9
It has been argued that the name ‘Eustache Dauger’ was not the mysterious prisoner’s true name. Prison names were usually single, a surname or a nickname, as Matthioli at Pignerol was called ‘Lestang’ and Protestant ministers on Sainte-Marguerite were called ‘Songster’ and ‘Scribbler’. According to Palteau, Dauger was known by the nickname ‘Tower’ among the prison staff, and in the course of his thirty-four years as a prisoner he had a number of code-names: ‘the prisoner from Provence’, ‘the longtime prisoner’, one of ‘the prisoners of the Lower Tower’ and ‘the prisoner brought by Captain de Vauroy’. The fact that ‘Eustache Dauger’ appears to be a complete name, both forename and surname together, does give the impression of authenticity, but arguably it was after all just an invention. Since the reason for the man’s imprisonment was so secret and the security measures surrounding him so thorough, it is highly unlikely, so the argument runs, that those who imprisoned him would ever have risked using his true name. As one writer puts it: ‘Whatever the man’s real name may have been, we may be quite sure it had no resemblance to “Eustache Dauger”.’
If ‘Eustache Dauger’ was a prison pseudonym, then the field of inquiry is open to any man of any name who might conceivably have disappeared in the region of Dunkirk in late July or early August 1669. The first candidate fulfilling those conditions was offered in 1903 by Andrew Lang in a book entitled The Valet’s Tragedy and Other Studies. Like investigators before him, he had followed a line of enquiry first suggested by Théodore Jung, but his contribution was altogether new. Jung had proposed various possible solutions to the mystery of Eustache Dauger’s arrest, one of which was that it could be found ‘in the records of the trial of Roux de Marcilly, and in the dispatches of the French Ambassador to England’. For the trial in question, no official record survives, but Lang pieced together what information he could find and, in his own words, ‘pushed the inquiry into a source neglected by the French historians, namely the correspondence of the English ambassadors, agents and statesmen for the years 1668, 1669.’ Today a more detailed account than his exists, published in 1969 by Aimé-Daniel Rabinel in a book entitled La Tragique Aventure de Roux de Marcilly. For a proper appreciation of the candidate discovered by Lang, the story of Roux as given by Rabinel should first be told.
In April 1668, a Frenchman calling himself Claude Roux de Marcilly, a Protestant from Nîmes in the Languedoc, arrived in London and took up lodging at a small hotel run by a Swiss wine-merchant in Chandos Street near Oxford Circus. The name of the hotel was ‘The Loyal Subject’, which ironically Claude Roux was not. France was at war with Spain for possession of the Franche Comté and the Spanish Netherlands, and Roux had just come from Brussels, the capital of the Spanish Netherlands, with a letter of introduction from the governor there to the Spanish ambassador in London. He was an unimpressive, unattractive man in his late forties, his hair black turning grey, his clothes soberly cut in greys and browns. Usually he kept to the hotel during the day and went out only in the evening. He called at government offices in Whitehall, or at the Spanish and Austrian embassies, and made regular visits to a French wine-merchant called Gerard, whose shop in Covent Garden he used as a mailing address for correspondence with Geneva and Paris. Occasionally he also met an Englishman named Samuel Morland who was a scientist and inventor, well-known for his experiments in hydrostatics and hydraulics and reputed to be one of the foremost engineers of the day.
It was not the cause of science which attracted Roux to the Englishman. Thirteen years before, Morland had taken part in a diplomatic mission sent by Cromwell to the Duke of Savoy to plead against the persecution of the Waldensian1 population there and had distinguished himself enough in the Protestant cause to be kept on in the region afterwards as chargé d’affaires in Geneva. His turning to science had coincided with the return of the monarchy to England and the termination in consequence of his career in the diplomatic service, but his genius for survival was not restricted to scientific accomplishments. Among his many achievements was the fact that, after serving as a secret agent for Cromwell, he had managed to engineer himself a pardon from Charles II by providing a list of his fellow-spies. At the science of double-cross he was unusually inventive, and towards the end of May, having heard a little of what Roux had to say about his reasons for being in London, he invited the Frenchman to his home for dinner so that they could be alone together and talk freely.
