Her infatuated ex-monarch sent her enough to live on for another few weeks, even as Lola added more men to her collection. But Ludwig had grown jealous, and she had to tantalize him with the promise that she would give herself to him when next they met. He asked if she would besar him [which literally means “to kiss,” but he intended it more crudely], admitting that for the time being he had to content himself with dreams of sucking her toes.
All through the summer the couple corresponded, their plans to rendezvous always changing, as Lola played a game of round-robin with her lovers—former, current, and some new flames—all the while demanding funds from Ludwig like a child asking for her allowance. After passing an unhappy sixty-second birthday on August 25, he enclosed some money with the following note:
The drawing in your letter that is meant to represent your mouth (each time I give it a kiss), I took at first to represent your cuño, and my jarajo began to get erect. As much pleasure as your mouth has given me, your cuño would have pleased me greatly. I give kisses to the one and to the other.
In her reply, Lola ignored his sex talk and instead complained that his family was conspiring to keep them apart. She fretted that he had not forwarded her diamonds to her, per a previous request, and she didn’t even have the grace to acknowledge his birthday.
On November 28, she set out for England, after sending Ludwig yet another request for money. By this time the story of her royal romance was being dramatized on the London stage. Written by some British hack, it was probably not half as sensational as the actual events.
In 1849, a con man named Papon whom Lola had met in Switzerland began to blackmail Ludwig, threatening to publish his memoirs that allegedly contained the deposed king’s correspondence with Lola. Ludwig tried to retrieve the letters and paid Papon ten thousand francs, but the swindler published the volumes anyway.
That July, Lola obtained a false French passport under the name of Mademoiselle Marie Marie, with the intention of traveling to Seville. Instead, within four days she met and married twenty-one-year-old George Trafford Heald, a handsome, slightly effete cornet in the 2nd Life Guards, after convincing Heald that she was not Mrs. James. The name she inscribed in the parish register was Maria de los Dolores de Landsfeld. She was still receiving her allowance from Ludwig.
When the long arm of the law caught up with her for bigamy, Lola insisted that she had been granted a divorce by Lord Brougham, the former lord chancellor (who may also have been a lover). She jumped bail and fled to the continent, writing to her “querido Luis” in despair over her marital mistake.
…How after knowing you, can I give my love to another, and this other man is without spirit, ignorant, a quasi-lunatic who is incapable of taking a step by himself…. My soul is yours forever and ever—I can love no other but you—believe my words they are written in affliction far from you—if I have one wish, it is to see you again mi querido Louis—once more I beg you to write to me—it is my consolation—I love you more in my unhappiness than when I was happy—Goodbye dear Louis, I am still the same Lolitta of heart and soul, loving you more than ever—Your Lolitta, yours unto death.
By Christmas of 1849, the marriage was over. Heald returned to England, while Lola went to Boulogne and reproached Ludwig for abandoning her while she was in ill health. For the next half year he paid her monthly allowance, but felt that Lola was blackmailing him over their love letters. She appeared to be threatening, just as Pabon had done, to publish their correspondence if Ludwig did not continue to subsidize her, as he as promised to do, “with the little pension you swore to give me all my life.”
On June 1, 1851, Ludwig sent her three thousand francs, the last Lola ever got from him. The aging former monarch had finally had enough of the fickle, hot-tempered gold digger. He subsequently learned that she had never been ailing, and the intermediary she had dispatched to negotiate for their love letters was her latest conquest.
Lola traveled through Western Europe, securing engagements because of her notoriety, rather than her talent. On December 5, 1851, having heard there was money to be made in America, she sailed for New York, where she made her debut on the twenty-ninth of the month. By 1853, in addition to the dances that had brought her renown, she was performing in a repertoire of plays: classics, new works, and those she claimed to have written or translated herself, some of which were autobiographical. Her notices as an actress were fairly passable, and she was even lauded for her interpretation of Lady Teazle in Sheridan’s comedy of manners The School for Scandal.
