The Man Behind the Iron Mask (11 page)

Proof of Beaufort's fate could not be established, but under the circumstances it seemed reasonable to suppose that he was dead. It was presumed that the reason no trace of him could be found was due to the fact that among all those hundreds of dead men, the piles of bodies beheaded and stripped, the heaps of heads battered and mutilated, it would have been difficult to identify anyone. A solemn memorial service was held at Notre-Dame in Paris and all the courts of Europe went into mourning. Not that everyone had reason to mourn. Colbert, one may be sure, was not saddened by the loss. Since Beaufort had no children, the office of Grand Admiral was left open to anyone the King wished to choose and his choice fell upon the Comte de Vermandois, who was at that time a child of two living under the care and protection of Colbert himself. Athénais de Montespan had no reason to be unhappy either: the post of acting-commander of the fleet was given to her brother, the Duc de Vivonne.

There were, however, a great many people who refused to believe that Beaufort was dead. On 31 August, Navailles withdrew from the island, abandoning it to the Turks, and when his troops disembarked at Marseilles nine days later they brought with them the story that Beaufort had been captured alive and taken to Constantinople. Meanwhile the English had received word from Athens, and the Vatican from the islands of Milos and Corfu, that Beaufort had been seen on a Turkish ship in the Aegean. Before the end of the month there were people in Paris prepared to wager that Beaufort was still alive. Just how wild these rumours were was difficult at that juncture to say, but it was evident that, if the Turks really did have the cousin of Louis XIV captive, they would do something to exploit the situation before very long. As time elapsed and the Turks continued to make no move at all, it seemed more and more certain that he was indeed dead. Nonetheless the people of Paris ten years later were still clinging to the belief that he was a prisoner in Constantinople and one day would escape and return. No doubt this faith was nourished by many more rumours, because as late as summer 1682 one such story was going the rounds at court. It was said that a dragoon, who after being captured at Candy had escaped from prison and returned to France, had seen Beaufort alive and well and apart from a big blond beard, unchanged, in the prison of the Seven Towers in Constantinople.

According to Lagrange-Chancel, Beaufort's prison was not in Turkey but in France. At the siege of Candy he was kidnapped by the French secret service, smuggled back to France and clapped behind bars in Pignerol with his head encased in an iron mask. In his letter to Fréron, Lagrange-Chancel had this to say: ‘M. de Lamotte-Guérin, who had the command of those islands in the time that I was detained there, assured me that this prisoner was the Duc de Beaufort who was said to have been killed at the siege of Candy but whose body according to the commentaries of the time could never be found … If one considers the Duc de Beaufort's turbulent spirit and the part he played in the disturbances in Paris at the time of the Fronde, one will not perhaps be surprised at the violent course of action employed to secure him, especially since the post of admiral, which he had received in reversion, put him every day in a position to cross the great designs of M. Colbert who was in charge of the Admiralty. This admiral, who in the eyes of the minister, seemed so dangerous, was replaced, according to that minister's wishes, by the son of the King and the Duchesse de La Vallière, the Duc de Vermandois, who was only two years old.' One might add here, in support of Lagrange-Chancel's theory, that Colbert's brother, with whom Beaufort shared command during the battle, was certainly well placed to arrange such a kidnapping.

For most of Lagrange-Chancel's readers, Beaufort was not sufficiently dangerous to Colbert or the King to warrant arrest and imprisonment in such an extraordinary fashion. For all his rebellious deeds of the past and dreams of future glory, his continuing popularity and increasing influence, the limitations of his personality made him a serious threat to no one except assailants in pitched battle. Some more important reason had to be found if he was to be seriously considered as a candidate for the Iron Mask. It was not until the twentieth century that anyone came up with such a reason, and in the meantime the issue was further complicated in 1868 by Augustin Jal, the scholar-historian and keeper of the Admiralty archives. He had reason to believe, he said, that Beaufort had entered a monastery in Crete. Neither killed, captured nor kidnapped at the siege of Candy, Beaufort the vanquished crusader had turned his back on war and become a monk in the Orthodox Church. What vision transformed his character on the battlefield and what angel led him from it alive remained a mystery; but those who nevertheless saw sense in the hagiography found supporting evidence for his sudden transformation in the passionate remorse he had shown after killing his own brother-in-law seventeen years before. Apparently at that time he had talked of entering a Carthusian Monastery to expiate his crime.

