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But first, There the last one. Enjoy a Coca Cola for a pause that refreshes. Hey this is Dana Schwartz, the host of Noble Blood. Just a little bit of Housekeeping. Tiny little announcements before we start, I have a new podcast called Hoax. It's a very casual podcast with my friend Lizzie Logan where every other week we do a deep dive into a famous historical or not so historical hoax that fascinates one or the other of us. It's so much fun to do and if you like Noble Blood and you just want to hear me talk in a more casual way, listen to Hoax. H oax exclamation point. We have a lot of fun making it. I also have a new book coming out in May 2026. I co wrote this book under a pseudonym. It's called the Arcane Arts. I co wrote it because we alternate points of view in the book. I write the female point of view. My co author, my friend Dan writes the male point of view. It's a dark academia sexy thriller. If that's the sort of thing you think you might like, look up the Arcane Arts by SD Coverly. Pre orders really, really help. So if the book seems like it's something that would interest you, please pre order the book. But as always, just thank you for listening to the show and letting me make Noble Blood. Let's get into it. Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manke. Listener discretion Adv Bavaria in the middle of the 19th century was a country in peril. The king, Ludwig I, had once been beloved, but now he was mired in a firestorm of controversy. His subjects were furious with him. Scandals piled up as rumors swirled that his judgment had been compromised, that he was being controlled by shadowy outside forces. High ranking officials were dropping like flies while citizens took to the streets in protest. By the middle of the 1840s, the demonstrations had reached a fever pitch. The Cabinet, the people, and eventually even the rest of the royal family turned against Ludwig. It reached the point where Ludwig knew he couldn't continue to rule, at least not without undermining the institution of the monarchy itself. And so, on March 20, 1848, he abdicated the throne, allowing his son, Maximilian to become the new King of Bavaria. What had caused King Ludwig's remarkable downfall? What had turned the people against him? Like any question in history, the answer is complicated and layered. But at the heart of it all, in this case, is an exotic dancer whom the King had made a countess. A woman named Lola Montes. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is noble blood. Lola Montez blazed a trail throughout the Western world, rubbing elbows and more with some of the greatest minds and most powerful men of the era. But her fiery spirit and insatiable lust for life turned out to be far too much for any one man, even a king, to handle. She was a master of reinvention, an opportunist whose motto was Courage and shuffle the cards. She wasn't actually, as she claimed until her death from Spain, nor was her real name, Lola Montes. But for simplicity's sake, we'll call her Lola throughout the episode. She was born in Ireland and given the name Eliza Rosanna Gilbert. Her birth year was most likely 1821, although with all things Lola Montez, we should take it with a grain of salt. Her dad, Edward, was a British officer and her mom the illegitimate daughter of a local pop politician. There were rumors that her mom was already pregnant when she got married. And that was in addition to the circling allegations that Lola's mother and even her grandmother were also illegitimate. Lola never stood a chance. She was just born into a scandalous life. In 1823, the family moved to India, where Edward's regiment was dispatched. Tragically, Edward died of cholera soon after their arrival. Lola's mother, Elizabeth, a widow at only 19 years old, remarried within the year to Lieutenant Patrick Craigie. Craigie was fond of his stepdaughter, but he was seriously concerned about her behavior. A childhood in a foreign land with a loving but less laid back Aya or nursemaid was fertile ground for young Lola's spirited nature to blossom into problem child territory. At age 10, Lola was sent away to live with Craigie's relatives, the idea being that sometime in England would groom the foreign wildness out of her. But it didn't work. Lola quickly earned a reputation as a troublemaker and was bounced from boarding school to boarding school, always leaving chaos in her wake. By the time Lola was 16, her mother was eager to marry her off. Elizabeth was an ambitious social climber and saw her daughter's marriage as the perfect way to elevate both the family's status and also make her daughter someone else's problem. Lo Elizabeth showed up at Lola's school at this point in Bath and announced her Lola would come back to India and marry Sir Abraham Lumley, a wealthy and powerful judge. Lola balked at the union for many reasons, not least of which was that Lumley was 60 years old. Lola wanted nothing to do with that old man. She sought the advice of a young army lieutenant named