On July 2, 1853, although Heald and James still lived, Lola wed a thirty-three-year-old San Francisco newspaperman, Patrick Purdy Hull, because she claimed he was the best raconteur she’d ever known. They moved to the gold-mining town of Grass Valley, California. By mid-September, it was rumored that Lola had filed for divorce.
In 1855, she formed a theatrical troupe and set off on a tour of Australia. Predictably, there were a number of violent incidents, just as there had been during the 1840s, when she traveled through Europe. While she was in Australia, she learned that George Trafford Heald had died at the age of twenty-eight, after a long illness. During her return voyage in May 1856, her costar and lover, Frank Folland, either committed suicide or was pushed over the side of the ship.
Folland’s death marked a literal sea change in Lola’s life. She cleaned up her act, jettisoning “narcotics and stimulants,” as well as her lifelong habit of chain-smoking cigars and cigarettes. In 1858, her autobiography was published to great acclaim in the United States. By then she had reinvented herself one more time, as an articulate and entertaining lecturer on such subjects as “The Arts of Beauty,” “Fashion,” and “Heroines and strong-minded women of history.” She spoke to packed houses about American culture in Europe, and English and continental culture in America. Her faux Spanish accent was almost entirely gone. She became a critical and financial success until her plans to open a boardinghouse in London bankrupted her.
Later that year she turned another corner and found God, embracing the Episcopalian beliefs of New York clergyman Reverend Ralph Hoyt, whom she met after his church was destroyed by fire. A New York City resident during the final two years of her life, Lola was genuinely devout. A stroke on June 30, 1860, left her legs partially paralyzed; after she learned how to walk again, Lola volunteered at the Magdalen Hospital for repentant prostitutes.
While she was out walking on Christmas Day, Lola caught a cold that developed into pneumonia. She died on January 17, 1861, at the age of forty, and was buried two days later in the Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn under the name Eliza Gilbert. After shaving years off her age all her life, she would have been mortified had she known that her original headstone claimed she was forty-two. Her biographer Bruce Seymour, whose winnings on the game show Jeopardy! afforded him the opportunity to spend several years researching Lola’s life, funded a new headstone that was unveiled on April 25, 1999. It reads, ELIZA GILBERT, on one side and, LOLA MONTEZ, COUNTESS OF LANDSFELD, on the other.
Ludwig died in Nice at the age of eighty-one. He had been permitted to return to Munich following his abdication, although he admitted, “It needs a great deal of endurance to stay in this capital where my word was law for twenty-three years…to be a nonentity, and at the same time to keep cheerful.”
GEORGE VI
1895–1952
RULED ENGLAND: 1936–1952
Born Albert Frederick Arthur George (and known within the family as Bertie), the second son of King George V and younger brother of Edward VIII grew up overshadowed by his glamorous and outgoing sibling, and cowed by a gruff, hypercritical father and a cruel nanny, who were insensitive to the painfully shy little prince. They were so dictatorial that the medical issues Bertie suffered as a youth (his knock-knees and rickety legs, his intestinal problems, and a profound stammer) manifested themselves emotionally as well as physically. Being a younger son, he was expected to be a sailor prince like his father (who was himself a second son), but hi
s naval career was curtailed by his physical woes, including an operation for a duodenal ulcer.
He did, however, grow up to be a good-looking man. Bertie was short, sandy haired, and blue eyed, with chiseled features and a slight, although athletically trim, build.
When he was twenty-two years old, the royal family changed its name. Because of rampant anti-German sentiment during the First World War, his father jettisoned the house’s name of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha inherited from Prince Albert, the consort of Bertie’s grandmother Queen Victoria. In its stead the family created a new identity that sounded one hundred percent English, and on July 17, 1917, after a massive brainstorming session to rebrand the dynasty, George V’s Privy Council announced that henceforth the royal family would be known as the House of Windsor.
