The Man Behind the Iron Mask (13 page)

For the rest of his theory Saint-Foix leaned heavily on the supposition that though James was notoriously cold-blooded, he was not so monstrous as to take the life of his own brother's son. He argued that Monmouth's death was pretended in order to remove the popular hope he embodied, and that he was smuggled to a prison in France to reduce the risk of his discovery or escape. According to Saint-Fox it was altogether in the interest of Louis XIV to assist James in this way, since their religious and political views were so similar and were threatened by the kind of popular opposition which Monmouth had come to represent.

It was in support of Monmouth's candidature that Saint-Foix offered the story about an apprentice surgeon named Nelaton being called to the Bastille to bleed a prisoner whose head and face were kept covered with a towel and who spoke French with a strong English accent. The purpose of the towel, Saint-Foix thought it reasonable to suppose, was not to hide this prisoner's identity but to hide the fact that his identity was already hidden by an iron mask. Reasonable or not, Nelaton's story could, however, be used to support theories other than the one Saint-Foix proposed. Monmouth was not the only English-speaking candidate. One of the very first explanations of the mystery identified the Iron Mask as ‘an English milord' who had been made to disappear by the French secret service thirteen years after Monmouth's execution. Saint-Foix and his contemporaries, including Voltaire, Griffet and Lagrange-Chancel, were unaware of this version, but it was the explanation accepted within the French royal family during Louis XIV's own lifetime.

Just thee years after Monmouth's failed rebellion came the Glorious Revolution in which James was driven from the throne by his nephew and son-in-law, the Dutch prince, William of Orange. In December 1688, James was allowed to escape to France where Louis XIV gave him refuge and support. He had loyal defenders in Scotland and Ireland, but his attempts to re-establish himself the following year with a French-backed army came to nothing. In England William ruled jointly with his wife Mary,
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while James set up a court-in-exile within the court of Louis XIV, his hopes of future restoration bolstered by his host and protector, who persisted in the view that William and Mary were usurpers. Jacobite officers, driven from Britain, flocked to their King in France and served him by serving in the French army against William and his allies.

Sooner or later, the Jacobites believed, the English would reject William as a foreigner, and when Mary died in December 1694 they imagined that William on his own was too unpopular to resist a concerted effort against him. By the following spring agents sent from France were in London to sound out the situation, and in the summer James was informed that to be sure of success the uprising would have to be preceded by the abduction or assassination of William and followed up by his own appearance in England at the head of a large army. As things really were, William had no need to fear the mood of the people. In October he returned from a victorious military campaign against the French in the Spanish Netherlands
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and on the strength of the popularity this gave him, he called an election and established his parliamentary backing more firmly than ever. Nonetheless James decided to go ahead with his plan and in January despatched two of his top officers to London: one to prepare a nationwide insurrection, the other to organize William's elimination.

The first of these was the Duke of Berwick, an illegitimate son of James, born and raised in France. He was twenty-five years of age, but already a soldier for ten years and a field commander of proven ability, holding the rank of lieutenant-general in the French army. The second was Sir George Barclay, about whom little is known beyond the fact that he was a Scotsman in his early sixties who had distinguished himself at the head of Jacobite Highlanders fighting William's troops in Scotland and Ireland. The two men travelled separately but by the same route, embarking on a privateer from France and slipping ashore in England at a smuggler's hideout on the deserted flats of Romney Marsh. Berwick did not stay long. A masked ball was arranged for him at which he was able to meet members of the aristocracy sympathetic to James; however, he achieved little beyond the promise that they would take up arms against William when James was himself in England with an army at his back. When Berwick returned to France, it was clear that everything hinged on Barclay.

