4
If the name ‘Marchiali’ is an anagram of ‘hic amiral’, it could be applied equally well to another candidate: the predecessor of Vermandois as Grand Admiral of France, François de Vendôme, Duc de Beaufort. His candidature was first canvassed by Lagrange-Chancel in his letter to Fréron in 1758 and though at the time few people were prepared to take the proposition seriously, it has been argued again as recently as 1960.
Beaufort had the same royal grandfather as Louis XIV, his father Cesar de Bourbon, Duc de Vendôme, being the eldest son of Henri IV.1 Vendôme was older than Louis XIII by seven years, but illegitimate, being one of three royal children, two boys and a girl, born to Gabrielle d’Estrées, Duchesse de Beaufort. Vendôme also had three children, two boys and a girl, of whom Beaufort was the youngest. Big and brawny with long blond hair, Beaufort looked like a Viking and his looks did not belie him. Having been raised in the country with an education limited to the arts of combat and the hunt, he was a true barbarian: a superb athlete and a prodigious fighter, uncouth and almost illiterate, simpleminded, thick-skinned and self-assertive. He saw himself as acting a central rôle in the affairs of the state and played to the gallery for all it was worth, propelling himself into the spotlight whenever the opportunity offered. His oafish lack of manners and his naive lack of discernment made him a figure of ridicule at court; but it was this very absence of education and refinement, this honest muddle-headed blundering in search of a hero’s rôle, which drew the ordinary people to him, while his genuine courage and energy in war and adversity earned him the admiration of all.
In 1636, at the age of twenty, he had already won honour and favour by distinguishing himself in action against the Spanish, but in the intrigues of court he took the side of the disgraced Queen, Anne of Austria, and the enemies of Louis XIII’s minister, Cardinal Richelieu. His father had always been prominent in the factions hostile to Richelieu and from 1626 to 1630 had been imprisoned at Vincennes for involvement in the Chalais Conspiracy. In 1642, he himself was implicated in another conspiracy against Richelieu, having to take refuge in England, but later that same year Richelieu died and so he was able to return. The Queen had absolute confidence in him. In her own words he was ‘the most honest man in France’ and, on the eve of the King’s death in May 1643, she entrusted her children to his safekeeping, afraid that the King’s brother, Gaston, or the Prince de Condé, who was commander-in-chief of the army, might attempt to kidnap the future King.
In the power struggle which followed, however, the Queen as Regent found her true champion not in the plain he-man Beaufort but in the wily con-man Mazarin. Opposition to Mazarin rallied behind Beaufort, but in September 1643 the Queen had him arrested and imprisoned at Vincennes. There he remained, rejected and ignored, until in May 1648 he managed to slip past his guards and escape. By that time the political situation had degenerated into an open squabble between Mazarin and the Parlement of Paris, the first of a confused series of violent conflicts, known later under the general name of the Fronde. Mazarin had the backing of the Queen, but the people of Paris gave their support to the Parlement with such vigour that she and her children fled the city and appealed to Condé for protection. The only other great military commander in France at that time, Maréchal Turenne, was sympathetic to the Parlement, but he failed to win over the troops under his command and so took refuge with the Spanish. Beaufort then offered his services to the Parlement and with a group of other nobles was given command of a newly raised army of 12,000 men.
These troops, untrained, undisciplined and ill-equipped, were so ignominously routed by the forces of the Queen led by Condé that their generals were ridiculed and their efforts turned to laughter. Condé himself called the conflict ‘the war of the chamber-pots’ and said it should only be recorded in comic verse. For Beaufort however the experience turned out to be a personal triumph. The common people of Paris were captivated by him and their adulation was not diminished by his defeat. In the time the conflict lasted he lived in the heart of the city and mixed with his raggle-taggle neighbours on equal terms, drinking and joking with them, gossiping and arguing, brawling and womanising. His enemies called him the ‘King of the Market’ but at a time when the King of England had just been executed by his people2 and the King of France was in hiding from his, it was not a title to be scoffed at.
In the course of 1649 everyone changed partners. Condé and the generals who had been opposed to him joined forces against the rest and in January 1650 the rest collaborated to have three of the generals, including Condé, arrested. Condé’s supporters in the country threatened insurrection, and in February 1651 the Queen banished Mazarin and had the three generals released. Beaufort at this time kept guard on the Palais Royal to be sure that the Queen did not try to take the young King to join Mazarin. For all his supposed stupidity, Beaufort demonstrated more consistency than most of his fellow disputants. Throughout the length of this burlesque and bloody war, his actions were motivated only by his opposition to Mazarin, and this in spite of the fact that his father had aligned himself with Mazarin from the first and, in that very month of February, his elder brother had taken one of Mazarin’s nieces in marriage.