Roux arrived in the late afternoon and stayed until the early morning. Morland was a generous host and a good listener. He put his guest at ease and got him to talk, showed understanding and admiration, made sympathetic remarks and asked questions. Roux, who enjoyed talking about himself, was delighted to have such an appreciative audience and spoke out with reckless confidence. His audience, however, was larger than he suspected. Henri de Ruvigny, the French ambassador, had also been invited. He had arrived shortly before Roux and was hidden in a curtained closet where he could watch and listen without being discovered, comfortably seated with pen and paper provided by his host to take notes of all that was said.
Roux gave him plenty to write about. He was, he explained, the special envoy of a secret political organization known as the Committee of Ten which had its headquarters in Geneva and was dedicated to the overthrow of Louis XIV and his government. A revolution in France was imminent; he personally had spent the last ten years working to achieve it. There were any number of Frenchmen ready to assassinate Louis XIV and countless numbers of French Protestants eager to revolt and set up a republic. The Languedoc, Provence, Dauphiné, Guyenne, Poitou, Brittany and Normandy: all were armed and prepared. However, to be sure of success they needed outside assistance. England, Holland and Sweden were already leagued in a defensive pact against France. What the Committee of Ten wanted was to extend this alliance to include Switzerland, Spain and Austria, with a military commitment to support such a revolution. The Swiss Cantons had shown themselves favourable to the idea, and Roux’s mission for the last two months had been to persuade the Spanish and the English to participate. He was having frequent meetings with Lord Arlington,2 the English minister, and with the Spanish and Austrian ambassadors. To them, however, he had made no mention of a future French republic. In return for their military backing, they had been led to believe that all the territory lost by Spain to France since 1630 would be handed back and that the sovereignty of all the rebel provinces would be given to England, to be shared between Charles II and his brother James. The Spanish had already pledged their support and were assisting Roux with passports and money. The English for the moment were holding back, but if necessary the revolution would go ahead without them.
Morland seemed impressed and Roux, who liked to be impressive, pressed his advantage. He knew Louis XIV personally, he said, and had met him in private many times. He also knew Monsieur, the King’s brother. In fact he was so well known that it was something of a disadvantage. In all the time he had been in London he had not dared to go out during the day for fear of meeting Ruvigny who would be sure to recognize him. Spying through his closet-curtain, Ruvigny did not recognize Roux as anyone he had ever seen before, but though these claims to personal significance and social grandeur were an obvious pretence or delusion, they did not discount the real importance of what the man had to say. Morland, primed beforehand, fished for Roux’s secret contacts and extracted the names of two members of the Committee of Ten: Colonel Balthazar, a former officer in the French army, and Count Dohna, a former governor of Orange;3 the names of his correspondents in Paris and Geneva; and the date and route of his return to Geneva – leaving 1 June by way of Brussels and the French border-towns of Charleville and Sedan.
Roux took his leave, altogether unaware that his host had betrayed him; and Ruvigny lost no time getting off a full report to Lionne, the Foreign Minister in Paris, so that the governors of Charleville and Sedan could be alerted in good time to expect Roux and arrest him. As it was, Roux delayed his departure until the beginning of July because the English were beginning to show an interest in opening negotiations with the Swiss, and because the Spanish governor in Brussels was being replaced; he wished to meet the new man before reporting back to Geneva. When finally he left, he was carrying a passport issued by the English authorities for a journey to Switzerland. He also held letters of introduction and credit from the Spanish and Austrian ambassadors to officials of the Franche Comté, including the Spanish governor in Besançon. On 1 August, while the French were still waiting for him to show up in Sedan or Charleville, he arrived in Switzerland with an imposing protector: Chief Justice Borrey of the Franche Comté, who accompanied him and paid his expenses.