In London Barclay made contact with a Catholic priest who was a secret agent and through him passed the word to a group of Jacobite terrorists whose names he had been given before he left. To avoid arousing curiosity he was obliged to change lodgings frequently, but always after nightfall on Mondays and Thursdays he walked under the lamps of Covent Garden with a white handkerchief hanging from his coat-pocket. It was in this way that his future accomplices were able to recognize and approach him. At least twenty men sent from France, in twos and threes by way of Romney Marsh, arrived to join him, while from London and the surrounding countryside he gradually enlisted twenty more. Arms and horses were acquired, the pattern of William's day-to-day movements was established, and a plan was formed. From the very outset, it seems, the aim of the operation was not to kidnap William but to kill him.

William went hunting in Richmond Park every Saturday. He left his palace in Kensington in the early morning and travelled by coach, with an escort of twenty-five guards, through Turnham Green to Chiswick. There he left his coach and took a boat across the Thames. His escort waited with the coach at the landing-stage and brought him back to Kensington by the same route when he returned in the late afternoon. The road between the landing-stage and Turnham Green was narrow and winding, with one section so deep in mud that the coach had difficulty getting through. Here, it was decided, the assault should be made. The commandos were to turn up individually at Turnham Green in the early afternoon and when William was seen to be on his way back across the river, they were to take up their positions on the road in four groups, ready to rush out simultaneously while the coach and guards were labouring through the quagmire. Any guards who survived the opening hail of bullets would be so encumbered by the morass of mud and fallen bodies that they could be despatched without difficulty at close quarters and so, as well as pistols and eight-ball muskets, the commandos were issued with stabbing swords. By February, everything was decided including the date of the operation.

James, meanwhile, was camped at Calais with a French army ready to put to sea. There would be no insurrection, Berwick had told him, unless he was first prepared to invade England for its throne. England would be invaded, he had decided, but first that throne had to be vacated. Barclay had prepared fuel for bonfires on the cliffs of Kent and would light them when his mission was accomplished. It was for that signal that James was waiting.

Among Barclay's forty men, however, three were traitors, and unknown to the rest of the group or to each other they gave warning of the plan to the Earl of Portland, William's friend and confidant. Portland was not prepared to take the first of the informers seriously, but when a second arrived and repeated what the first had said, he thought it wise to play safe. That day was Friday and the ambuscade was fixed for the next day. At Portland's insistence, William cancelled his trip to Richmond and since the weather was cold and stormy gave that as his excuse. Barclay had no reason to suspect treachery and so simply postponed his plan to the following Saturday.

In the course of the week that followed the third informer gave his warning and when Friday came around again, the second informer returned to reiterate his. This time he met William as well as Portland and was persuaded to give more details of the plan, including the names of the ringleaders. The following day William again cancelled his trip to Richmond. This time the reason was that he had some slight illness, but Barclay's suspicions were aroused. When he discovered that the guards at the palace had been doubled and the troops in London put on the alert, he called off the plan and made his escape. Three of the leading conspirators were arrested before dawn and seventeen others before noon the next day. The gates of London were by that time closed and road-blocks had been set up. Within a few days all the conspirators except Barclay had been caught, and the local militia had been called to arms for fear of a French invasion.

The failure of Barclay's mission had far-reaching consequences for James, and they were all bad. William's position was strengthened by a renewed wave of anti-Jacobite, anti-Catholic, anti-French feeling, and this at a time when his handling of affairs at home and abroad was beginning to prove effective. With the prospect of genuine political and economic stability ahead, even Jacobite sympathizers saw James as a divisive rather than an alternative force, too unpredictable and reactionary to be trusted. The Jacobite cause, for the moment at least, was lost, and though James himself did not recognize it his protector, Louis XIV, did. In spring 1697, just one year after the failed insurrection, Louis XIV sued for peace with the English and their allies, offering among other concessions to recognize William as lawful king. The treaty was signed that autumn and in the following year Portland was received at Versailles as the English Ambassador to France.

