XXVI Lola in Search of a Home
“Her last hope for Bavaria being broken,” Lola (to use her own words) “turned her attention towards Switzerland, as the nearest shelter from the storm that was beating above her head. She had influenced the King of Bavaria to withhold his consent from a proposition by Austria, which had for its object the destruction of that little republic of Switzerland. If republics are ungrateful, Switzerland certainly was not so to Lola Montez; for it received her with open arms, made her its guest, and generously offered to bestow an establishment upon her for life.”
At Bern, the quaint, beautiful old city of fountains and arcades, the deposed dictatrix of Bavaria found a pleasant asylum. She was greeted with especial cordiality by the English Chargé d’Affaires, Mr. Robert Peel (son of the more celebrated statesman of the same name), whose fine presence, gaiety of manner, and brilliant conversational powers rendered him a universal favourite. Peel was a warm supporter of the anti-clerical policy of the Government to which he was accredited, and on political grounds alone, must have felt the strongest sympathy for the Countess of Landsfeld. Peisner, Hertheim, and Laibinger seem to have at last parted company with Lola at Bern, for a letter in her handwriting is preserved, dated from that city, 2nd March 1848, alluding to their probable departure, and directing that a packet be forwarded to Peisner.
From the terraces of Bern, Lola looked forth over Europe and beheld the utter discomfiture of her enemies. If she craved revenge, here was enough and a surfeit. Metternich, the mighty minister, whose gold had contributed to her undoing, was dismissed and driven into exile after forty years of unquestioned sway. Everywhere Liberal principles were in the ascendant. Louis of Bavaria, who had not dared to save her, had now shown himself unable to defend his own throne. Lola must have been more than human if she experienced no inward exultation at the downfall of those who had basely abandoned her. The reign of her clerical foes and conquerors had indeed been short-lived. Too late did they realise that they had been merely the instruments of their natural antagonists, the extreme revolutionary party.
But if the situation of Europe in the spring of 1848 afforded satisfaction to Lola’s vindictive instincts, it offered little incentive to her ambition. The men who were shaping the nation’s destinies were cast in the stern, republican mould, and disdained to use the charms and wiles of a woman in the furtherance of their ends. Issues were being fought out on the battlefield, not in the boudoir. Nor did any state, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, present even such slight evidences of stability as a high-flying adventuress might found her plans upon. To re-enter the political arena at such a moment was to plunge headlong into a whirlpool. The old order had changed. The world, hardly tolerant of kings, would no longer brook the domination of their favourites, wise or unwise. The princes pulled long faces, and swore that the Constitution and the Catechism should be henceforward their only rule of life. They vowed to live like respectable citizens, indulging their amiable weaknesses only in privacy. Pericles must no longer converse on affairs of state with Aspasia in the market place. Beauty must exert what power it could in the boudoir and on the back stairs. For half a century woman as a political factor almost ceased to be. Only in our own day has her voice again been heard, demanding in stern, menacing tones her right to a larger, nobler part in the councils of the nations than the Pompadours and Maintenons ever dreamed of.
Weary, it may be conceived, of affairs of state, of strife and intrigue, conscious that she had played in her greatest rôle, the Countess of Landsfeld quitted Switzerland, once more to try her fortunes in England. She had stepped down from the throne for ever. She embarked for London at Rotterdam on 8th April 1848. By the irony of fate, it was ordered that the bitterest, and once the most powerful, of her foes, the fallen minister, Metternich, should be waiting at the same port seeking the same destination. The news of the Chartist demonstration alone prevented him sailing by the same vessel. “I thank God,” he piously remarks, “for having preserved me from contact with her.” Assuredly, the meeting would have been a painful and ignominious one for the fallen minister, at any rate.
Lola’s arrival in the troubled state of England passed almost unnoticed. She determined to try her fortunes once more upon the stage, and found, of course, as a celebrity, that she was persona grata to the managers and agents. The directors of Covent Garden conceived the ingenious idea of presenting her as herself in a dramatic representation of the recent events at Munich. The play was written and entitled, “Lola Montez, ou la Comtesse d’une Heure,” but the Lord Chamberlain declined to license a performance in which living royal personages were introduced.19 The scheme fell through, and Lola, having a private income to fall back upon, retired into lodgings at 27 Halfmoon Street, Mayfair. There “she invited a few men, including myself,” writes the Hon. F. Leveson Gower, “to visit her in the evening. She had lost much of her good looks, but her animated conversation was entertaining.”20 The journalist, George Augustus Sala, then a very young man, describes Lola on the contrary, as a very handsome lady, “originally the wife of a solicitor,” whom he met at a little cigar-shop, under the pillars, in Norreys Street, Regent Street. She proposed that he should write her life, “starting with the assumption that she was a daughter of the famous matador, Montes.”21 Lola’s imaginative powers, especially when directed to inventing romantic origins for herself, rivalled those of the heroine of “The Dynamiter.” Lord Brougham, that learned but relatively susceptible Chancellor, she also claimed acquaintance with; he lived not far from her, in Grafton Street. It is probable that a woman of Lola’s beauty, wit, and remarkable attainments would have numbered the most brilliant and distinguished men in London among her associates, whatever attitude may have been assumed towards her by the little clique of prigs and prudes that arrogated to itself the title of Society.