Thomas James, whom her mother had befriended on her journey to Beth. Lola poured out her heart to this visiting stranger. And for the first time, but certainly not the last, a man found himself captivated by her. Lt. James was taken with the vibrant young girl and decided on the spot that he would be the one to save her. That very night, he took Lola to his family home in Ireland, where they were married. Days later, Lola's mother was apoplectic. Her carefully devised social climbing had ended in complete betrayal. But the marriage was doomed from the start. Lola was too young and inexperienced to understand what she'd committed to and had mostly been focused on getting out of a bad situation. And here is where we cue Getaway Car by Taylor Swift. Thomas James did care for his young bride, but they were never really a good fit. Lola wrote of her time in Ireland. I wished for nothing more intensely than to be abducted once more, but this time not by a potential husband, but by anything or anyone who could rescue me from the deadly monotony of this eternally repetitive life. From these cold English faces. No smiles, no friendly glances, no kind words. What started as verbal arguments escalated into physical abuse. Things improved slightly when the couple returned to India in 1838 and could enjoy some semblance of a social life. But they parted ways five years later. Desperate to leave that chapter of her life behind, Lola sailed for London. A single woman now with her whole life before her. She was never one to be without a man for long. Whether that was a matter of convenience, or of genuine emotion and preference, we'll never know. Although she most likely landed somewhere in the middle. Regardless of the reasons why. Exactly. Upon her arrival in London, Lola immediately took up with a man she met on the ship. Between the money she had gotten from both her stepfather and her then ex husband. Lola arrived in London with around $10,000. But thanks to her extravagant spending, it didn't last long. Neither did that new relationship I alluded to. Now, alone and broke, Eliza needed a new plan. For a single young woman in the 1840s, employment opportunities were scarce. Lola didn't have the right disposition to be a governess. And given her scandalous social life, she probably wouldn't have kept a position for too long. Besides, the other option was much more appealing to her. The stage. Lola started her training, but things didn't go perfectly well. Her voice was too weak for the theater, and she wasn't naturally gifted as a dancer either. But she had one big thing going for her. She was beautiful, with a magnetic presence and a killer body. Spanish dances were fashionable at the time and required much less in the way of technique, at least to English audiences. After a few months of training and a trip to Spain to study the language and customs, Lola reinvented herself completely as someone glamorous and quote unquote exotic. She adopted the stage name Lola Montez, full name Donna Maria Dolores de Porres Emantes. She had learned just enough of the language and Spanish customs to seem authentic to the casual English observer. She started smoking thin black cigars and spun multiple invented gloriously dramatic backstories for herself. She was ready to take the world by storm. But even Lola herself couldn't have imagined how far she'd go. You might be asking yourself, why Spanish? At this time, Spanish culture was very popular in Europe. It represented passion, mystery, sensuality, all the things that other cultures, especially early Victorian England, were sorely lacking. Spanish dancers had a reputation for being fiery and uninhibited, which, coincidentally, could provide excellent cover for a lack of technical prowess. It was the perfect Persona for a woman looking to reinvent herself and stand out. In 1843, Lola had her stage debut. She went on a press tour where she posed as a genuine Spanish woman, telling stories in broken English. She charmed the press completely. Her reviews were nearly unanimous, although most critics did note that she was more style than substance. But they didn't seem to mind. But there was one problem. She was almost immediately recognized. People began to talk, and Lola Montez was outed as Mrs. James and identified as most definitely not being Actually, Spanish London was too close for Lola. If she wanted to make her new Persona stick, she needed to put more distance between her old life and her new one. It's assumed that around this time, Lola was putting her natural charms to work as a means of supporting herself. Whether that was outright sex work or just keeping company with wealthy men who showered her with gifts, we can't say. But Lola was never shy about, let's say, maximizing her assets. Around this time, Lola met a rich, elderly German princeling who soon found himself entranced by the exotic young woman. He gave her money to pay off her debts and and extended an offhand invitation to come visit his court if she were ever in his country. That was all the encouragement our