10
Edith 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.
Even in historical romances there is a limit to how much the reader’s disbelief can be suspended, and when one recalls that on this very day, 20 January 1669, Charles wrote to Louis XIV proposing a secret alliance, it would seem that this limit has been reached. Nevertheless, for what it is worth, Pagnol’s story continues like this. The young man, overwhelmed by the discovery of his true identity and frightened by the warnings of what would happen to him if ever his twin brother Louis XIV found out about him, allowed himself to be persuaded that his only hope lay in the success of the revolution planned by the Committee of Ten. Roux promised him the throne of France and in the meantime had him pose as his valet under the name Martin. Whether there was ever an actual valet called Martin, Pagnol does not make clear, but he does present us with another valet unnamed who takes advantage of the situation to make off with the Jesuit’s money and escape to Naples. The marriage and death of the Prince Stuart recorded there was this man’s story, and nothing to do with James de La Cloche. Roux left London in March and was arrested in May. He confessed under interrogation in June that the aim of his conspiracy was to oust Louis XIV in favour of his twin brother, who was at that moment living in London disguised as a valet. Lionne thought him mad but played safe anyway, and in July had James de La Cloche kidnapped and locked up in Pignerol under the name ‘Eustache Dauger’. That Pagnol could seriously offer this rigmarole, as an elucidation of the mystery of the Iron Mask, is no small mystery in itself.
Lang, Carey and Pagnol were not the only Iron Mask hunters to carry the search into the undergrowth of political and religious intrigue in England in 1668 and 1669. The plots and counter-plots, deals and double-deals surrounding Charles II, along with the pretended involvement and unexpected entanglement of James de La Cloche, have all the makings of a secret worthy of the Iron Mask. Not surprisingly they have provided yet another theory and yet another candidate. In the view of Arthur Barnes, whose bookThe Man of the Mask was published in 1912, the secret of how the Iron Mask was employed before he was imprisoned was what Charles II called ‘the great secret’: his plan to use the financial and military support of Louis XIV to take his kingdom back into the Roman Catholic Church. In this respect, Barnes trod the same ground as Carey, but in his version of things the Iron Mask was a different man altogether: ‘a mysterious priest-astrologer’ by the name of Pregnani. It is known from reliable sources of the time that this man visited Charles from France in February 1669 and vanished on his return to France in July 1669, his disappearance thus coinciding perfectly with the arrest of Eustache Dauger. What follows is the generally accepted account of Pregnani’s visit to England.
When, at the end of January 1669, Louis XIV received a secret letter from Charles II asking for his support, he was naturally very interested. An alliance with England was very much to Louis XIV’s advantage. His ambitions for territorial expansion to the north and north-east had been checked less than a year before by the alliance between England, Holland and Sweden. In summer 1667 he had invaded and conquered large areas of the Spanish Netherlands, and in February 1668 had occupied the Franche Comté which also belonged to Spain. England and Holland, whose maritime and commercial rivalry had kept them at war with each other for two years, patched up their differences in July 1667 and entered a joint alliance against French expansion in January 1668. In the following April they brought Sweden into the alliance, and in May obliged the French to accept terms which limited their gains to Flanders. So far as Louis XIV was concerned, this peace was only a truce until the balance of power in Europe could be weighted his way and the frontiers of France could be extended to include the whole of the Spanish Netherlands, the Franche Comté and the Duchy of Lorraine. In return for supporting Charles against the Protestants in England, he therefore hoped to receive English support against the Dutch and Spanish in Europe. In his opinion, however, Charles was too devious and secretive, too frivolous and capricious to be relied upon, and so far as he could see the sympathies of his chief minister, Arlington, were not inclined to France. Arlington, it seemed, was strongly in favour of a pro-Dutch foreign policy and by all reports he had been in secret communication with Roux. Louis XIV was understandably cautious about the new relationship and glad when an opportunity presented itself to have someone worm his way into Charles’s confidence to watch and influence him.