Condé, meanwhile, impatient for a showdown, left Paris to raise an army and in January 1652 Mazarin returned from exile, also with an army. Then in a final comic-book change-about, Condé who had won all his glory as a general in victories over the Spanish army turned to Spain for help, while Mazarin gave the command of his forces to Turenne, who just three years before had tried to get his troops to turn against Mazarin and had since then been fighting with the Spanish against the French. Beaufort and his sister’s husband, the Duc de Nemours, shared the command under Condé. Their victories were brilliant, their defeats honourable, but for Beaufort the experience was a personal disaster. He quarrelled with his brother-in-law and in July 1652 fought and killed him in a duel. Twelve days later Mazarin was dismissed from office and his enemies, with the exception of Condé, were finally persuaded to submit to the will of the young King. Beaufort was banished from Paris and the court and was not restored to favour until six years later. Mazarin, by contrast, was recalled to office after only six months.
In 1663, two years after the death of Mazarin, Beaufort succeeded his father as Grand Admiral of France, a post which included control over trade as well as war, his full title being ‘Grand Master, Chief and Superintendent-General of the Navigation and Commerce of France’. As it was, however, the ships and men which constituted the French Fleet at the time were a beggarly assortment not even capable of protecting the French coast from pirate raids. Louis XIV’s ministers were aware of the need to build a new fleet, and Colbert especially was convinced of the enormous political and economic advantages to be had from a major investment in sea-power; but none of the ministers, Colbert in particular, was prepared to see Beaufort at the head of such an enterprise. Both the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of War sought to supervise and control the new admiral. His authority was questioned, restricted, undermined, and yet he went to work with such dash and drive to transform the little he had into a fighting force that in the following year he was able to begin a series of expeditions against the Barbary pirates along the coast of the Maghreb. As always his personal valour in the fighting was spectacular and his popularity with the lower ranks resounding, but as in any campaign he ever led the endeavour itself, though not an outright failure, was far from being a success.
In 1669, Louis XIV was persuaded by the Vatican to send an expedition to Crete, at that time known as Candy, to help the Venetians against the Turks. For twenty-four years the island had been under siege and only the chief city, which is today Iraklion, had not surrendered. The reasons which motivated Louis XIV to make such a gesture were political not religious, but in appearance at least it was a crusade against the infidel. The expeditionary force was 7,000 strong and was led by the Duc de Navailles with Beaufort in overall command. The Duc de Vivonne, who was the brother of the King’s new mistress, Athénais de Montespan, was commander of the galleys and among the other officers was Colbert’s brother, Colbert de Maulevrier, and Beaufort’s nephew, the young Philippe de Vendôme. From the Pope, Beaufort received the title ‘Captain-General of the Naval Army of the Church’ and from the King the order that under no circumstances was he personally to set foot on Crete or engage in any fighting.
The fleet reached Crete on 19 June and found the city in a worse plight than had been anticipated; one of the two bastions already fallen, the streets burning and blocked with debris, the population decimated and in despair, the garrison reduced to half its number, sick and demoralized. Beaufort joined Navailles in a council of war with the Venetian commanders. Morosini and Montbrun, at which it was decided to disembark the troops by night on the 24th for a sortie at first light on the 25th. Against the express orders of the King and the earnest advice of everyone else, Beaufort refused to be left on board. He went ashore with the troops and took command of the left wing with Colbert’s brother.
When the attack began, the Turks, taken by surprise, ran for their lives and the French went after them deep into their camp. In the midst of the charging ranks, however, an ammunition dump, hit by a chance bullet, blew up; a battalion of French Guards was suddenly and completely annihilated. Shock and confusion at the tremendous explosion, horror and incomprehension at the appalling carnage, stopped the French army in its tracks; then, convinced that the ground ahead was mined, the front line turned back upon the rest. The French troops who stood firm were trampled by the troops who fled, or took them for Turks in the dark and cut them down. The Turks finding themselves at an advantage launched a counter-attack and what was left of the French army broke up. Beaufort, trying to rally his troops, was abandoned on the field and only when the beaten army had taken refuge inside the city was it realized that he was missing.
