The Ultramontanes had no intention of taking their defeat lying down. The Jesuits were fighting for their very existence just over the frontier in Switzerland; the Sonderbund or Catholic League was threatened with an attack at any moment by the forces of the Confederation. Austria and France could do nothing for the League through fear of Palmerston, but it is very probable that help was expected from Bavaria, on which England could not have brought any direct pressure to bear. Munich was the asylum of Ultramontane exiles from all parts of Europe—of French Legitimists, Polish Catholics, and Swiss Jesuits. In Lola’s action they detected the hand of the arch-enemy, Palmerston. Liberally supplied with gold from Austria (as Bernstorff did not hesitate to allege), these champions of legitimacy sedulously strove to inflame the people with hatred of the favourite. Lola’s unfortunate temper aided their exertions. The citizens of Munich disliked being boxed on the ears even by the most beautiful of her sex, and Baron Pechmann, who had endeavoured to avenge them, had been banished. Lola, like all people of a rich, generous nature, was fond of dogs. In London she had bought a bull-dog from a man who told Mark Lemon, with a very proper professional reservation, that the lady was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen—on two legs. The animal, being indisposed, was sent by his devoted mistress to the Veterinary Hospital at Munich. The patient did not progress very rapidly towards recovery, and Lola remonstrated with the medical man in attendance. His reply was too brusque for her taste. Her ears having been offended, she promptly boxed his. She then carried off her darling, who was soon restored to health and vigour. So complete was his recovery that a week or two later, while accompanying his mistress in the streets of Munich, he prepared himself to attack a carrier who was walking beside his cart. The man anticipated the onslaught by flicking the bull-dog with his whip. The enraged Lola at once smote the man on the ear. The assault was witnessed by several passers-by, whose threatening attitude compelled her to take refuge in a neighbouring shop. From this dangerous situation she was delivered only by the police. Lola and the King laughed good-humouredly over these incidents; the people of Munich were disposed to look upon them as deadly outrages.
The new favourite, then, was not likely to become popular with the masses; and her enemies could turn with some confidence to the educated classes, as far as they were represented at the University. Students in France, Russia, Italy, and indeed most civilised countries, are admittedly hot-blooded, enthusiastic champions of freedom and progress; in some states they are the very backbone of the revolutionary party. In Bavaria at this time, on the contrary, the students, like those of our English universities, displayed fervent devotion to the ideals of their grandmothers, and held tenaciously by the standards of the nurseries they had so lately quitted. Munich rivalled Oxford and Cambridge in its zeal for Conservatism and obsolete canons. Professor Lassaulx, therefore, was only voicing the sentiments of the University generally when he presented an address to Councillor von Abel, deploring that minister’s retirement, and congratulating him upon his adherence to Ultramontane principles. This was tantamount to a vote of censure on the sovereign. Lassaulx was at once deprived of his chair, despite (it is said by Dr. Erdmann) Lola’s earnest entreaties with the King. The professor received a tremendous ovation from the students. On the 1st March 1847 they collected in the morning outside his house in Theresienstrasse, cheering him vociferously. Lola, unluckily, was then living in the same street, and having expressed their sympathy with the professor, it occurred to the students that they might as well express their disapprobation of the woman to whom they attributed his downfall. Lola was at lunch when howls and hoots and cries of “Pereat Lola!” brought her to the window. She was received with yells from the throats of two hundred stout, beer-drinking, Bavarian burschen. Amused at the sight, and undismayed, as she ever was, she derisively toasted the mob in a glass of champagne and ate chocolates while she watched their gyrations. Her coolness would have disarmed the enmity of an English crowd, and sent it away cheering. But the sportsman-like qualities are not specially inculcated by the disciples of Loyola, nor were perhaps highly esteemed in the Germany of that date. Presently the King himself came along the street, and, unmolested and unnoticed, quietly elbowed his way through the mob. He stood at Lola’s door composedly contemplating his excited subjects. He turned to Councillor Hörmann, whom the noise of the disturbance had also brought to the spot. “If she were called Loyola Montez,” remarked His Majesty, “I suppose they would cheer her.” Then he quietly entered the house. The street was cleared by the mounted police. Louis remained all the afternoon at his favourite’s house, and when night fell, attempted to return to the palace on foot, and unattended, as he had come. He was compelled to abandon the attempt. He was received with howls and threats, and could only reach his residence by the aid of a military escort. The streets were filled with the most dangerous elements in the city. A crowd collected before the palace, and cheered the Queen, who, poor lady! must have been embarrassed by this demonstration of sympathy with the emotions of wifely jealousy and injured dignity to which she was a stranger! Before day broke order had been restored by the sabres of the cuirassiers.
Lola, knowing the temper of her countrymen, saw in this attack on a woman a sure means of enlisting their sympathies. She wrote a letter to the Times in which she gave her own version of affairs in Bavaria in the following terms:—
“I had not been here a week before I discovered that there was a plot existing in the town to get me out of it, and that the party was the Jesuit party. Of course, you are aware that Bavaria has long been their stronghold, and Munich their headquarters. This, naturally, to a person brought up and instructed from her earliest youth to detest this party (I think you will say naturally) irritated me not a little.