girl needed, and she headed for the continent. Things didn't go well with the princeling. Lola's casual swearing and rejection of royal protocol rubbed everyone the wrong way. But Lola kept it moving, still trying to get a foothold as a performer. Lola's reception in Germany was basically the same as it had been in London. Some were entranced by her brash stage presence and gonzo performing style. But for most patrons, Lola was the inverse of that famous song from a chorus. She was looks 10 dance 3 again. Lola's temper also got her in trouble. She was almost thrown in prison for hitting an officer with a whip while trying to sneak into a state visit from Tsar Nicholas I of Russia. Lola, incidentally, loved a whip, and she needed little excuse to break it out. But with that, it was time for her to move on again. In Poland, Lola found new benefactors, including the composer Franz Liszt. More stage time brought more mixed reviews and more controversy. Then it was on to Paris, where Lola made her stage debut in an opera. But that didn't go particularly well either, and she soon found herself taken off lineups. People seemed to either love her or hate her, with no in between. It can't really be a coincidence that the ones who loved her and were usually predominantly wealthy, powerful men who were also happy to bankroll her lifestyle. Through a relationship with newspaper owner and drama critic Alexandre Dujarrier, Lola was able to boost her performing career. And she continued to perform to wildly varying reviews. As always, her beauty and stage presence made up for her lack of real skill. She cared deeply for Dujarier and hoped to marry him someday. But he was killed in a duel, and Lola found herself once more without a protector. She moved from place to place and man to man, but no one could keep up with her. Finally, in 1846, Lola traveled to Munich, where She bagged her biggest catch yet. The King of Bavaria. Ludwig I was 60 years old when he met Lola. I'm guessing the royal title made him much more palatable than the 60 year old her mother had tried to marry her off to back in India. Ludwig at this time was generally popular among his subjects. As a ruler, he had little political ability, content to leave the government in the hands of others who, while he focused on the arts and on beautiful women, for years his subjects as well as Queen Therese had tolerated Ludwig's dalliances, knowing any fling would be short lived and result in not much more than a new portrait for his gallery. There was no reason to think that this Spanish dancer would be any different. They had no idea just how different this one would be. Lola and Ludwig met in October 1846. There was a rumor that Ludwig asked her in public if her breasts were real and she responded by tearing off enough of her garments to prove that they were. Whether or not that story is apocryphal, it's undeniable that Ludwig fell under her spell. And Lola immediately began to exercise her control. She started getting stage time and audiences were once again divided between love her and hate her. What was obvious was Ludwig loved her. Within a month, she had a yearly allowance of 10,000 florins, five times as much as a university professor's salary and nearly twice that of a cabinet minister. A couple weeks after that, Ludwig had Lola written into his will. By December, he had bought her a house purchased in her name. This was both to keep the money trail clean and to help her establish residency. More than anything, Lola wanted Bavarian citizenship as well as elevation to nobility. And she wasn't shy about letting the King know. Within just days of meeting her, Ludwig had presented Lola to his ministers. Gentlemen, you have the honor to meet my new best friend, he declared. Please oblige me by treating her at all times with the same respect you have always shown me. But Lola immediately recognized the stern men as potential enemies and boldly warned King Ludwig that his Jesuit Pact government controlled him. She singled out Prime Minister Carl von Abel as being particularly untrustworthy. Ludwig was stunned. She had identified in mere weeks what he had been questioning for years. In his eyes, that gave Lola enormous credibility. For her part, Lola truly believed that she was freeing the king's mind from outdated conventions. She saw herself as the people's liberator, symbolizing freedom in a new age. Ludwig was deaf to suggestions that she was manipulating him. The Jesuits called her the apocalyptic whore. Lola's stubbornness and temper were still on full display, making her extremely unpopular among the people. Ludwig was spending astronomical amounts of money on her, and despite his attempts to rein her in, she continued to blow past her allotted allowance. She was arrogant and often abusive to anyone who caught her at the wrong moment. She was seen with lots of other men. She was often scandalously underdressed. Despite opponents installing a spy in Lola's household and reporting back her erratic behavior, Ludwig couldn't accept the truth. Despite extreme