Beaufort as monk and Iron Mask was the final shape of the argument reached in 1960 by Dominique de La Barre de Raillicourt. According to his scenario, French secret service agents kidnapped Beaufort from the monastery in Crete two years after his disappearance. They had planned and even attempted to kidnap him during the expedition to Candy, but he had escaped and gone into hiding. What motivated the decision to have him live out the rest of his life in prison was the realization that he possessed a secret dangerous to Louis XIV and could not be relied upon to keep it. Presumably Louis XIV had only discovered the secret himself on or after his mother's death in 1666. His father, he had been thunderstruck to learn, was not Louis XIII but Beaufort. One may easily imagine his horror and alarm at the news, but, unhappily for the hypothesis, imagination is not enough. That Anne of Austria had tender feelings for Beaufort and that he was passionately devoted to her is a fact recorded in numerous contemporary memoirs, but never was it said by anyone that they were lovers. Moreover, at the time of Louis XIV's conception, Anne of Austria was under house-arrest at the Louvre and Beaufort like all her favourites and admirers was not allowed to visit her.

To give the hypothesis its due, however, Beaufort's face was so well known to the common soldier and the ordinary man, both of Paris and of Provence where his family had estates, that if he had been secretly held a prisoner on Sainte-Marguerite and in the Bastille a mask would have been necessary to hide his identity. Also, for what it is worth, there are points of similarity between the description of the Iron Mask as given by Voltaire and the known behaviour of Beaufort during his imprisonment at Vincennes: his pleasure in fine clothes and good food and the fact that he played the guitar. Beaufort, like Voltaire's Iron Mask, was ‘admirably well-built' and being the grandson of Henri IV he would have been treated by his gaolers with the greatest respect. However, at the time of the Iron Mask's death in 1703, Beaufort would have been 87 years old and though such longevity was possible in a man of such robust health, it seems hardly likely when his last thirty years and more had been spent cooped up in prison.

The most serious single argument against the whole hypothesis is provided by a letter written on 8 January 1688 by Saint-Mars, the Governor of Sainte-Marguerite, to Louvois, the Minister of War, in which he declared: ‘Throughout the province some say that my prisoner is M. de Beaufort and others that he is the son of the late Cromwell.' Both names were clearly meant by Saint-Mars to be amusing examples of error and ignorance. The mysterious prisoner, one must therefore assume, was not the Duc de Beaufort, and Lamotte-Guérin was not revealing inside information confided to him as an officer on Sainte-Marguerite, but merely repeating a false rumour which anyone could have picked up anywhere in the region.

As a footnote to the facts and figments of Beaufort should be mentioned the ‘timid conjecture' made by François Ravaisson in the preface of his
Archives de la Bastille
published in 1879. For him there seemed a possibility that the Iron Mask was Beaufort's aide-de-camp, the Comte de Kéroualle. He offered the conjecture that Kéroualle was captured with Beaufort at Candy and was then sent by the Turks to France to negotiate Beaufort's ransom. Louis XIV, only too pleased to be rid of Beaufort, had Kéroualle masked and imprisoned. Why masked, Ravaisson does not explain, nor how in 1671 the Admiralty records were able to list Kéroualle as killed in action aboard the flag-ship
Monarch.

Yet another princely candidate for the Iron Mask, picked from yet another illegitimate branch of the same tangled tree, was Monmouth: one of the love-children of Louis XIV's cousin Charles II
³
of England. He was born in Rotterdam in 1649, two months after the execution of his grandfather, Charles I, and was called to London in 1661, two years after the restoration of the crown to his father. Until recognized by his father, the boy lived in Paris with his mother, a Welsh girl by the name of Lucy Walters, who had met Charles in Holland when as a young man of eighteen he had been in refuge there from the Roundheads. On his arrival in England the boy was married, though only thirteen, to Anne Scott, the Countess of Buccleuch, heiress to one of the richest estates in the kingdom, and in the following year was made a Knight of the Garter and Duke of Monmouth.