The marks of dignity and honour shown to Portland by the French were manifest and unstinted, but the difficulties of the new relationship were every day apparent in the problems posed by the presence in the French court of James and his followers. That Louis XIV would continue to treat James as king in name while recognizing William as king in deed was something the English had expected, but they had hoped that the banished king and his court would have been prevented from showing their faces under the nose of William's ambassador. What particularly incensed Portland was the sight of Berwick and Barclay parading with brazen nonchalance before him. In a private audience with Louis XIV, he accused them of being arch-conspirators in the recent plot to assassinate his king and demanded their extradition. Louis denied categorically that Berwick had ever been a party to such a crime, and though for Barclay he could make no such denial, he protested that he did not know what had become of the man. Not only was Portland unable to lay hands on Berwick, he was thereafter unable to lay eyes on Barclay, and in the absence of further provocation from him was obliged to let the matter drop. What happened to Berwick is now recorded history: he became a naturalized Frenchman and a Marshal of France, celebrated as the victor of the battle of Almansa. What happened to Barclay, no one knows – unless, as some imagined, he became the Man in the Iron Mask.

It was just thirteen years after Barclay's disappearance that the Princess Palatine heard tell of a mysterious prisoner and wrote to her aunt the Electress of Hanover to tell her about it. The man had died in the Bastille after many years of imprisonment, during all of which time he had been forced to wear a mask even when he lay down to sleep. There had been guards beside him day and night with orders to kill him if he tried to take the mask off, and yet he was otherwise very well looked after, well-lodged, well-fed and given everything he desired. Who he was and why he was treated in this strange way, no one could ever find out. The letter containing this information was written on 10 October 1711 and twelve days later was followed by another explaining that in the interval the Princess had been allowed into the secret.

‘I've just learned the identity of the masked man who died in the Bastille. It was not out of cruelty that he was made to wear a mask. He was an English milord who had been mixed up in the Duke of Berwick affair against King William. He died like this so that the King could never learn what had become of him.' Which King it was who could not be allowed to know about the prisoner is not at once evident. In a letter from Versailles, reference to ‘the King' ought to mean Louis XIV, but it seems hardly possible that he is meant. Presumably it is William who is referred to, and the explanation appears to be that Louis XIV had Barclay imprisoned and his identity kept secret in prison to avoid him being kidnapped by William's agents. The need for the mask could then be explained by the fact that an anti-Jacobite spy would have recognized Barclay if ever he saw his face, and that many of the prisoners in the Bastille were there precisely because they were suspected of being British or Dutch agents. Since prisoners usually lived two or three to the same cell, short-term and long-term prisoners together, and were moreover obliged to change cells or cell-mates frequently, messages were easily passed from one prisoner to another and from inside the prison to the outside world. If by chance another prisoner had seen and recognized Barclay in the Bastille, William would have been told.

NOTES

1
.   
Henri IV
: King of France, b. 1553, reigned 1589–1610.

2
.   Charles I was executed on 30 January 1649.

3
.   Charles II: King of England, b. 1630, reigned 1660–1685.

4
.   William of Orange: b. 1650, Stadtholder of Holland 1672–1689, became William III, King of England, 1689–1702.

5
.   Emperor: Leopold I, Archduke of Austria and Holy Roman Emperor, b. 1640, reigned 1658–1705.

6
.   James in exile: having reigned as James II from 1685 to 1688, he lived in exile in France until his death in 1701.

7
.   Mary II: Queen of England, b. 1662 reigned 1689–1694 Daughter of James II.

8
.   Spanish Netherlands: modern Belgium.

5

AND EVEN MORE

T
wenty-three years before Barclay's attempted assassination of William, there was an abortive bid on the life of Louis XIV and, according to Théodore Jung, whose book
La Verité sur le Masque de fer
appeared in 1873, the Iron Mask was the ringleader of that conspiracy. At the time of his arrest, this man gave his name as Louis Oldendorf and claimed to be a Dutch national from Nijmegen but, when the French secret service first discovered him, he was in Brussels and was using at least two other names as well: Kiffenbach and Harmoises. Nothing more is known of his background, but Jung argues that he was a young nobleman from Lorraine who had previously been a cavalry officer in the service of the Empire, and whose true name might well have been ‘Marchiel', as the Iron Mask's name at burial was once transcribed.