(Signed) Von Abel. Von Seinsheim.
Von Gumppenberg. Von Schrenk.
Munich, 11th February 1847.”
This extraordinary address exhibits the courage, if not the tact and sense of humour of the signatories; but none of them cared to present it. Abel sent it by messenger to the King, who perused it with mingled amusement and indignation, and then locked it in his desk. He asked Abel if this was the only copy existing, and was answered in the affirmative. But a day or two later the memorandum appeared in print in the columns of the Augsburger Zeitung. A preliminary draft had been sent by Abel to a fifth minister, Herr Von Giese, who had left it carelessly upon his bureau. Here it was scanned with interest and curiosity by his elderly sister, and was carried off by her, to be proudly exhibited at a tea-party. Handed round among the guests for examination, it was not long in finding its way into the Press. It was reproduced in the French and English papers. The Times devoted an editorial to its contents, and compared the excessive sensibility of the Bishop of Augsburg with the hardened indifference of the English hierarchy to the transgressions of the fourth George and William. The lachrymose prelate contributed hugely to the gaiety of nations. Bernstorff, the Prussian Ambassador, considered the address wanting in respect to the sovereign; by another statesman it was qualified as unbecoming, injudicious, and crude. More heads than one, it was remarked, had been lost over Lola. No one could have been more amused than the lady herself by this astonishing memorandum.
She had indeed good cause for mirth. The indiscretion of the Cabinet brought about the complete triumph of her policy. The King allowed Abel twenty-four hours to reconsider his attitude, and as the minister stood to his guns, he was formally dismissed from office on 16th February. His fall involved his colleagues. Louis’s return to his earlier ideas, consequent upon his relations with Lola, was made evident in his choice of new ministers. The portfolio of the Interior was entrusted to Baron Zu Rhein, with the intimation that His Majesty wished to be served by men sincerely attached to their religion, but determined to resist any encroachment by the Church upon the rights of the State. Councillor Maurer became Minister of Justice, having presumably recanted the views attributed to him by his late colleagues in the memorandum. He was a man of learning and Liberal tendencies, and was the first Protestant to hold Cabinet rank in Bavaria. The portfolios of finance and war were given respectively to Councillor Zenetti and Major-General von Hohenhausen. The whole Cabinet was frankly Liberal. Lola had coaxed the King back to sanity, and inflicted a signal defeat upon the clericals. All over Germany she was acclaimed as the heroine of Liberalism. Metternich groaned over the deplorable state of things at Munich, and wrote that this woman had become an instrument of the Radical party. Bernstorff received the news of the fall of Abel’s Ministry with satisfaction, accompanied, as it was, by Maurer’s assurance that the reign of the Jesuits in Bavaria was at an end.
It was at her evening reception at her house in Theresienstrasse that Louis came to announce to Lola the dismissal of his old ministers, and his unalterable attachment to her and to her policy. “I will not give Lola up,” he declared; “I will never give up that noble princely being. My kingdom for Lola!” Maurer was obliged to consent to the naturalisation that he had described as a national calamity. Lola was soon after raised to the peerage with the titles of Countess of Landsfeld[15] and Baroness Rosenthal. She is described in the register of Bavarian nobility as Maria Dolores Porris y Montez, the daughter of a Carlist officer and Cuban lady. (That the daughter of a follower of Don Carlos should be a deadly foe of all that was Ultramontane must have struck her friends and opponents as odd.) Her titles conveyed with them an estate of importance, and certain feudal rights—the middle and the low justice, perhaps—over two thousand souls. She was made a canoness of the aristocratic order of St. Theresa, of which the Queen was the head. To enable her to support this dignity the King endowed her with an annuity of twenty thousand florins. With this and the money bequeathed her by Dujarier she was now rich. A palace befitting her position was ordered to be built for her in Bärerstrasse after the design of the architect, Metzger, who was one of her most impassioned admirers. Her portrait was painted by royal command, and placed in the Gallery of Beauties, where Louis, it is said, was accustomed to spend hours in rapturous contemplation.
XXI
THE INDISCRETIONS OF A MONARCH