In the early 1920s, Bertie, then Duke of York, fell in love with a pretty young Scottish aristocrat, Elizabeth Bowes Lyon, the vivacious daughter of the 14th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne. They were wed in Westminster Abbey on April 26, 1923. Elizabeth was the first commoner (meaning anyone of nonroyal blood) to marry into the House of Windsor, but she was hardly “common,” boasting a noble lineage that descended from Irish and Scots monarchs.
The Duchess of York became Bertie’s ultimate helpmeet. In 1926, she suggested that her husband schedule an appointment with an Australian speech therapist, Lionel Logue, who might help the duke overcome his stammer. Logue and Bertie worked together for years at his Harley Street office in London; at first the duke attended sessions almost daily, where he learned a variety of techniques that would enable him to surmount his stuttering.
After Bertie ascended the throne in 1936, his ability to confidently speak in public became a matter of international importance, because the radio was a primary means of communication. Bertie’s speech therapy was arduous, and ultimately successful, although he was never entirely “cured” of his stammer.
His other physical issues resulted in problems in the boudoir. The Duchess of York conceived their daughters, Elizabeth (born in 1926) and Margaret Rose (born in 1930), by artificial insemination.
Nicknamed “Betty and Bert,” the close-knit Yorks, who called themselves “Us Four,” were viewed as the model modern royal family—the polar opposite of the Prince of Wales, with his wild house parties, his nightclubbing, and his married paramours. As the two brothers rarely socialized, especially after Edward VIII became king, Bertie was unaware of the possibility that his older sibling might abdicate the throne if he were unable to wed his girlfriend, the American Wallis Simpson, until just a few weeks before the event.
Back in 1934, when Edward was still Prince of Wales, he had fallen in love with Wallis Warfield Simpson, a divorced Baltimore native who was still married to her second husband, Ernest Simpson. The pair shamelessly paraded their romance, a rather tawdry and dysfunctional relationship, which I profiled fully in both Royal Affairs and Notorious Royal Marriages. After Edward became king upon the death of George V in January 1936, he made it quite clear that he intended to wed Wallis as soon as she divorced Simpson. The royal family was appalled, and for numerous reasons, the British government was not about to let this happen. As Wallis’s morality was questionable, she was hardly queen material (it had nothing to do with her being an American). She had two husbands still living, and Britain’s monarch is also the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, which, like the Catholic Church, did not recognize divorce. The king could not wed a divorcée as long as her ex-husbands remained alive. Had she been a widow, things might have been different. Additionally, the British had amassed copious dossiers on both Wallis and Edward and had learned of their sympathies toward fascism and the Third Reich.
Edward compromised by suggesting a morganatic marriage in which Wallis would not be styled as queen of England; nor would any children of theirs have rights of succession. But the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, ultimately made it clear to Edward that he would have to choose between Wallis and his crown, as neither England’s Parliament nor the British Empire’s Dominion governments supported the morganatic option. They refused to consent to his marriage with Wallis and would not accept her as queen of England in any way, shape, or form. Apart from the fact that no one could stand her personality, it was her politics that caused the most concern. She was roundly believed to be a friend of the Nazis and fascists, and her power over the king was so influential—in part because he was so madly in love with her—that the dynamic of their relationship bordered on sadomasochism.
Baldwin informed Edward that if he insisted on wedding Wallis and remaining king, his government would resign en masse, a disaster for the nation. The prime minister offered Edward two clear choices: the lady or the crown. Edward chose Wallis.
So, on a technicality (which in fact was a big deal), by refusing to countenance Edward’s marriage with Wallis if he were to insist on defying both religious and civil law, Parliament was able to rid England of a monarch with problematic political views that could have proved disastrous for the country at a time when Hitler was on the rise.
On December 10, 1936, Edward VIII renounced his throne, the only English sovereign to voluntarily abdicate. A reluctant monarch who stepped up to the plate to do his duty when his brother abrogated it, Bertie succeeded him. He reigned under the last of his four names, becoming George VI in order to give his subjects a sense of stability and continuity after the terrible flux of the Abdication Crisis.