Two days later, the Intendant of the Fleet, whose name was Brodart, wrote to Colbert to report that Beaufort was still missing and that whether he was ‘dead or captive’ no one could say. All that was known for certain was that he had been ‘left among the enemy’. Spies had been sent into the Turkish camp to find out what had happened. Sometime later one such spy was said to have reported that Beaufort was dead, that he had been killed in the fighting and his body, like the bodies of all the other French dead, had been beheaded and stripped; that his head had been thrown in a heap with the rest in front of the Grand Vizier’s tent and his armour had been sold. An officer named Flacourt, who was despatched under a flag of truce to the Turkish camp, could not find Beaufort among the prisoners and yet a prisoner named Montigny, who was allowed to examine the heads, could not find Beaufort’s amongst them. Morosini thought he had seen Beaufort’s headless body in golden armour on the field and Montbrun later maintained that the Grand Vizier had sent Beaufort’s head to Constantinople where for three days it had been carried throught the streets on the end of a pole as a sign that the Christians had been defeated.
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 II3 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.
When the new Parliament met in October 1680, the Exclusion Bill was passed by the Commons but rejected by the Lords. Charles dissolved Parliament and called a new one for March 1681, but again the Commons demanded the Exclusion Bill and again Charles dismissed them. Tension mounted and at the instigation of the Whigs, Monmouth returned in defiance of his father and went on a tour of the country to win popular support. In November 1682, Charles had him arrested for disturbing the peace but could not bring himself to punish him and even allowed him to stay on in England. Monmouth, unrepentant, undeterred, continued to keep company with his Whig friends, and when in June 1683 a conspiracy to raise an open rebellion was disclosed, he was implicated. A group of extremists had planned to assassinate Charles and James at Rye House near Hoddesdon on their way back from the horse-races at Newmarket. Because the races that year had ended earlier than expected and Charles had returned to London ahead of schedule, the plot had failed, but during an interrogation of the suspects it emerged that Monmouth and certain Whig lords were in the process of planning an uprising in London, Bristol and Newcastle. The conspirators were rounded up and the leaders put on trial for their lives. One committed suicide in prison, and two were executed. Monmouth was not even arrested; his father merely sent him off again to Holland.
Having professed himself contrite, Monmouth had little doubt that he would soon be recalled; Charles was too fond a father to keep his favourite son in exile for long. In February 1685, however, the prospect was abruptly and drastically changed. Charles died and was succeeded by James. Not only did this mean that Monmouth could no longer hope to come to England; he would have difficulty finding a home anywhere else. No foreign court could be expected to risk bad feeling with the new King by showing hospitality to his onetime rival. Monmouth’s host in Holland, William of Orange,4 asked him to leave, offering the advice that if he went to Hungary to fight against the Turks he would be well-received by the Emperor5 and well thought of by all of Europe. Unsure what to do , he moved to Brussels and there he encountered exiles like himself who had a very different proposition to make. According to them, if he were to land in England and claim the crown, the Whig lords, the city of London and all the surrounding counties would immediately rally behind him. The Earl of Argyll, paramount chief of the clan Campbell, was in Amsterdam, preparing an invasion of Scotland. Monmouth had only to time his landing in England to coincide with that and his success was assured. Persuaded that he would be swept to the throne on a popular uprising which no military, political or religious leader would dare to withstand, Monmouth threw in his lot with the rebels.
Argyll set sail for Western Scotland with 300 men at the beginning of May and Monmouth for Western England with 80 men at the end of the same month. On 11 June he landed at Lyme Regis in Dorset to an enthusiastic welcome and there in the market-place published a manifesto in which James was denounced as a tyrant, a murderer and a usurper, accused among other things of poisoning his own brother, the late King. The declaration also pronounced Monmouth legitimate and the rightful successor to the throne, but announced that he was putting his claim to one side until it could be judged by a free Parliament. Peasants, artisans and traders, day-labourers and apprentices rushed to the standard and in twenty-four hours the rebel army numbered 1,500 men. Three days later, when the assembled horde marched inland, their mere appearance put to flight an army of 4,000 militia drawn up to stop them at Axminster. New recruits flocked in from every side as the march north continued, and Monmouth was everywhere hailed with adulation. On 18 June he reached Taunton in Somerset and was received with such acclaim that on 20 June he forgot his original declaration and proclaimed himself King. His followers were only too delighted, but since he bore the same Christian name as his hated uncle and another King James would have caused confusion, everyone called him ‘King Monmouth’.