In February 1669, the Duke of Monmouth wrote to the Abbé Pregnani, an Italian priest resident in France, inviting him to England. Pregnani was a member of the Theatine Order, which was well-known in Italy and Spain but not elsewhere. The congregation was established in 1524 as part of the effort of the Roman Church to reform itself from within, the aim of its founders being to provide an example of poverty and spirituality to Roman Catholic clergy too often interested in wealth and worldly affairs. Monmouth, however, was not at all interested in the aims of the Theatine Order, nor to all appearances was Pregnani. The ladies of the French court, including Madame, the sister of Charles II, were Pregnani’s chief concern and they took delight in his company because of his ability to tell fortunes from the stars. The Duke of Monmouth had met him on a recent visit to Madame in France, and Pregnani had revealed his past so accurately and foretold his future so favourably that they had become great friends. As well as being an expert in astrology, Pregnani was something of an adept in chemistry and, since Charles II had a passion for both of these sciences, Monmouth thought it would amuse his father to meet him. Louis XIV, informed of the invitation, had Pregnani briefed. Since Charles was as likely to be influenced by astrological suggestions as he was by logical proposals, Pregnani was to convince him by the movements of the stars that his only good and sure alliance was with France. He was to involve himself as much as possible in the King’s amusements and the informal life of the court, and to give a daily account to Croissy of all that transpired.
Pregnani arrived in London on 26 February and took rooms in Covent Garden with Gerard, the French wine-merchant used by Roux as a postal agent. Roux himself was to slip out of England a few days later just as Lionne received information that he was in London. Pregnani visited the Duke of Monmouth that same day to pay his respects and at the same time sent a servant to Croissy with his letter of introduction from Lionne. On the following day he called upon Croissy to receive a more detailed briefing on the English court, and then he went to work. His début was a great success. There was a certain young lady at court whom Monmouth, Charles and James were all trying to seduce, and Monmouth asked Pregnani to tell him which one of them would be the first to succeed. Pregnani, without having seen this fortunate creature, was able to describe her character and appearance, her past life and current behaviour with such precision that everyone was impressed. The King, convinced by this that he had ‘a great deale of witt’ and was ‘very ingenious in all things’, asked him to draw up his horoscope and invited him to join the court at Newmarket the following week.
Pregnani was immediately popular, but not with everyone. Soon after his arrival, the Duke of Buckingham was informed by his sister, writing from the French court, that Madame had sent Pregnani to London for the express purpose of negotiating with Charles and Monmouth behind his back. Negotiating what, Buckingham did not know, but assumed that it must be something to his personal disadvantage, and his attitude to Pregnani was in consequence hostile and suspicious. As it was, Buckingham’s attention was thus distracted from Arundel’s visit to Paris and what was really happening behind his back.
The ingenious fortune-teller was not popular for long, however. At Newmarket he made a foolish and fateful blunder. Since he was supposed to be a prophet, some wag suggested he ought to be able to predict the winners. The challenge was made and accepted. Monmouth and James backed his forecasts heavily and lost a lot of money. For them it was amusing, but for their less wealthy friends and hangers-on, their servants and lackeys, who backed the same horses, it was a disaster. Pregnani’s reputation as an astrolger collapsed. Buckingham’s attitude to him was sweetened by the incident and Charles continued to enjoy his company, but no one took him seriously any more. He became at best a figure of fun, ridiculed mercilessly on all sides. Realizing that if he proved a failure in England he would lose all credit in France, the poor man delayed reporting his blunder to Croissy until the end of March, by which time he claimed he could still win the King’s confidence and bring serious influence to bear through the horoscope he was preparing. Croissy believed him and Lionne gave him the benefit of the doubt, but jokes made about him in the English court were soon being repeated in the French court. In May Lionne wrote to Croissy ordering him to arrange Pregnani’s return.
