This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Patrick M. Geoghegan. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Born: 1820, Ireland
Died: 17 January 1861
Country most active: International
Also known as: Maria Dolores Eliza Rosanna Gilbert, Gräfin von Landsfeld (Countess of Landsfeld)
Gilbert, Eliza Rosana (‘Lola Montez’) (1820–61), dancer and adventuress, was born in spring 1820 in Co. Limerick, daughter of Edward Gilbert, a British soldier serving in Co. Cork, and Eliza Oliver, illegitimate daughter of Charles Silver Oliver, MP; her parents married around the time of her birth. The young Eliza Gilbert, as she was then known, accompanied her parents to India, where her father died on arriving; in 1824 her mother married a Capt. Patrick Craige. An unmanageable child, Eliza was sent abroad to be educated, first at Montrose, Scotland, and later Paris and Bath. Her beauty and her temper developed in parallel, and in 1836 her mother decided to marry her to Sir James Rutherford Lumley, the 64-year-old adjutant-general of Bengal. Always determined to get her own way, Eliza eloped to Ireland with a soldier on leave, Capt. Thomas James, and married him in Co. Meath (23 July 1837). Accompanying her husband to India the following year, she did not settle into colonial life, and the marriage collapsed; she returned to England, having an affair with a fellow passenger, George Lennox, on the journey home. James sued for divorce, and Lennox accepted liability; a decree was granted that did not allow either party to remarry.
Deciding on a career on the stage, she took lessons in dance before making her debut at the Haymarket on 3 June 1843 as ‘Lola Montez’, the name she would make notorious throughout the world. Lord Ranelagh, a spurned suitor, led a protest against her, cutting short her London career, and she moved to the Continent, where she soon became notorious for her temper and proclivities. In Germany she assaulted a policeman with a horsewhip, and this episode soon entered the ‘Lola Montez’ mythology – in later years she always carried a horsewhip, frequently using it on anyone who crossed her. In Paris in 1844 she had numerous affairs, with, among others, Franz Liszt, Alexandre Dumas, and Charles Dujarier, an editor who was killed in a duel in 1845. After the sensational trial for Dujarier’s murder, where the self-styled Lola Montez asserted that she would have been happy to fight in her lover’s place, she pursued Liszt to Bonn where she demanded entrance to a male-only banquet, danced on a table, and caused consternation amongst the guests. She arrived in Bavaria in September 1846 and soon made a conquest of the elderly king, Ludwig I, signing herself proudly as the king’s mistress. The bewitched king, who called her ‘his Lolitta’, made her countess of Landsfeld in 1847. She was resented by Bavarian society, whom she had no qualms in offending, and riots broke out against her (January 1848); unimpressed, she nonchalantly toasted the mob with champagne in one hand and chocolates in the other. The growing weight of popular hostility against her, and mounting evidence of her philandering, soon became intolerable; she was expelled from the country on 17 March by Ludwig, who himself abdicated a few days later.
Returning to England, where she continued to spin lies about her past, she took (19 July 1849) a second husband, George Trafford Heald, a cornet in the 2nd Life Guards. She was arrested for bigamy (August), however, and went to the Continent, where the marriage soon ended. Returning to the stage, she set out for the USA in 1851, where she became something of a celebrity. Dancing, and performing in a play which gave a self-serving account of her time in Bavaria, she contracted a third marriage (Heald having drowned) on 2 July 1853 to Patrick Purdy Hull, owner of the San Francisco Whig, giving her name as Maria Dolores Eliza Rosana Landsfeld Heald. This marriage also ended quickly, like most of her affairs, and in 1855 she toured Australia, before returning to America in 1857. Her looks fading, she reinvented herself for a final time as a lecturer, speaking on many subjects including her life, beautiful women, and heroines of history. She returned briefly to Ireland in November 1858, speaking in Limerick and Cork, with a final lecture in Dublin (8 December) entitled ‘America and its people’. From there she toured Britain before returning to America in 1859. She suffered a massive stroke 30 June 1860 and died 17 January 1861 in New York. She was buried in the Greenwood cemetery. It is not known whether she had any children.