The Man Behind the Iron Mask (33 page)

So ends the strange story of the odd young man who claimed to be the Prince Stuart, alias Jacobo Enrico de Bovere Roano Stuardo, alias Henri de Rohan, alias James de La Cloche du Bourg de Jersey. ‘Hee was buried in the Church of San Francisco di Paolo out of the Porta Capuana,' wrote the British agent at Rome in his report to London on 7 September 1669, ‘… and this is the end of that Princely Cheate or whatever hee was.' As James de La Cloche he had swindled the Jesuits of Rome out of a large sum of money, but as Jacobo Stuardo he had deceived no one except an illiterate Neapolitan family who were altogether ready to be deceived. Since in Naples he had proved such a wretched clown, it seems certain that in Rome he had been masterminded by someone else. Of this accomplice nothing is known, but presumably he was the Frenchman who had been with the young man when he first arrived in Naples. No doubt it was there that they divided their ill-gotten gains and the accomplice, who had been the brain of the operation, took the lion's share before embarking on a ship for Malta. Whoever he was, he must have been an extraordinary character, and it is tempting to believe that he possessed the intelligence and wit to enjoy the hoax for its own sake as well as for the money it brought him. The family name of the innkeeper he chose to leave the young man with was ‘Corona', and presumably he appreciated the aptness of this, just as he enjoyed giving the young man the name ‘de La Cloche'. To call someone ‘de la cloche' in French is to call him ‘a beggar', while the word ‘corona' in Italian means ‘crown'.

As a footnote to the story of James de La Cloche, offered with no intention of proving or disproving, approving or disapproving anything, one might add that though in general the names used in the hoax were derived from some knowledge of the Stuart, Rohan and La Cloche families, two were not: the ‘Marquisate of Juvignis' and the ‘Barons of Saint-Marzo'. Apparently both were fictitious. What inspired the invention of the words ‘Juvignis' and ‘Saint-Marzo' is not known and presumably not important, but one of them presents a strange coincidence which, though no doubt lacking in any real significance, is nonetheless forcefully surreal: ‘Marzo' in Italian is ‘Mars' in French, and it is not a common name in either language.

NOTES

1
.   
Waldensian
: proto-Protestant movement originating in the 12th century.

2
.   
Lord Arlington
: 1618–1685, served Charles II in exile, was his Secretary of State from 1662 and his chief minister from 1667.

3
.   
Orange
: independent non-French principality within France until confiscated by Louis XIV in 1673.

4
.   
Charles IV
, Duc de Lorraine, 1604–1675.

5
.   
Marquis de Croissy
: 1629–1696, brother of Colbert.

6
.   
Calais
: In Lang's day it was not possible to say where exactly Dauger was arrested. However in 1987, at the International Symposium on the Iron Mask held in Cannes, Stanislas Brugnon revealed the existence of a document establishing with near certainty that Dauger was indeed arrested in Calais. This document is an order for the reimbursement of expenses which was issued to Vauroy for his journey with Dauger in August 1669, and it specifies that Vauroy went from Dunkirk to Calais and from there to Pignerol.

7
.   
doubloon
: Spanish gold coin.

8
.   
scudo
: Italian silver coin.

10

AND INTERCONNECTIONS

E
dith Carey, like Andrew Lang, took the view that James de La Cloche was all that he purported to be, that his letters for all their inaccuracies and absurdities were genuine, and that the only deception practiced by him upon the Jesuits was a claim to be older than he actually was. She argued that in April 1668, when he asked to become a postulant, he was twenty-one, not twenty-four; he lied about his age because he thought the Jesuits would be more likely to accept him if he pretended to be older. That he was in fact twenty-one emerged later, she maintained, in the letter sent to the General of the Jesuits on 3 August 1668. There he was said to have been born when Charles was ‘scarcely sixteen or seventeen years of age' and in the opinion of Carey that established the matter beyond reasonable doubt. He was the illegitimate son of Charles and Marguerite de Carteret, conceived in May or June 1646, when Charles made his first visit to Jersey, and therefore born in February or March 1647.

