The Man Behind the Iron Mask (32 page)

Preparations for the young man's departure were begun at once, but again there was a hitch. It being the custom in the Society, a Jesuit father was chosen to accompany him. Within a week another letter arrived from Charles to say that he had been advised by the Queen Mother and by Madame, his sister, that his son would probably be obliged to travel with a companion. It was however of the greatest importance that his son was not accompanied by an Italian. Suspicions would otherwise be aroused. His son should travel under the name of Henri de Rohan, as though he were a member of a noble French Protestant family well-known to the King, and under no circumstances was anyone to arrive in England with him. The Father-General would have to provide his son with money for the journey, but Charles would keep good account of all he owed.

The young man left Livorno on 14 October 1668 carrying a letter for Charles from the Father-General. He was accompanied by a Jesuit father, but the agreement was that he should leave him somewhere in France and collect him on his return. When he reappeared in Rome, sometime in mid-December, he was alone and was carrying two letters for the Father-General, both purporting to have been written by Charles at Whitehall on 18 November. In the first of these, Charles explained that his son had returned to Rome with a message of great importance for the Father-General, a request of some kind from Charles which he would deliver by word of mouth, and as soon as he had obtained what was asked he was to return to London. On his way back, he was to pick up the Jesuit father, who had accompanied him on his previous journey out and who was still waiting for him in France, and take him along to London.

Since the letter was false and involved the Jesuit companion in its fictions, it seems possible that the Jesuit companion was also false. If that were so, it would help to explain how a young man of twenty-four was able to arrive out of the blue to accomplish this kind of deception Such a prodigy working on his own would surely have found himself easier and more rewarding victims to cheat than the Society of Jesus. All in all it seems reasonable to suppose that the young impostor was merely the front-man in someone else's stratagem, someone on the inside with sufficient access to secret files to know of Bellings' mission and sufficient knowledge of the Father-General to dupe him: a Jesuit to outsmart a Jesuit. Such a conjecture would fit the circumstances of what took place up to and after the end of 1668 with a fair degree of plausibility.

Since the forged letters were written in French, one might even assume that the accomplice was a French Jesuit and that he set up the hoax in the expectation that he would be given responsibility for supervising the studies of a postulant who spoke nothing but French. Thus he would have been confident that from the very start of the operation he would be able to control and direct developments at source. Also, as the young man's mentor, he would have considered himself the natural choice to accompany him on any journey he made. One might suppose that when arrangements were begun for the young man's departure to London another Jesuit, an Italian, was chosen to be his companion, and that it was for this reason that a letter arrived from Charles at the last minute to say that under no circumstances was his son to be accompanied by an Italian. Presumably the accomplice, being French, was then recognized to be the best choice and allowed to leave the novitiate with the young man as he had originally intended.

Be that as it may, the letters the young man was carrying make it clear that the chief reason for his return to Rome was to defraud the Father-General of a large sume of money. The first letter went on to say that Charles had heard from his son that the Jesuit house was badly in need of money and so he was going to assist them with a large donation before the year was out. In the meantime, however, he wanted the Father-General to provide for his son in any way he asked. He would keep an account of it all and settle with him later. The second letter was nothing less than an IOU, written by Charles, in which he promised to pay the Father General the sum of £20,000 within six months and, in a postscript, to pay an additional £800 to cover the travel expenses of his son, also within six months.

Exactly how much money the young man was able to extract from the Jesuits on the strength of these two letters we do not know. An extraordinary stroke of luck made that precise moment especially favourable for him, but it was then or never that the money had to be realized. By a strange coincidence, the events the swindlers had been pretending for the past few months were suddenly overtaken by similar events in reality. Soon after the young man returned to the novitiate with his two counterfeit letters from Charles, a genuine letter reached Rome from Charles's brother, James. It explained that he was a Roman Catholic by conviction and wished to know if it was permissible for him to practice the Roman faith in secret while continuing to practice the Anglican faith in public. That James should have been thinking along the same lines as the Jesuits believed Charles to be, must have had the immediate effect of strengthening the young man's position, but it was a position which in a short time was liable to collapse completely. There could be no question of continuing the hoax of a pretended contact with Charles once a real contact was made with his brother. The Jesuits at that time, however, with their confidence boosted, were as ready to be cheated as they ever would be. The swindlers had to get what they could, while they could, then vanish, and in fact so far as the Jesuits were concerned, James de La Cloche did disappear at this very moment.

On 27 December 1668, the day Claude Roux was drawing up his report for Arlington, hoping to persuade Charles II to send him as his envoy to the next Diet of the Swiss Confederation – the time also that James de La Cloche was leaving Rome with a large sum of money borrowed in the King's name from the General of the Jesuit Society – Charles II wrote to his sister Henrietta of England, the wife of Louis XIV's brother, about some secret business known to no one in England but himself and ‘one person more'. The secret business was his decision to become a Roman Catholic and to bring England back into the Roman Catholic Church. The ‘one person more' might have been Bellings, who had been entrusted with Charles' mission to Rome six years before, or one of three ministers: Arlington, Arundel and Clifford.

Anti-Catholic sentiment in England was fierce and opposition within the government itself to such a move would have been so powerful that in retrospect it is difficult to imagine how Charles could have believed his plans had any hope of success. He realized of course that he would be putting his throne and possible his life in jeopardy, that the strength of Protestant resistance might even unleash another civil war, but he believed that with outside help he could control the situation. For this financial and military backing, he turned to Louis XIV. In another letter to his sister on 20 January, he wrote: ‘I am now thinking of the way how to proceede in this whole matter, which must be carried on with all secrecy imaginable, till the particulars are further agreed upon … I send you, heere enclosed, my letter to the king, my brother, desireing that this matter might passe through your handes, as the person in the world I have most confidence in.'