From Taunton the army, now numbering 6,000, marched on through Bridgwater, Glastonbury and the Mendip Hills towards Bristol, but on 25 June was driven off by a force of regular troops when trying to cross the River Avon at Keynsham. Monmouth, who had expected to enter Bristol without meeting serious resistance, wavered irresolutely and then drew back. Most of his infantry were barefoot rustics, armed with mattocks and scythes, and what few cavalry he had were mounted on young horses bred for coach or cart and not yet trained to the bridle. Matched against regular soldiers, the rustics were little better than a mob, while the horses were likely to take flight at the first sound of a musket. With such an army he was unwilling to risk a major battle, and yet he had little or no hope of finding reinforcements which would render it more effective. After two whole weeks he had the support of no one except the common people of the towns and villages he had marched through. London had not stirred, nowhere had there been a spontaneous uprising, and not a single member of the aristocracy or gentry, the Commons or the Church, had taken his side. Parliament had put a price on his head and an army of regular troops had been despatched from London to destroy him. On 28 June with the advance guard of those troops already on him, he received news that Argyll had been routed, made captive and executed. Knowing then that his venture had failed, he wanted to give up, but his lieutenants, who still had hopes of success, argued that he could not abandon the thousands of simple people who had put their lives at risk by following him.
On 2 July the rebel army returned to Bridgwater and on 5 July the government forces pitched camp just three miles away at Weston on the plain of Sedgemoor: 2,500 troops, cavalry, infantry and artillery, backed up by 1,500 militia. A battle was unavoidable, and its outcome appeared to be a foregone conclusion. Sedgemoor was reclaimed marshland, flat and bare, criss-crossed by wide, deep trenches, and on such terrain the superiority of the government troops, both in fire-power and manouverability, presaged a massacre. Government officers and men, confident and careless, got drunk on local cider.
Monmouth, seizing the only advantage left to him, decided upon an immediate night attack. In moonlight, obscured by banks of thick fog, he moved his valiant peasants out onto the moor. So far as he knew, there were two trenches to be crossed before the enemy could be reached, and he had guides to lead the way across them. At the second trench, however, a guide missed his way and though the column got across, the noise of their confusion alerted the enemy guard who quickly raised the alarm. Monmouth unflustered drew up his battle-line and moved to the attack only to discover his way barred by a third trench which he had not expected. The two armies, facing each other across this trench, opened fire in the darkness and the horses of the rebel cavalry took fright and stampeded. Their headlong retreat caused panic in the rear, and the supply cars, waiting with what ammunition there was, drove off with the rest. When the government cavalry charged the flanks they were repulsed, but Monmouth knew that with day about to break and ammunition almost spent the situation was hopeless. Treacherously then he took horse and fled, leaving his followers to fight on until the government artillery was brought up and their ranks were broken by heavy shelling. At dawn the routed army poured back into Bridgwater, and the cavalry swept after them, cutting them down in the streets.
Monmouth, riding for his life, fled north to the Bristol Channel with the intention of hiding in Wales, then changed his mind and with two companions rode south-east through Wiltshire, heading for the New Forest and the southern coast. By the time the three men reached Cranborne Chase their horses were dying on their feet and had to be abandoned. Disguised as peasants they continued on foot, but the local militia had been alerted in the meantime and early the following morning one of the two companions was captured. The area was sealed off and the search intensified. At dawn the next day the other companion was taken, and some hours later Monmouth himself was found, wearing the ragged clothes of a shepherd and crouching in a ditch. According to the government account, the soldiers who made the capture did not at first recognize him. His hair had turned white and he cringed in half-witted terror before them, unable to speak or to stand. However, in his pockets, which were crammed with raw pease, were a purse full of gold, his watch, his rings and even his medals, including the Order of the Garter.
Later that day under guard at Ringwood, he was permitted at his own request to write to the King and degraded himself ignominiously in a letter of abject supplication, pleading that he had been misled by others, imploring forgiveness and begging to be allowed to speak to the King in person. On the following day he wrote to the Queen Dowager, entreating her to intercede for him, and on the three-day journey to London shocked all observers by his craven behaviour. On 13 July, with his arms bound behind his back, he was allowed into the royal presence and there he begged for his life at any price. Grovelling and weeping at the King’s feet, he swore that he was wrong but not to blame, that he was sorry and understood the errors of his ways, that as proof of his new-found virtue he was even ready to renounce the Anglican faith and become a Roman Catholic. In the Tower later that day he was informed that he would be executed in two days’ time and in an access of renewed terror prayed for a respite, beseeching the King’s mercy and the help of anyone he thought the King might listen to.