As a first condition to an alliance with the Swiss, the English wanted them to extradite the English Parliamentarians who had voted the death-sentence of Charles I. At the time of the Restoration, these men had taken refuge in various European countries and all except those in the Swiss Cantons had since been extradited to face the charge of regicide. Roux, who to see Louis XIV executed was quite prepared to sacrifice the executioners of Charles I, went to Zurich, Berne and Geneva to argue for their extradition. Balthazar, as well as Borrey, went with him, and while he was in Switzerland he was Balthazar’s guest at his home in Prangins near Nyon on Lake Geneva.
The French ambassador at Solothurn in Switzerland reported to Lionne on 10 August that a mysterious Frenchman from England was discussing an Anglo-Swiss alliance in Zurich and on 7 September that this same Frenchman had travelled through Switzerland with Borrey and was last heard of staying at Saint-Claude, forty miles from Geneva in the Franche Comté. That the man at Saint-Claude was the unsaintly Claude Roux was established beyond question for Lionne by a descripton of the man furnished by the ambassador’s informant in Zurich. On 23 September, a Guards officer named La Grange was despatched with a dozen men to hunt down and capture Roux whereever he might be, in or out of France, but by the time he crossed the frontier into the Franche Comté, his quarry had vanished without trace. By a strange coincidence, Roux had left Saint-Claude at the very moment the ambassador had got news that he was there.
The coincidence was no accident. The ambassador’s information was supplied by two agents: one in Zurich who knew nothing about Roux and had difficulty learning anything, and one in Geneva who knew everything about Roux and would have had difficulty hiding it. The informant in Geneva was Roux’s friend and host Balthazar: an intelligence agent for France as well as a member of the Committee of Ten, he was playing a double game like Morland, but in this case to the advantage of Roux. Balthazar was a wealthy Swiss national of German origin who had served in the Swedish, French and Palatinate armies before settling in Switzerland. People who did not like him said that his money had been made out of pillage and malversation. Probably he had been working for French intelligence since his retirement from the French army thirteen years before, and as recently as January he had served as ambassador-extraordinary for France on a mission to the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg in northern Germany. Not until Ruvigny heard him named as a member of the Committee of Ten did the French have any reason to suspect that he was a double agent and whatever Lionne thought of Roux’s disclosure he had not passed it on to the ambassador at Solothurn.
Balthazar, unaware that in Paris his double rôle was known, continued to put on a show. Sooner or later, he realized, the ambassador would learn something about Roux’s visit to Geneva, and silence from him on such a matter would seem odd. Late in August, therefore, he supplied the ambassador with vague and misleading information about three strangers in the area, who he thought were envoys from Sweden, Holland and England, having meetings with the governor of the Franche Comté. He promised to investigate the matter further and make a full report. However, by 31 August the ambassador had still heard nothing more from him and wrote to Lionne to ask if perhaps Balthazar had sent his report directly to Paris. It was only after another week’s delay that the report finally appeared, and in it Roux’s name was not given. He was simply described as ‘a Frenchman who changes his name often and claims to have been sent from England’. The other two men were identified as Borrey and the superintendant of finance at the Abbey of Saint-Claude. The Frenchman, Balthazar declared, was staying at Saint-Claude. In fact, Roux had just left.
It was two or three months before Roux was back in England. From the Franche Comté he went to Nancy in the Duchy of Lorraine for secret talks with the Duke,4 whose enmity to Louis XIV was no secret, and from there to Brussels and possibly Holland. By the end of November he was certainly in London, staying once again at ‘The Loyal Subject’, and well-established with a secretary, a valet and two lackeys. The French, in the meantime, were still looking for him in Switzerland and the Franche Comté. If Morland knew he had returned, and presumably Roux contacted him soon after his arrival to let him know, then he tried his best to avoid him and made no attempt to inform the French embassy. Ruvigny had been recalled to Paris and Morland was refusing all contact with his successor, Croissy.5 Morland lived in fear of his life. Ironically, one of his servants had turned out to be an English government agent and had reported his involvement with both Ruvigny and Roux. He had been questioned about them, his letters had been opened and he was being followed.
