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.