Pregnani, desperate to salvage his prestige, begged for more time. ‘If the Abbé Pregnani is not successful here, it will not be for lack of zeal or ability in the service of the King’, Croissy told Lionne and argued for letting him stay in London a little longer. Pregnani, however, was more concerned to enlist a king in his own service and prevailed upon Charles to defend his name in Paris. ‘I find the poore Abbé Pregnani very much troubled,’ Charles wrote to Madame on 6 May, ‘for feare that the railleries about foretelling the horsematches may have done him some prejudice with you, which I hope it has not done, for he was only trying new tricks, which he had read of in bookes, and gave as little credit to them as we did. Pray continue to be his friend so much as to hinder all you can any prejudice that may come to him upon that score, for the man has witt enough, and is as much your servant as possible, which makes me love him.’ Pregnani had certainly succeeded in winning Charles’s serious attention and concern, but only in so far as he had proved himself such a serious failure that no one would be concerned to pay any attention to him ever again.
Lionne repeated his command that Pregnani be withdrawn, but again Croissy put him off. The post of ambassador had been given to Croissy because he was Colbert’s brother, and in truth he was not up to it. Roux had been living under his nose in London, visiting Whitehall and the embassies of Holland, Spain and Austria for at least three months without him realizing it, and Charles thought him so obtuse that he refused to have him brought into the full secret of his dealings with France. Pregnani had no difficulty convincing him that with a little more time he could achieve his mission, and it was not until mid-June, after Lionne’s third demand, that Croissy finally told Pregnani to leave. The departure was fixed for 25 June, but Pregnani managed to hang on still longer and left at last only on 5 July.
Between English dates and French dates at that time there was a difference of ten days, because France had adopted the revised calendar promulgated by Rome while England had kept to the old one. The 5 July in England was therefore the 15 July in France. When he left London, Pregnani was carrying a letter for Lionne from Croissy, but apparently he took his time along the way, and did not deliver it until after Lionne had received two subsequent letters from Croissy sent by normal post; at least that is what Lionne told Croissy in the reply he wrote on 27 July. The return of the astrologer was not noticed at the French court, but since his reputation there also had been destroyed by the disaster at Newmarket, the lack of interest is hardly surprising.
That Pregnani’s story was as simple as that, Barnes refused to believe. Charles usually gave the appearance of being a fool only when he was being particularly clever and Pregnani, who made such a poor show as an astrologer, was after all a priest. It was evident that in his seemingly frivolous way Charles enjoyed Pregnani’s company immensely, and since both were adepts in chemistry, no further excuse was necessary for the two of them to spend a lot of time together in private. Thus for four months, while Pregnani was at the English court, Charles had direct and easy access to the services of a priest. The timing for this extraordinary state of affairs was significant: it had come about, as though by chance, just one month after Charles had committed himself to a plan which if successful would make him and his kingdom Catholic. It was not, Barnes concluded, the work of chance. Charles himself had arranged the whole thing. After years of indecision, something had prompted him to act out his religious convictions, to seek the political support of Louis XIV and to have the spiritual support of this priest. And what had happened to arouse his conscience and courage in this way was nothing less than divine intervention, albeit through the impious workings of the impostor James de La Cloche.
Barnes took up the story of James de La Cloche on his arrival in Naples in January 1669. While he saw no reason to contest the generally accepted view that the young man was a fraud, he did not accept the idea that he had an accomplice. In his opinion the man who turned up with him in Naples was the Jesuit companion whom he abandoned in France, a genuinely loyal and trusted member of the Society of Jesus. La Cloche, having left him in France, had not expected to see him again. His story to the Father-General, about picking him up again on his return through France and taking him on with him to England, had been a simple stratagem to get away without supervision of any kind when he left Rome the second time. Unhappily for that stratagem, however, the Jesuit companion had grown anxious waiting without news in France and had returned to Rome to ask for instructions. La Cloche had thus been caught in his own trickery. The companion had naturally expected to go with him again and this time all the way to London.