oppositional pressure, Ludwig granted Lola Bavarian citizenship. In February of 1847, the Minister of the Interior resigned in protest and many of his colleagues followed suit. Protests erupted all over, including one outside Lola's house, where it is rumored that that she, in characteristic fashion, flashed her breasts at the crowd. Ludwig was becoming a joke to his own people. He and Lola followed all the hallmarks of a toxic couple. Break up, get back together, cause chaos, repeat the cycle. Despite all the drama, on Ludwig's birthday, August 25, 1847, Ludwig made lola the Countess of Landsfeld and Baroness of Rosenthal. He wrote her a letter asking her to please behave in accordance with her new title, essentially begging her not to embarrass him. Please, please, please. You won't be shocked to know it didn't work. Lola's elevation to nobility only increased her appetite for power. Her arrogance, her hatred of the Jesuits, her blatant greed were all the talk of Europe. Her public behavior was increasingly shocking. Spitting at a bishop, thrashing a worker, smashing a shop window, or breaking her parasol over the head of a nobleman who opposed her. On more than one occasion, she threatened an angry crowd with her whip, pistol or dagger. One of her lovers was a university student, and she essentially turned his fraternity, the Alemannen, into her own private army. She partied with them and they worshipped her. When Lola set her bulldog on a much respected university professor of philosophy who had done her no harm, she unwittingly set in motion her own downfall. The students were tremendously supportive of the professor. Munich university students revolted, with clashes erupting between the Aleminenen and the rest of campus who hated her. Ludwig closed the university, which only escalated the situation. By March 1848, pressure was mounting. The specter of the French Revolution still hung over Europe decades later. And the very real threat of revolution was enough to knock some sense into Ludwig. He reopened the university and abdicated, leaving his son, Maximilian II to become the new king. Lola fled the country. In less than two years, Lola Montes had brought a country to its knees and and permanently changed the geopolitical landscape not bad for a random girl from Ireland. Lola Montes found herself stripped of the power she had enjoyed and abused as King Ludwig's number one mistress. Without her benefactor and protector, she was suddenly Bavaria's public enemy number one. Lola fled to Switzerland where she waited for Ludwig to come for her. He never did. But Lola didn't spend too much time tied up in grief. She dusted herself off and kept things moving. She moved to London in 1848 and you guessed it, met another guy. George Heald was a 21 year old officer with serious family money as well as an apparent affinity for passionate dancer types. The two were married quickly, but soon ran into problems. Lola's separation from Thomas James, the ex that she had left back in India, contained terms that prohibited either of them from remarrying while the other was still alive. That meant that Lola and George had to leave the country to escape the bigamy charges. The two lived in France and Spain for a while, but within two years the marriage fell apart. At this point, Lola decided to do what so many before her also try her luck in America, where she was surprisingly successful in rehabilitating her image. For a time at least, she threw in some acting with her dance performances and her shows sold out across the country. At New York's Broadway Theater, she pulled in over $4,000 in a single week, a box office record for that venue. Lola was smart enough to know why audiences came. They wanted to see the King's scandalous mistress, the woman famous for her whip and pistol, the notorious bedroom adventurer. Americans showed up expecting a shameless, talentless royal plaything. Instead, they found someone surprisingly refined and tasteful, although she couldn't help herself from throwing in some of her old dances. For good measure, she created a show called Lola Montes in Bavaria, where she played four versions of herself. It wasn't high art, probably more like a play based on the pages of US Weekly, but audiences loved it. That legendary temper still made frequent appearances, especially during her dance performances. And some audiences would deliberately provoke her just to watch the show within a show. During her American sojourn, Lola had her own California adventure, which lasted a few years and was full of the highs and lows that defined her life. Rough crowds heckled her, sometimes chasing her off stage. There was another marriage and an attempt at domesticity. But her wild past threatened the new guy and the union ultimately fell apart. In 1855, Lola sailed to Australia, reviving her career by performing for gold miners. As soon as she landed in Sydney, she started generating headlines. Her notorious Spider Dance in which she lifted her skirts high enough for viewers to see that she wasn't wearing underwear, caused