“When they saw that I was not likely to leave them, they commenced on another tack, and tried what bribery would do, and actually offered me 50,000 francs yearly if I would quit Bavaria and promise never to return. This, as you may imagine, opened my eyes, and as I indignantly refused their offer, they have not since then left a stone unturned to get rid of me, and have never for an instant ceased persecuting me. I may mention, as one instance, that within the last week a Jesuit professor of philosophy at the University here, by the name of Lassaulx, was removed from his professorship, upon which the party paid and hired a mob to insult me and break the windows of my palace, and also to attack the palace; but, thanks to the better feeling of the other party, and the devotedness of the soldiers to His Majesty and his authority, this plot likewise failed.”
It was, in fact, as disastrous to its instigators as the famous memorandum. The King perceived the University to be a hot-bed of clericalism, and promptly invited the majority of the professors to transfer their services to other seats of learning, or to abandon this particular sphere of usefulness altogether. Their chairs were filled by men of moderate views. At the same time the University was freed from the oppressive surveillance of the Ministry; the obnoxious decrees affecting the sale of books were withdrawn; and even the undergraduates felt constrained to testify their gratitude to the liberal King by means of a torchlight procession.
Louis and his new ministers were not wanting in firmness. Several officers and civil servants were transferred to distant stations, and otherwise made to feel the weight of the royal displeasure for having taken part in an Ultramontane gathering at Adelholz, in the Bavarian Highlands, where a protest was raised against Lola’s elevation to the peerage. With the bulk of the people, notwithstanding, the King’s popularity knew no diminution. He received an enthusiastic greeting at Bruckenau, Kissingen, and Aschaffenburg, where he passed the summer. He wrote to his secretary in Munich, on 27th June 1847: “I am very satisfied with my reception throughout my whole progress;” and on 31st August: “I was surprised, agreeably surprised, by my evidently joyful reception in the Palatinate.” In Franconia, inhabited largely by Protestants, the King’s change of policy was naturally welcome. Lola’s popularity likewise increased by leaps and bounds, though her uncontrollable temper continued to lead her into mischief. A furious quarrel with the commandant of the Würzburg garrison interrupted her journey north to join the Court at Aschaffenburg. The Queen, meanwhile, was the object of a demonstration of sympathy at Bamberg, really directed against the favourite. Certain sections of the aristocracy held aloof from the Countess, with that steadfast devotion to virtue that has always characterised their order. Lola complained of their attitude to His Majesty. Questioned by him they alluded to the lady’s doubtful antecedents as sufficient justification for their refusal to present her to their wives. The King’s answer was that of a chivalrous man of the world: “What other woman of so-called high standing would have conducted herself better, had she been abandoned to the world, young, beautiful, and helpless? Bah! I know them all, and I tell you I don’t rate too highly the much-belauded virtue of the inexperienced and untried.” Louis was a gentleman as well as a prince, and had the courage to protect the woman he loved. “Mark well,” he wrote to a person of rank, “if you are invited to the house the King frequents, and you do not come, the King will see in this an offence against his dignity, and his displeasure will follow.” Louis’s rule for his courtiers was, in short: “Love me, love Lola.”
Social distinction and wealth were not enough to satisfy the Countess of Landsfeld. She was not content to pull the wires; she wanted the appearance of power, as well as its substance. She longed to display openly her talents as a ruler. She was galled by the affected indifference of statesmen, who could not in reality put a single measure into execution without her sanction. While all Germany acclaimed her as the Liberal heroine, Zu Rhein was able afterwards to affirm publicly in the Chamber that the favourite had at no time come between the Cabinet and the sovereign, nor had in any way governed its policy. This statement may be accepted as far as it goes, but the ministers could have done nothing without the King’s co-operation, and the King never denied that he was accustomed to consult the Countess on all affairs of state. The credit of the Zu Rhein-Maurer administration rightly, therefore, belongs in great measure to her. She was always by the King to keep him in the straight way of reform, to safeguard him against a relapse into Ultramontanism. She not unnaturally chafed at what must have seemed the ingratitude of the ministers. She had not yet forgiven Maurer for his reference to her proposed naturalisation as a calamity. Now she regarded him as a puppet which had the impudence to ignore its maker. He got the credit of reforms, she told herself, that she had initiated. Meantime, the clerical Press bombarded her with low abuse. She demanded the enforcement of the censorship and the suppression of the offending journals. Such steps as these, a professedly Liberal Government was loth to take. A collision took place between the favourite and “the Ministry of Good Hope,” as it was derisively called. Lola found an instrument ready to her hand in Councillor von Berks, whose devotion to her was warmer than a merely political allegiance. In December, the King decided to reconstitute the Ministry. He appointed Berks to the Department of the Interior, and to Prince Wallerstein, lately Bavarian representative at Paris, he gave the portfolio of foreign affairs. The new Cabinet was composed entirely of men wholly in sympathy with the views of both sovereign and favourite. By its opponents it was derisively dubbed the Lola Ministry. The Münchner Zeitung welcomed its frank and whole-hearted Liberalism as a guarantee of the solution of all the problems of Bavaria’s internal and foreign policy. Wallerstein was even more anti-clerical than his predecessors. The Sonderbund was crushed in November by the strategy of Dufour, and the Jesuits came flying from Switzerland into Bavaria. They were forbidden to remain in the country more than a few days. The Press was not gagged, but conciliated. Lola was acclaimed as the good genius of Bavaria. The German Liberals hailed her as a valued ally. To her influence was attributed the tardy addition of Luther’s bust to the collection of German worthies in the Walhalla. Punch, as a suggestion for a colossal statue of Bavaria, represents Lola upholding a banner inscribed “Freedom and the Cachuca.” The “good little thing” of Simla wielded the sceptre, and wielded it well.