Marguerite de Carteret was the youngest daughter of the Seigneur of Trinity, and so presumably any child of hers would have been christened in that parish. Carey examined the Trinity parish register and uncovered possible evidence that some record of baptism made in late 1648 had been suppressed. She found that the original registrations of two baptisms had been cut out and two extra entries inserted on the opposite page as though they were copies of the ones which were missing. Apparently they were, but not necessarily. Arguably, one of the original entries had recorded the baptism of this child born to Marguerite de Carteret, and the disarrangement had been a cover-up ordered by Charles himself when he returned to Jersey in September 1649. Apart no doubt from this registration, the child's existence had been revealed to no one outside the walls of Trinity Manor and, since the secret continued to be well-kept, Charles probably took the child away with him when he left Jersey for France in February 1650. Marguerite herself remained on the island, because in Trinity Church in 1656 she was married to Jean la Cloche, the son of the rector of Saint Ouen.

The Carterets were the oldest and most distinguished family in Jersey. They had been lords of the islands since the eleventh century when their ancestors accompanied William the Conqueror to England, and in the seventeenth century four of the five Seigneuries of Jersey were in their possession: Saint Ouen, Rozel, Melesches and Trinity. Though staunch Calvinists, they were dedicated Royalists. When Charles I was executed in February 1649 Sir George Carteret, Seigneur of Melesches and Lieutenant-Governor of Jersey, proclaimed Charles II king, and in October 1651 he and his fellow-Royalists abandoned their possessions in Jersey to follow their King into exile rather than accept Parliamentary rule. In 1660, when Charles was restored to the throne, he rewarded Sir George for his loyalty with the gift of ‘a certain island and adjacent islets near Virginia in America' with a patent ‘to build towns, churches and castles, and to establish suitable laws'. The name given to this new Carteret domain was New Jersey.

According to Carey, James de La Cloche was thirteen years old at the time of the Restoration and eighteen when he was called to England. In her version of things Charles privately acknowledged him to be his son, but would not do so publicly for fear that speculation about the boy's mother would lead to the truth which he had gone to such pains to hide. Since the boy was raised a Calvinist, the Carteret family were directly concerned in his upbringing, but the Carterets of Trinity and possibly Sir George Carteret were the only members of the family to know the secret. Marguerite was by that time the mother of six small children and her husband, who by all accounts was an ambitious and uncompromising man, knew nothing about the child she had born nine years before he married her. If the truth had become public, the shame for the Carteret family, hard-line Calvinists as they were, would have been insupportable.

In his contact with the English court, James de La Cloche preferred the French-speaking company of the Queen Mother's household. She was a devout Catholic, and under the influence of her entourage he came to question the Calvinism in which he had been raised. Perhaps the disclosure, made to him in confidence, that his father was himself a Catholic by conviction helped in his conversion. In 1667 he left England for the Continent and while in Hamburg was received into the Catholic Church. His decision to join the Jesuits was made with the intention of one day helping his father to follow the dictates of his conscience and become a Catholic too.

Charles was at first delighted by the spiritual commitment and filial devotion manifested by his son. When the young man came to England in November 1668, he took him entirely into his confidence, revealing to him his plan for a secret alliance with Louis XIV and entrusting to him a message for the Vatican. No sooner had the young man left for Rome, however, than Charles had second thoughts. His son was too immature, too indiscreet, for such a confidence. Though sworn to silence regarding the truth of his own birth, he had revealed the secret to the Queen of Sweden and to the General of the Jesuits. He was too trusting of others to be trusted with information which, if betrayed, would cost Charles his throne and possibly his life. It was conceivable that the young man, in his naivity, would reveal the secret to the Protestant Carterets, who would not hesitate to denounce it openly as ‘a foreign and Popish plot'. It was even possible that already before leaving London he had let enough of the secret slip to arouse the suspicions of Arlington, whom Charles suspected was in league with the fanatical Protestant, Claude Roux.

Needless to say, this account of James de La Cloche and his relationship with Charles and the Carterets, Arlington and the rest, has no demonstrable basis in fact. Carey was inventing a story to fit a theory, with nothing but plausibility to offer in its support, and as it was, the final link between her version of James de La Cloche and the facts of the Iron Mask proved difficult to forge. Her James de La Cloche returned to England in January 1669 and vanished into a secret prison prepared for him by Charles. The King, to cover the traces, arranged with the agreement of the Jesuits to have ‘a red herring drawn across the scent': an imposter dispatched to Naples ‘to divert attention from the career and fate of the real James de La Cloche'. Holding the young man a secret prisoner in England was too risky a business to maintain for long, however; since it was as much in the interest of Louis XIV as of Charles II to ensure his ‘perpetual silence and disappearance', he was taken to Dunkirk six months later and handed over to the French, who for security reasons changed his named to Eustache Dauger.

