Later she went with Captain James to India.  She endured a campaign in Afghanistan, in which she thoroughly enjoyed herself because of the attentions of the officers.  On her return to London in 1842, one Captain Lennox was a fellow passenger; and their association resulted in an action for divorce, by which she was freed from her husband, and yet by a technicality was not able to marry Lennox, whose family in any case would probably have prevented the wedding.

Mrs. Mayne says, in writing on this point: 

Even Lola never quite succeeded in being allowed to commit bigamy unmolested, though in later years she did commit it and took refuge in Spain to escape punishment.

The same writer has given a vivid picture of what happened soon after the divorce.  Lola tried to forget her past and to create a new and brighter future.  Here is the narrative: 

Her Majesty’s Theater was crowded on the night of June 10,1843.  A new Spanish dancer was announced—­“Dona Lola Montez.”  It was her debut, and Lumley, the manager, had been puffing her beforehand, as he alone knew how.  To Lord Ranelagh, the leader of the dilettante group of fashionable young men, he had whispered, mysteriously: 

“I have a surprise in store.  You shall see.”

So Ranelagh and a party of his friends filled the omnibus boxes, those tribunes at the side of the stage whence success or failure was pronounced.  Things had been done with Lumley’s consummate art; the packed house was murmurous with excitement.  She was a raving beauty, said report—­and then, those intoxicating Spanish dances!  Taglioni, Cerito, Fanny Elssler, all were to be eclipsed.

Ranelagh’s glasses were steadily leveled on the stage from the moment her entrance was imminent.  She came on.  There was a murmur of admiration—­but Ranelagh made no sign.  And then she began to dance.  A sense of disappointment, perhaps?  But she was very lovely, very graceful, “like a flower swept by the wind, she floated round the stage”—­not a dancer, but, by George, a beauty!  And still Ranelagh made no sign.

Yet, no.  What low, sibilant sound is that?  And then what confused, angry words from the tribunal?  He turns to his friends, his eyes ablaze with anger, opera-glass in hand.  And now again the terrible “Hiss-s-s!” taken up by the other box, and the words repeated loudly and more angrily even than before—­the historic words which sealed Lola’s doom at Her Majesty’s Theater:  “Why, it’s Betty James!”

She was, indeed, Betty James, and London would not accept her as Lola Montez.  She left England and appeared upon the Continent as a beautiful virago, making a sensation—­as the French would say, a succes de scandale—­by boxing the ears of people who offended her, and even on one occasion horsewhipping a policeman who was in attendance on the King of Prussia.  In Paris she tried once more to be a dancer, but Paris would not have her.  She betook herself to Dresden and Warsaw, where she sought to attract attention by her eccentricities, making mouths at the spectators, flinging her garters in their faces, and one time removing her skirts and still more necessary garments, whereupon her manager broke off his engagement with her.