an uproar. A local newspaper declared her show, quote, utterly subversive to all ideas of public morality. And ticket sales tanked. In another town, Lola took the bad press into her own hands and attacked a newspaper editor with a whip. The editor was actually armed with a whip of his own. Lola's reputation having preceded her and the altercation escalated into a full blown fight. The stormy ups and downs with the Australian public continued and after nearly a year down under, Lola headed back to the US during the voyage back to San Francisco, her manager went overboard and drowned. Given Lola's legendary temper, it's been considered if he had any ill timed unwanted feedback for his client and whether O Whip had had been involved in his untimely accidental demise. Back in America, Lola tried repeatedly to resurrect her theatrical career. But nothing really took hold by this point. Ever the reinventer, Lola pivoted to image rehabilitation. In 1857, she began touring the country giving lectures on what else? Morality and doing charity work helping vulnerable women. Whether her late stage religious awakening was sincere or just another performance is up for debate. But Lola brought the same fervor to this new chapter that she had to everything else she did. By 1860, advanced circumstances, syphilis was destroying her body. She died on January 17, 1861 at just 39 years old, which seems almost astonishing given how much life she had lived. Lola Montez, international scandal, is buried in Brooklyn's Greenwood Cemetery with a headstone that reads simply Mrs. Eliza Gilbert. It's ironic but ultimately fitting that the woman who tore across continents and came dangerously close to toppling an empire would be memorialized with her maiden name. It's probably for the best because when it came to Lola, the man on her arm would always be the least interesting thing about her. Ludwig outlived her by seven years. After Lola exited his life and he'd transferred governing responsibilities to his son, he returned to his true passions, poetry, art and beautiful young women. He won back the love of his former subjects and spent his final years surrounded by the beautiful city that he had been instrumental in creating. No doubt his thoughts would drift to his adventures with the sultry Spanish dancer. If not the one who got away, then the one who very nearly carried him away. Lola Montez is one of the most intriguing talked about women of the mid 19th century. An inveterate liar, Lola's biggest and longest sustained lie was her reinvention of herself. When she had returned From India in 1841, escaping a loveless marriage and an ambitious mother. That reinvention changed not only her name but also her destiny. Lola defied social norms and blazed her own trail. Chaotic as it was, society's reaction to her highlighted just how threatening a sexually liberated woman was, and still can be to the status quo. There have been many books written about her, each exploring different facets of her personality. But the best authority, or at least the most entertaining one, is Lola herself. Lola's autobiography was based on interviews with the writer Charles Chauncey Burr, and it probably contains, to be fair, more fiction than truth. But as Amanda Darling writes in her book Lola Montez, in a sense Lola's wild disregard for truth reveals more about her character than documented statistics would. Just as the psychiatrist of today finds the daydreams of his patient as significant as sleeping dreams, so Lola's reshaping of her past tells us far more than she realized about the forces that formed and motivated her. How much truth does a woman owe to a world that is set up against her? From Lola's what can a woman do then who cannot take her part? The great misfortune that there was too much of her to be held within the prescribed and safed limits allotted to women, but there was not enough to enable her to stand securely beyond the shelter of conventional rules. 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. I do want to say on a personal note, I do not think Lola Montez is in any way a hero. And of course she is wildly satisfactory self aggrandizing. What she is is entertaining and it's worth looking at the question of who she might be in today's world. A diagnosed sociopath, a politician, a reality TV star, an influencer, always on the verge of getting herself canceled. One thing is certain, we wouldn't be able to look away. As Lola herself said, even my many enemies must admit, I always had a flair for living. That is the scandalous story of Lola Montez. But keep listening after a sponsor break to hear one more scandal in Lola's life. Here's the thing about being a great gift giver. When you find something that's truly perfect for everyone on your list, you almost don't want to give it away. That's what happened with my Quinter. Everything is so soft and well made. I'm seriously tempted to keep it all for myself. I mean really, the answer is I just buy myself the sweaters. 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