Many noblewomen who welcomed Charles’s other mistresses with open arms refused outright to have Nell among their company because of her base birth. The dowager duchess of Richmond told the king that she “could not abide to converse with Nell,” to which the monarch replied that “those he lay with were fit company for the greatest woman in the land.”17
Commoners, on the other hand, felt that if Charles had to have a mistress, it should be a Protestant Englishwoman like Nell rather than an aristocratic French papist like Louise de Kéroualle. Many of the lower and middle classes admired Nell for dragging herself out of the gutter and through talent, hard work, and humor making a lady of herself.
By the time of the Catholic Panic in the late 1670s and early 1680s, Nell clearly came out on top in the public opinion poll. She was thought to be a “good commonwealth’s woman,” a Protestant who had never “to make her own private gains endeavored the ruin of a nation.”18 Louise de Kéroualle, on the other hand, was certainly a spy for their historical enemy France and the pope. Stuffing her money bags with their taxes, she became known as one of “Pharaoh’s lean kine” who had “almost devoured a nation.”19
One day Nell’s carriage was encircled by a mob who thought it belonged to Louise de Kéroualle and threatened to overturn it. Nell stuck her head out the window and cried, “Pray, good people, be civil, I am the Protestant whore.”20 In response, the laughing mob blessed her and bid her be on her way.
“Kill me if you dare!”
In 1848 Lola Montez was so unpopular in Bavaria that she precipitated a revolution. In late 1846 the dancer had visited Munich with the intention of staying a week or two and pulling in some money for her performances. But she enchanted the elderly King Ludwig, who convinced her to stay on as his special friend. The Munich citizens were not blind to their ruler’s frequent visits to the dancer’s hotel. Whipping out binoculars, they studied her closely in the special opera box she had convinced Ludwig to give her.
As always, the populace was not so much concerned with their monarch’s sexual morality, but with the political influences exerted on him by an outside source. This woman was no German, as Ludwig’s others had been. Worse, Lola had no clear nationality at all, claiming to be a Spaniard in order to hide her true identity. Born in Ireland, raised in India, married in England and divorced there for adultery, Lola spoke a little Spanish with an Irish-British accent. Who was she? If she was indeed working for a foreign government, which one was it?
Worse than her uncertain nationality and political agenda was Lola’s uniquely bad temper. Petulant, fiery, uncontrollable, she frequently slapped and punched shop owners and people on the street who she felt had insulted her. One day, as she walked the streets of Munich, her huge black dog bit a deliveryman’s foot. Reaching for a club to protect himself, the poor man was struck hard several times by the king’s mistress. A crowd formed and chased Lola into a silver shop. As darkness fell, and some four hundred incensed citizens yelled for her in front of the shop, Lola escaped down a ladder in the back.
The seats near Lola’s theater box were usually empty, as no one wanted to be seen near her. During the plays, when Ludwig would abandon his wife, children, and royal guests to visit her, Lola remained seated while the king stood, a shocking breach of protocol.
People in the street jostled her and called her rude names. Boys threw horse manure at her. Though Lola was far from a typical damsel in distress, these incidents soon attracted a group of university students which acted as a personal bodyguard. Her admirers formed their own fraternity, the Alemannia, named for an ancient German tribe, and wore a distinctive red cap.
With Ludwig’s money, Lola treated the Alemannen to wild drinking parties—some said orgies—at her stately house. At one dinner, the students, carousing around wearing no pants, carried Lola on their shoulders and knocked her unconscious on a chandelier. The arrogance of the few dozen Alemannen outraged the other two thousand university students, who began to whistle and catcall whenever a red cap appeared in view. When Lola’s fraternity boys would attend lectures, the other students would rise and leave. On some occasions, two or three Alemannen would sit alone in a large lecture hall.
Annoyed by the constant reports of disruptions, Ludwig decided to close the university for a semester. A riot ensued, students and ordinary citizens chasing the Alemannen and battling with them in the streets. Lola, hearing about it, threw herself into the midst of the fray with characteristic fearlessness. But she was soon recognized and chased, pelted with manure, and knocked to the ground. She made her way to a church, where the priest promptly threw her out. Finally, several gendarmes encircled her and helped her escape to the royal palace.
Hundreds of protesters stormed the police headquarters, tore up the paving stones, and broke every window in the building. The following day, protests continued. To defuse the ticking time bomb, the city commandant announced to a crowd that Lola Montez would be leaving the city within an hour. Delighted, the mob ran to her house to witness the royal whore’s departure. But the statement was false. Lola ran outside with a gun and dared them to kill her. When a hail of stones was the reply, she cried, “Here I am! Kill me if you dare!”21
Worried that Lola’s foolhardiness would indeed get her killed, her coachman and a lieutenant harnessed her horses to a carriage and threw her inside. The coachman sprang on top and whipped the horses through the jeering crowd. Against her will, Lola left Munich.
Within a few days, Lola, dressed as a man and wearing a false beard, sneaked into Munich and managed to visit Ludwig briefly to secure her financial future. She and Ludwig arranged to meet in Switzerland a few weeks later when things calmed down. But word flew through the city that Lola had visited, and angry crowds, hearing that she was hiding in this building or that, would surround them and threaten to tear them apart.
In the midst of the uproar, Ludwig abdicated the throne, hoping to leave Bavaria and go to his Lola. But Bavarian citizens, furious that he would escape with state funds and crown jewels for his whore, grew riotous when word spread of his intended trip. His son, the new king, begged Ludwig to stay in Bavaria or else he, too, might lose the throne. Despite several efforts over the next two years to meet, the pair were always thwarted. And slowly, as reports filtered in about Lola’s lifestyle, Ludwig’s heart hardened against her. And he looked back wistfully on his blinding, foolish dream of love.
But the revolutions of 1848 were the last convulsions of the French Revolution. By the late nineteenth century, Western Europe had settled into a more polite form of civilization where society could not be roiled by anything as boring as a king’s mistress. When Edward VII became king of Great Britain in 1901, he was labeled “King Edward the Caresser,” a pun on his saintly ancestor King Edward the Confessor. Englishmen roared with laughter when they heard a story first reported by a naval officer on the royal yacht who, walking by the porthole of Edward’s cabin, heard him cry, “Stop calling me Sir and put another cushion under your back.”22
9. The Fruits of Sin—Royal Bastards