James was not slow to avail himself of the pretext she afforded him. He instituted through his proctors[Pg 36] a suit against her for divorce in the Consistory Court of London, to which jurisdiction in all matrimonial causes at that time belonged. Lola, as he probably expected she would do, ignored the proceedings from first to last. The case was heard before Dr. Lushington on 15th December
1842. Mrs. James was accused of misconduct with Mr. Lennox on board the ship Larkins, and of subsequently cohabiting with him at the Imperial Hotel, Covent Garden, and in lodgings in St. James's. The court was satisfied with the proofs adduced, and pronounced a divorce a mensa et toro. In modern legal language this was a judicial separation. These two people, though they were to live apart, were sentenced never to marry again during the lifetime of each other. It is by such dispositions that the law of England proposes to promote morality and the interests of society.
Both lover and husband disappear from the scene. James rose to the rank of captain, retired from the Indian army in 1856, and died in 1871. He never crossed Lola's path again, and she ever afterwards referred to him with contempt and bitterness. If it was in any vindictive spirit that he divorced her, he would have done well to remember how in former years he had taken advantage of her youth and inexperience. It was a squalid ending to the romantic runaway match. It would be interesting to know with what emotions Captain James heard of his ex-wife's adventures in high places in the years that followed. It must have seemed odd that monarchs
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should risk their crowns for the charms that he so lightly prized. Perhaps his wonder was not untinged with regret. More likely it might have been written of him as of Lola:--
[Pg 37] "Who have loved and ceased to love, forget
That ever they lived in their lives, they say-- Only remember the fever and fret,
And the pain of love that was all his pay."
Mrs. Craigie put on mourning as though her child was dead, and sent out to her friends the customary notifications. The good old
Deputy-Adjutant-General alone thought kindly of Lola. [Pg 38]
[Pg 39]
VI
LONDON IN THE 'FORTIES
To a woman in Lola's situation, London in the early 'forties offered every inducement to go to the devil. Between a roaring maelstrom of the coarsest libertinism, on the one hand, and an impregnable barrier of heartless puritanism on the other, her destruction was well-nigh inevitable. The hotchpotch of unorganised humanity that we call Society seldom presented an uglier appearance than it did in the first decade of Victoria's reign. Sir Mulberry Hawk and Pecksniff are types of the two contending forces. Blackguardism was matched against snivelling cant. Luckily, the victory fell to neither. Those were the days of Crockfords, of Vauxhall, of
the spunging-house, of public executions turned into popular festivals; when gentlemen of fashion painted policemen pea-green, and beat them till they were senseless; when peers got drunk and the people starved. Opposed to this debauchery was a religion of convention and propriety, narrow, stupid, and un-Christlike--the cult of the correct and the respectable, the fetishes to which Lady Flora Hastings and many another woman were coldly sacrificed.
In spite of Sir Mulberry and Mr. Pecksniff, however, Lola, ex-Mrs. James, had no intention of going under.[Pg 40] Her exclusion from society, after her wearisome experiences in India, she probably regarded as no great hardship. Her youth, her sprightliness, and her beauty made her many friends. Some of these as quickly became enemies, when they discovered that a divorced woman is not necessarily for sale. More than one roue vowed vengeance against the girl who, with bursts of laughter and dangerous gusts of anger, rejected the offer of his protection. It was, perhaps, in this way she offended the elegant Lord Ranelagh, who was then swaggering about in the Spanish cloak he had worn in the Carlist Wars. Lola was strong enough to swim in the maelstrom. Independence and adversity brought out the latent force in the character of the "good little thing" of Simla. Instead of looking out for a refuge, she sought a career.
She turned, of course, towards the stage, the one profession in Early Victorian times that offered any promise to an ambitious woman. She took more pains to acquire a knowledge of her art than are deemed necessary by most beautiful aspirants nowadays. She studied under Miss Fanny Kelly, a gifted actress, who had distinguished herself by her efforts to improve the social status of her profession, and who had opened a dramatic school for women adjacent to what is now the Royalty Theatre. Lola describes Miss Kelly as a lady as worthy in the acts of her private life as she was gifted in genius. This opinion was shared by all the contemporaries of the venerable actress. In after years Mr. Gladstone thought fit to recognise her services to the theatre by a royal grant of one hundred
and fifty pounds, but the money arrived in time only to be expended on a memorial over her grave in the dismal[Pg 41] cemetery at Brompton. Since Lola was a friend of Miss Kelly, she must have been very far from being the depraved character she is represented by some.
With all the goodwill in the world, the experienced mistress could not make an actress of her beautiful pupil, who accordingly determined to approach the stage through a back-door. If talent of the intellectual order was denied her, she could fall back on
her physical advantages. She determined to become a dancer. She was instructed for four months by a Spanish professor, and then (so she assures us) underwent a further training at Madrid. It was now that she assumed the name of Lola Montez--so soon to be known throughout Europe. She passed herself off as a Spaniard, partly, no doubt, for professional reasons, and partly to conceal her identity with the wife of Captain James. Society can hardly expect its quarry to step out into the open to be shot at. Her beauty
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and her dancing so impressed Benjamin Lumley, the experienced director of Her Majesty's Theatre, that it was on his stage that she actually made her first appearance.
The morning papers of Saturday, 3rd June 1843, announced accordingly that between the acts of the opera (Il Barbiere di Seviglia), Donna [sic] Lola Montez, of the Teatro Real, Seville, would make her first appearance in this country, in the original Spanish dance, "El Olano." Attracted by this advertisement, a critic, who afterwards wrote under the pseudonym of "Q.," called at the theatre, and was presented to the debutante. In her he recognised a lady living opposite his lodgings in Grafton Street, Mayfair, who had long been the object of his silent adoration. He dwells on her extreme vivacity, on her brilliancy of conversation, and on her[Pg 42] foreign accent, which struck him as assumed. She was persuaded to give a rehearsal for his special benefit.
"At that period," he goes on to say, "her figure was even more attractive than her face, lovely as the latter was. Lithe and graceful as a young fawn, every movement that she made seemed instinct with melody as she prepared to commence the dance. Her dark eyes were blazing and flashing with excitement, for she felt that I was willing to admire her. In her pose, grace seemed involuntarily to preside over her limbs and dispose their attitude. Her foot and ankle were almost faultless. Nadaud, the violinist, drew the bow
across his instrument, and she began to dance. No one who has seen her will quarrel with me for saying that she was not, and is not, a finished danseuse, but all who have will as certainly agree with me that she possesses every element which could be required, with careful study in her youth, to make her eminent in her then vocation. As she swept round the stage, her slender waist swayed to the music, and her graceful neck and head bent with it, like a flower that bends with the impulse given to its stem by the changing and fitful temper of the wind."[3]
On that eventful June evening, then, manager, critics, not least of all Lola herself, confidently looked forward to a striking success. The house was crowded, and many notabilities were present. There were the King of Hanover, the Queen-Dowager, the Duchess of Kent, and the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. There was also Lola's old enemy, my Lord Ranelagh, who with a party of friends occupied one of the two omnibus-boxes--an admirable point from which to examine the ankles and calves of the long-skirted