In the absence of a legitimate son, Charles heaped Monmouth with honours and distinctions normally reserved for a Prince of Wales. In the presence of his father, when others were obliged to remove their hats, he was allowed to keep his on, and during official mourning he was permitted to wear the royal purple as though he were a prince. At the age of nineteen he was made Captain of the King's Guard and at the age of twenty-one he was admitted to the Privy Council. Such marks of favour were not everywhere approved, but so pleasant a person was he that no one resented his good fortune. He was the most charming of men, handsome and sweet tempered, gracious and generous, a brilliant courtier and a fine soldier, as popular in city, camp and Parliament as he was in his father's palace. In 1673 he was given command of an English auxiliary force sent to assist the French in their invasion of Holland, and when he returned was given a hero's welcome by the people of London. At that stage his popularity appeared to have little or no political significance, but five years later it was obvious that it had, and he was obliged by his father to leave London for exile in Holland because his presence had become an incitement to rebellion.

The factor which had transformed the political situation so much in that interval was the problem of the King's successor. A few years after the royal marriage in 1662, and with increasing certainty as more time elapsed, it was realized that the Queen was unable to bear children and that therefore, on the King's death, the succession would pass to his brother James. This was a prospect which Parliament and the people came to regard with growing dismay. Since the King of England was titular head and sworn defender of the Church of England, it was unthinkable that he should owe allegiance to any other faith. In 1669 however James had secretly become a Roman Catholic and although he had been persuaded by the King to keep up a pretence of Anglicanism, the truth was suspected, and after four years of equivocation came out when he resigned all public office rather than take an anti-Catholic oath.

The King was only three years older than his brother and his health was to all appearances excellent, so there was no strong reason to suppose that James would ever succeed to the throne, but whether he did or not it was certain that one of his children would. In April 1673, when it became generally known that the heir-presumptive was a Catholic, fears for the future were only calmed by the knowledge that he was a widower and that his two daughters, the only children he had, were both staunch Protestants. In November of that same year, however, he married again, this time a Catholic. Clearly any son born of this second union would take precedence over the daughters of the first, and such a son would certainly be raised in his father's new faith. Unless something were done to alter the line of succession, it was wellnigh certain that, by the ordinary processes of devolution, the future Kings of England would be Roman Catholic.

As opposition to James gathered momentum Charles, himself a would-be Catholic, temporized. While keeping up the appearances of Protestantism, he had in 1670 signed the secret Treaty of Dover with Louis XIV, promising to proclaim himself a Catholic and reclaim his kingdom for the Church of Rome. When the time came he was to have the backing of French troops to put down any resistance from his people, and in the meantime he was receiving large sums of money from France. No one except his brother and three ministers were privy to this agreement, but his equivocal attitude on political and religious issues gave rise to serious doubts and suspicions.

Though it was not until 1678 that any plot for a Catholic take-over came to light, and though it came in a version so sensationalized and from a witness so untrustworthy that it was not even credible, the nation was ready to believe the worst. The plot, it was claimed, was the work of the Pope, the King of France and the General of the Jesuits, in league with five Catholic peers and with the connivance of James and the Queen. All the shipping in the Thames was to be set on fire, the French army was to land in Ireland, Catholics were to massacre their Protestant neighbours and all the nation's leaders, including the King, were to be assassinated. Incited more by rumour than report, the populace was soon carried away on a wave of anti-Catholic hysteria. In April 1679, when Charles convened a new Parliament, the Commons insisted on debating a bill to exclude James from the throne, and the confused political situation crystallized into a conflict between two factions: the pro-James party, which came to be called Tories, and the anti-James party which came to be called Whigs.

In the search for an alternative heir to the throne, one group of Whigs picked upon Monmouth. His widespread popularity, his plain uncomplicated Anglicanism and his amenable character made him the perfect choice. He was the very antithesis of his rival, as open, trusting, indulgent and affable as James was secretive, suspicious, authoritarian and cold. With a little flattery and good fellowship he could moreover be easily influenced and controlled. The story was put about that Monmouth was not illegitimate after all, that Charles had been married to Lucy Walters and that their contract of marriage still existed, locked up for safe keeping in a certain black box. Charles denied this categorically in a public declaration, but Monmouth took to wearing the royal coat-of-arms without the bar-sinister which until then had indicated his illegitimacy. It was at that juncture in September 1679 that Charles deprived him of all public office and banished him to Holland.