George V had prepared both of his sons to become rulers by deputizing them to make appearances for him during his own reign. When Bertie ascended the throne he was able to ensure a smooth transition, as assiduous and diligent as Edward had been irresponsible.
During the Second World War, Bertie overcame his fear of public speaking, surmounting his stammer thanks to Lionel Logue’s tireless, if unorthodox, coaching; the king’s Sunday radio broadcasts became a source of comfort to his subjects. In the aftermath of the Blitz in 1940 the monarchs toured the areas ravaged by the bombing. Buckingham Palace itself was struck nine times by German bombs.
When George VI ascended the throne at the age of forty-one, the British Empire covered twenty-five percent of the globe. By the time World War II was over, the landscape had changed dramatically. On August 15, 1947, India declared her independence. On Easter Monday, 1949, thirty years after the famed Easter Uprising that began at the Dublin General Post Office, the Republic of Ireland was declared. That January, a new Indian Constitution no longer recognized the king of England as their sovereign, but agreed to acknowledge him as “Head of the Commonwealth.” Ceylon, Pakistan, and South Africa still recognized him as king, but no longer as “Defender of the Faith.” Only Canada, New Zealand, and Australia still acknowledged him as both their king and Defender of the Faith, yet all of these former “kingdoms” had become “realms.”
A heavy smoker throughout his life, George VI was operated on for arteriosclerosis in 1949 and for lung cancer two years later. His health remained fragile and he died on February 6, 1952, at the age of fifty-six. His eldest daughter, the twenty-five-year-old Princess Elizabeth, learned that she had become queen while on a state visit to Africa with her husband, Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh.
Elizabeth II celebrated her diamond jubilee—sixty years on the throne—in June 2012.
GEORGE VI AND
ELIZABETH BOWES LYON (1900–2002)
Baptized Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes Lyon on September 23, 1900, the ninth child of Lord and Lady Glamis (later the 14th Earl and Countess of Strathmore), the future queen of England enjoyed an idyllic Edwardian childhood in England and Scotland. She divided her time between the stately (and purportedly haunted) Glamis Castle and the charming St. Paul’s Walden Bury in Hertfordshire.
In the summer of 1905, Lady Elizabeth met her future husband—although neither of them knew it—at a house party hosted by the Duchess of Buccleuch, the mistress of the robes to the queen. The royal children were present, and as usual, the king’s eleven-year-old grandson, Edward, was
the life of the party. His next-youngest brother, nine-year-old Albert, known as Bertie, already self-consciously hampered by a stammer, was silent and withdrawn, standing off to one side, removed from the gaiety. For a long time, he found himself beside a tiny girl nearly dwarfed by the enormous blue bow in her hair. She plucked the crystallized cherries from her cake and solicitously transferred them to his plate.
The pair of them would not recall this first encounter, but when they finally fulfilled their destiny, the dynamic between them would always remain the same.
Five summers later, at a garden party at Glamis, the subject of young Elizabeth’s fate was literally at hand, when a palmist hired to entertain the guests made a startling prediction. Elizabeth’s French governess, Mademoiselle Lang, asked if she’d gotten her palm read. The little girl replied, “Yes, I did. But she was silly. She says I’m going to be a queen when I grow up.”
“That you can’t be, unless they change the laws of England for you,” said her French teacher.
Elizabeth tossed her straw hat on a chair. “Who wants to be a queen anyway?” She never did aspire to the role that was marked out for her. But when called to fulfill it, she rose to the occasion and inspired her subjects during their darkest hours.
The First World War, which broke out on Elizabeth’s fourteenth birthday, delayed her entry into society, yet made her grow up fast. She saw her older brothers volunteer to fight, and pitched in herself on the home front when Glamis Castle was converted for five years into a convalescent hospital for wounded soldiers. She knitted her fingers to the bone making shirts for their local battalion, the Black Watch. She shredded paper to make the lining of sleeping bags, served tea to the men, and played secretary by writing letters home on behalf of those unable to do so on their own.
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