Before leaving Rome the two of them had been given a reply to the questions asked by James as well as a message for Charles, and they were in Naples to find a ship for England. La Cloche realized at this point that he could not keep up the game any longer and so he pretended to be ill. The Jesuit companion suspected nothing and, conscious of the importance and urgency of their mission, decided to continue the journey alone. Before going to Charles in London, he visited Madame in Paris; it was he who, on 20 January, met Charles in the dark passage, appearing unbidden like an emissary from heaven to remind Charles of his own most secret doubts and aspirations. From Charles, he returned to Madame, and from Madame, a month later, he returned to Charles, this time openly as Pregnani, an altogether false identity invented for him by Charles.
Having got thus far on a simple play of ingenuity and plausibility, Barnes chose to make unnecessary difficulties for himself, and ran his theory into dull and clumsy improbabilities. The priest’s false identity was invented by Charles, but Louis XIV collaborated in setting it up. At the request of Charles, Louis had his minister Lionne write to his ambassador Croissy and deliberately deceive him into the belief not only that Pregnani was a celebrated astrologer from the French court, but also that he was a secret agent for the government. Why Louis XIV should have wished to mislead his own ambassador and jeopardize the security of his own secret service is difficult to imagine and the puzzle is made no easier by a further claim from Barnes that Louis XIV did not know who Pregnani really was or why Charles wanted to have him in England. Barnes did have Louis XIV realize the stupidity of this action, but not until three months had passed. Meanwhile, Croissy made the understandable assumption that Pregnani was as informed as he was on Louis XIV’s secret intentions and so took him entirely into his confidence. The poor priest thus ended up knowing more than was good for him, which was the reason why Lionne demanded his return to France and why, when eventually Croissy got around to sending him there, he disappeared. Vauroy was waiting for him when he stepped off the boat in Dunkirk and whisked him straight off to Pignerol under the name of Eustache Dauger.
It would have been a good deal less complicated and more convincing if Barnes had argued that to bring Pregnani into existence Charles only needed the collaboration of Madame and the cooperation of Monmouth. In that case, he might have proposed that Louis XIV was just as much deceived as everyone else, that he made the mistake of engaging the man as his agent without probing his background and later, when he realized that the Pregnani identity was a complete fabrication, had the man arrested as a double agent. The priest’s knowledge of the secret negotiations between England and France was a good enough reason for his imprisonment; and the need to keep his imprisonment secret, not only from Charles but also from the Society of Jesus, was a good enough reason for hiding his identity as completely as possible.
Of all the theories which trace the Iron Mask to the undercurrents of English politics in 1669 this one is certainly the best, and yet unhappily it must be rejected together with the rest. Pregnani did not disappear altogether in July 1669, nor indeed did he appear for the first time in the preceding January. Primi Visconti, the Venetian ambassador to Paris, who was himself something of a fortune-teller, knew Pregnani well enough to mention him in his Mémoires sur la cour de Louis XIV. According to him Pregnani did come from Naples, but only in as much as he was a Neapolitan by birth. Before his arrival at the French court, he had been at the Bavarian court and, on the recommendation of the Electress Adelaide, Louis XIV had given him a living at Beaubec near Dieppe in Normandy. He was indeed a Theatine priest, Visconti says, but altogether dissolute and in fact defrocked. What happened to him when he left England, Visconti does not explain, but it seems reasonable to assume that he stopped off at Beaubec on his way to Paris and this accounted for his delay in delivering Croissy’s letter to Lionne. After that, with his reputation at the French court ruined by the Newmarket fiasco, he no doubt moved on, hoping to win patronage in some less hostile corner of Europe. What is certain is that he ended up in Rome where, Visconti says, ‘he died, putrified by shameful diseases, in spite of numerous horoscopes which were found on his table according to which he predicted for himself that he would one day be Pope.’