While he was actually writing this, Charles received a letter from his sister, conveyed to him by someone who, so far as one can gather, had been entrusted with it in spite of the fact that neither Charles nor his sister knew anything about him. ‘I had written thus far,' Charles wrote, ‘when I received yours by the Italian, whose name and capacity you do not know, and he delivered your letter to me in a passage, where it was so darke, as I do not know his face againe if I see him; so as the man is likely to succeede, when his recommendation and reception are so suitable to one another.' The passage in the letter is every bit as obscure as the passage in which the meeting took place, but the most reasonable explanation seems to be that the Italian had come from Rome carrying an answer to James's question and, having stopped off in Paris on his way, had been entrusted with a letter by Madame, on the recommendation of someone she could trust.

It was certainly at about this time that James received his answer from Rome, because what he learned from it obliged him to confide his problem to Charles and led to the secret meeting with Arlington, Arundel and Clifford on 25 January. Under no circumstances, he learned from Rome, was it permissible for a Roman Catholic to attend the services of any other religion. He could not continue to be an Anglican in public if he accepted the Roman Catholic faith. To Charles he declared that he was determined to become a Roman Catholic no matter what the consequences might be; to him Charles explained that he also intended to embrace the Roman faith, but only when he was sure that he could control the consequences well enough to take his kingdom into the Catholic Church with him. At that same secret meeting, Charles disclosed his plan for seeking the support of Louis XIV and chose Arundel to go to Paris to negotiate it.

Meanwhile, in Rome, the Father-General of the Society of Jesus fondly imagined that James de La Cloche was in London, engaged in secret confabulations with his father, Charles, about the promised donation towards the upkeep of the Jesuit house. And meanwhile, in Naples, sometime in that same January of 1669, two wealthy travellers turned up: one who though professing to be English spoke only French and later gave himself out to be the son of Charles II; and the other a Frenchman who claimed to be a Knight of the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem. The Frenchman took ship for Malta soon after and the Englishman, who was in poor health, was left alone in the kindly hands of a poor Neapolitan innkeeper and a simple parish priest.

At first he made no claim to be the Prince Stuart, though the parish priest later claimed that he had revealed this to him in secret and had produced two documents to prove it – a letter from the Queen of Sweden and another from the General of the Jesuits. Whatever the papers were which the parish priest saw, they were certainly not what the young man professed them to be. One must suppose that the parish priest was barely literate himself and pretended to read and recognize what it was the young man told him was there. In fact, as emerged later, he had no papers with him at all to back up his claim. At what stage he included the innkeeper and his family in the confidence is not known, but the fact that he was a rich foreigner, on his own and ready to be exploited, made him important enough in their eyes without the need for further claims; he had been in Naples for little more than a month when he was married to the innkeeper's daughter. Why there should have been such a haste to the altar may be at least partly explained by the fact that a child was born just less than nine months later. Perhaps the young man was beguiled into the arms of the innkeeper's daughter at a time when the innkeeper was able to discover him there and oblige him to make an honest woman of her. The wedding took place in the cathedral of Naples on 19 February and the young man gave his name as Jacobo Enrico de Bovere Roano Stuardo: a compilation of James Stuart and Henri de Rohan. He paid the wedding bill, of course, and even provided a dowry for the bride. By March, the jubilant innkeeper was on a spending spree with his son-in-law's money, and local envy and suspicion bred rumours that the foreign young man was a coiner of false money. By order of the Spanish Viceroy of Naples, the inn was raided and the young man arrested.

Among his effects were found 200 doubloons
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cash, a number of jewels and some letters in which he was addressed as ‘Highness', but nothing incriminating. The authorities were nonetheless inquisitive and stupidly he tried to bluff his way through with the pretence that he was the Prince Stuart. Presumably because he was without the know-how and imagination of his accomplice, he was very soon out of his depth. The English consul was brought in to help clarify the situation, but found that the young man could speak no English and could produce no recognizable credentials. At his own request he was allowed to write to the General of the Jesuits in Rome, begging him to intercede. The Viceroy himself meanwhile wrote to Charles II for verification and, to play safe until he received an answer, he had the young man confined in the castle of Gaeta, well attended at a cost of 50 scudi
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per month. Whether the Father-General ever received a letter or replied is not known, but at the beginning of June a reply from Charles arrived disclaiming all knowledge of the young man. The Viceroy had him brought back to Naples and thrown into the common prison. There was talk of having him whipped through the streets at the cart's tail as a common impostor, but, at the supplication of his wife's family and the intercession of the Viceroy's wife, he was allowed to go free.

Not surprisingly he then left Naples, probably with the intention of never setting foot there again, but in August he was back, very ill and needing to be looked after. He now claimed to his wife's family that he had 50,000 pistoles and was going to take them all to Venice to live. His mother, the Lady Mary Henrietta Stuart of the Barons of Saint-Marzo, an altogether fictitious name, had died and left him an estate worth 80,000 scudi per annum. Before the end of August, however, he was dead himself, and found to be penniless. His father-in-law, who had supported him since his return and had even loaned him money to pay a notary to draw up his will, was also obliged to pay for his burial. The will, written in Italian, was an absurd piece of make-believe magnificence. To his unborn child he left his late mother's estate, and to his parents-in-law and their three other children, 50 scudi per annum each, assigning as security for the payment of this his personal estate, the purely fictitious Marquisate of Juvignis worth 300,000 scudi per annum. To his ‘father', Charles II, he commended his unborn child and asked that if he were a boy he would grant him ‘the ordinary principality either of Wales or Monmouth, or other province customary to be given to the natural sons of the Crown.' As his executor and the guardian of his child, he named his ‘cousin', Louis XIV.