opinions be known. She was aware of her power over the King. King Ludwig I's goal in life was to make Munich the center of architecture and art and spent lavishly to build and decorate.  But was he really "mad"?  Lola's presence and the King's unwillingness to give her up challenged the social order and his regime. So controversial was she that protests erupted. She was anti Jesuit/Catholic and sided with the Protestants. It wasn't just his family who wanted her out. Other aristocrats wanted the infamous affair to end. 

By 1848 there were student protests and Ludwig closed down the university for a year.  She was involved with a young Protestant noble.  Soon she was denying rumors of orgies while working on the King to give her a title.  |

"He made the Irish poseur Countess of Landsfeld, Baroness of Rosenthal, and a cannoness of the Order of Saint Therese, of which Ludwig's humiliated Queen was the head." page 40  He also demanded she be respected for her new position and that she receive a lifetime income and a new palace be built for her.
The protests against her became violent. Rocks were thrown at the King.  Lola left town thinking King Ludwig would catch up to her snf when he didn't she tried to come back.  Then she went to Switzerland and awaited him.  He didn't show. 

Lola left Munich because he sent her to Frankfurt where 500,000 florints awaited her at the Rothschilds bank.

Ludwig was forced to cancel her citizenship and all those titles.  

To Londen Lola Montez went, there calling herself Marie, Countess de Landsfeld.  She misjudged that the English didn't know what had happened with Ludwig or that they would accept her. She married a new heir - 21 year old George Stafford Heald, who was a decade younger than she.  Bigamy charges followed.  Divorce was highly unusual.  Had her first husband died in India?  As things got complicated the newly married couple left the country and then fled to France. They lived there quarreling for a couple years - domestic violence. He fled to England alone.  She changed her name to La Comptess de Landsfeld Heald.

Though she got money from Heald and had some of what Ludwig gave her, she spent too much.  So in 1851, she decided to write her memoirs, and they were published in Le Pays, serially.  Like other mistress memoirs, the stories may have been an attempt at extortion.

Affairs and rumors of affairs continued.  Finally she took a steamship to America.  Was she revitalized or broken?  When she arrived in New York in December 1851 crowds were there to greet her.  A book had already been written about her.  Broadway embraced her but the reviews of her dancing skills were not good.  Still, she was learning to market herself and manipulate the press... better than she had before.

More to come!

Missy

C 2019 Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot  All rights reserved.