Pagnol, like Carey, wanted us to believe that James de La Cloche never set foot in Naples, and that when he left Rome in January 1669 he went to London. Unlike Carey, Pagnol was prepared to admit that the claims made by the young man to the Jesuits were false and that his letters were forgeries, but he argued that the young man really did believe himself to be the son of Charles II; he genuinely wished to be a priest so that he might help Charles become a Catholic. Though he was deceiving the Jesuits, Pagnol maintained, he had no intention of swindling them and he certainly was not masterminded by anybody else. His true identity was more noble than even he imagined, and his true story more romantic than even Dumas imagined. While Pagnol was quite sure ‘that the mysterious prisoner, incarcerated under the name of Eustache Dauger, had been an important member of the conspiracy of Roux de Marcilly, under the name of the valet Martin,' he was also ‘convinced that this man was neither valet, nor Martin, nor Dauger, … he was the twin brother of Louis XIV.' Back, with a cavalier flourish, to square one!

Some fast thinking was all it required, Pagnol believed, to bring the dead myth back to life. Brisk calculation had brought him to the view that, in thirty-four years of imprisonment, the Iron Mask had cost what in 1960 would have amounted to fifty million new francs. A secret which was worth that kind of money was not, Pagnol declared, ‘the secret of a valet, who could have been hanged in five minutes with a rope for forty sous.' Moreover, rapid consideration had brought him to the view that a ‘continual concern' had been shown for the prisoner's health, in spite of the fact that his ‘death would have liberated Louvois – and perhaps the King – from a great anxiety.' This strange attitude on their part reminded Pagnol of the old belief that ‘when one twin is ill, the other soon begins to sicken – and that if one of the two dies, the survivor in his turn dies soon after.' If after injecting the theory with ideas like that it was still cold, then Pagnol took the view that its revival could be effected by a heated attack upon Louis XIV. ‘Today in the light of his acts which reveal his jealousy, his egoism, his cruelty, I am persuaded that if he had been born in a litter of quadruplets we would have had three Iron Masks.'

Energy and heat apart, however, Pagnol had nothing more to propose in his reanimation of the dead theory than the bogus document published by Soulavie. Even then, it was only for the description of the twin-birth that he wished to pass off this fabrication as authentic, since for the rest of the unfortunate prince's life he had a concoction of his own to offer. According to Soulavie, the rejected prince was taken to a remote house in Burgundy as soon as he reached boyhood and was kept there until the year 1660 when at the age of twenty-two he discovered the truth of his identity; he was in consequence masked and imprisoned. According to Pagnol, he was taken to England at the age of six and from there to Jersey, where he was passed off as the natural child of some French noble family and given into the safe keeping of the Carteret family. As a young man, the mystery of his birth along with a similarity to his cousin Charles, whose noticeable resemblance to Louis XIV may in Pagnol's view be verified from existing portraits, led him to believe that he was the son of Marguerite de Carteret by Charles. The Carteret family was aware that Charles secretly wished to become a Roman Catholic, and it was to win his father's recognition by helping him in this that, in 1668, the young man went to the Jesuits in Rome. In fact the young man was not so young. He was then twenty-nine, but thought the Jesuits would be more likely to accept him if he pretended to be younger.

The letters which so impressed the Father-General, though false, were a truthful representation of the dilemma in which Charles found himself and were forged by the young man for the sole purpose of establishing himself as a ready-made go-between for Charles and the Vatican in some eventual secret dialogue. When in December 1668 a genuine letter arrived from Charles's brother James, revealing that he too needed help, the young man decided that it was time to go to his father and explain himself; the Jesuits entrusted him with a reply for James as well as a letter to Charles. On his way to London, he stopped off in Paris to see Madame, the sister of Charles, and ask her advice. She recognized him immediately as the living image of Louis XIV, but said nothing to enlighten him and hurried him on his way with a letter of her own for Charles. The young man met the English King on 20 January 1669, and the obscure passage in the letter which Charles wrote that day about an Italian in a dark corridor whose face he would not recognize again, was a reference to that meeting. When Charles saw the young man and heard his story, he guessed that he must be the twin brother of Louis XIV and, realizing the political potential of this, shared the news with Arlington and Claude Roux.