After such ignoble behaviour it is astonishing to find that he went to his death on Tower Hill with the courage and dignity of a true hero. A huge crowd, silent and mournful, saw him salute the guard with a smile and mount the scaffold with a firm tread, heard him speak with tenderness of the woman he loved and with sorrow for the bloodshed he had caused, watched him pray with serenity and prepare himself for the axe with composure. The priests and bishops who were there exhorted him to address the people on the necessity of obedience to the government, but he refused. To the executioner he gave six guineas and the promise of more if he did his job well, then knelt down and stretched his neck across the block. The first stroke was badly delivered, and lifting his wounded head he looked reproachfully at the executioner. The second stroke was no better, nor yet the third. With the head half-severed the body continued to move, and still two more blows were needed to stop it. The head was then separated from the shoulders with a knife. Angry and tearful, the spectators rushed forward and, while the guard struggled to protect the executioner from them, they dipped their handkerchiefs in the dead hero’s blood.
One explanation for this extraordinary transformation from shameless cowardice to noble heroism was that the government had told lies about Monmouth’s behaviour in captivity in the hope of discrediting him with his followers and sympathisers. Another explanation was that the hero who died on the scaffold was not Monmouth at all, but a devoted friend who looked like him and chose to die in his place. In the West Country the common people, who for decades afterwards kept as relics odd buttons and ribbons he once had worn, found truth in both explanations: King Monmouth was for them a hero without blemish and he was not dead; one day, they confidently believed, he would return to avenge their suffering. Over a thousand of them had died at Sedgemoor and for a week after that the army had crippled and slaughtered hundreds more in an orgy of looting, rape and torture. The prisons of Somerset and Dorset were packed with prisoners and, in the notorious Bloody Assizes which followed, Judge Jeffreys filled the villages with executions and floggings, with bodies rotting in irons and severed heads on poles.Hundreds who had been able to bribe their way out of prison before the trials began escaped on ships to New England, and Jeffreys had nine hundred more transported as slaves to the plantations of the West Indies. In such devastation, the broken dream of those simple people was transmuted to a messianic faith which found expression in local ballads:
Then shall Monmouth in his glories
Unto his English friends appear,
And will stifle all such stories
As are vended everywhere.
The strength of the people’s belief in Monmouth’s second coming was so great that in Wiltshire just one year after the rebellion and in Sussex more than ten years later, imposters managed to pass themselves off as Monmouth on the common people and, until they were arrested and exposed as cheats, received help and shelter, money and protection.
The theory that the Iron Mask was Monmouth was first proposed by Saint-Foix in 1768. His argument was founded upon the persistence into the early eighteenth century of the rumour that Monmouth was still living, and to that tradition he added two stories of his own. He claimed that a certain Abbé Tournemine had told him that he had overheard Fr. Francis Sanders, who was the confessor of King James in exile,6 tell the Duchess of Portsmouth that Monmouth was not the man who had been executed. He also claimed that soon after the execution a certain noblewoman, having heard the rumour that someone had taken Monmouth’s place at the block, bribed the guards to open the coffin and realized from an examination of the body’s right arm that in fact the dead man was not Monmouth.
Having established the tradition as fact in his own eyes, Saint-Foix then came up with a third story culled from a sensational and scurrilous pamphlet published anonymously in Holland under the title Amours de Charles II et de Jacques II, rois d’Angleterre. In this, a man referred to as ‘Colonel Skelton’ and described as ‘a former commander of the Tower’, was made to say: ‘The night after the pretended execution of the Duke of Monmouth, the King, accompanied by three men, came himself to take him from the Tower. His head was covered with a kind of hood and he got into a coach with the King and the three men.’ Where Monmouth was taken, the anonymous author did not have his Skelton divulge, but Saint-Foix was quite sure that he was put aboard ship for France that very night, and the hood which hid his face was replaced by a mask of iron, if indeed it was not already covering one. Perhaps it is worth noting, as a point of information, that a certain Beril Skelton was indeed Commander of the Tower during the reign of James II, but for one month only, and that in 1688 just before James fled into exile. At the time of Monmouth’s imprisonment, this same Skelton was the King’s envoy in Holland.
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,7 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 Netherlands8 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.