Roux, however, soon found another confidant, a dissident Frenchman who went by the name of Veyras and who like himself was a Protestant from the Languedoc. On a previous visit to England, this man had called himself Portail, but he had been deported then for subversive talk and was using a different name to avoid being recognized by the authorities. Both as Portail and as Veyras he had made debts and enemies enough to get himself rearrested, but he lived a charmed life, protected by Lord Orrery. Roux brought him into the ring with Balthazar and his fellow-conspirators; he brought Roux into the circle of Orrery and his fellow-intriguers. Orrery was popular at court as a writer of plays in the heroic French manner, and his work was admired by the Duke of Buckingham who also wrote for the stage, but his prowess in heroic verse was nothing compared to his valour in politics. Though he had been a confidential adviser to Cromwell, he had become a privy-councillor to Charles II. Buckingham, who was the son of Charles I’s favourite and himself a favourite of Charles II, was a riotous, pleasure-loving character and Orrery had exploited this to make himself one of his closest friends. Buckingham’s political views were vague and easily influenced; Orrery’s were clear cut and convincingly expressed: in his view it was in the English interest to join forces with the Dutch in a war against Louis XIV.
Roux had meetings with the Dutch ambassador as well as the Spanish ambassador, with Buckingham as well as Arlington, and his tactics changed accordingly. Though still secretly financed by Catholic Spain, he now proposed a league of exclusively Protestant states to defend and protect the Protestants of France. On 26 December he had dinner with the Dutch ambassador and the next day drew up a report for Arlington. He argued that if he were to attend the General Diet of the Swiss Confederation on 25 January, armed with letters from Charles II and accompanied by Colonel Balthazar, he could bring the Swiss Cantons into the existing alliance between England, Holland and Sweden, on the new understanding that they would invade France to aid a Protestant insurrection. Buckingham and possibly Arlington were sympathetic in principle to the idea of a more foreceful league against France, but Charles II certainly was not. He was already in secret contact with Louis XIV about the possibility of using French troops to restore Catholicism to England and, at a meeting held on the very day that the Swiss Diet met, he shared the secret with his brother, James, and three ministers, Arlington, Arundel and Clifford. Buckingham’s absence from that meeting was a clear sign that the King did not fully trust him, and Arlington, whatever his proper feelings on the matter, was opportunist enough to give his support. Thus, while Roux was hoping to persuade the English to join a Protestant league against France, Charles II and his closest ministers, including Arlington, were secretly planning a Catholic alliance with her. Roux did not leave England for Switzerland again until the beginning of March, but he was wasting his time; his plans were no further forward when he left than they had been the year before.
The French, meanwhile, had lost track of Roux completely. After Balthazar’s report in early September they had nothing to go on for six months, until on 6 March someone passed the word to Paris that he was in London. The informant, however, had played the same trick as Balthazar: Roux by a strange coincidence had just left for Brussels. Lionne, unaware of his informant’s duplicity, wrote at once to Croissy in London to tell him what he had learned – that Roux was staying with Gerard in Covent Garden and was planning to return to Switzerland in the near future. Croissy soon discovered that Roux was not in Covent Garden, but it took him more than a month to find out that he had been staying in Chandos Street and had long since left. On 27 April, before his full report had reached Paris, Lionne got news from the Franche Comté that Roux had reappeared at Saint-Claude.
The informant this time was almost certainly a Catholic priest by the name of Ragny, who although French was a member of the religious community at the Abbey of Saint-Claude. Ragny had come to know Roux at the time of his first visit, when for his own reasons the priest had set out to win his confidence. For some years Roux had assumed the noble name of Marcilly and Ragny, whose father’s mother had been a Marcilly, was curious to know by what right he made such a claim. Roux always pretended to have acquired the name with the purchase of one of the Marcilly estates near Orléans, but he was lying. Ragny resented the usurpation, particularly when he saw the kind of man Roux was. To get at the truth of the visitor’s pretensions, he had played the convivial reprobate, which an anti-Catholic like Roux could despise and enjoy as a typical example of the age-old corruption of the Church (although the fact that Roux did not suspect Ragny’s true hostility may suggest that the rôle of gourmandizing monk was sufficiently close to his actual character to make it easy for him to play). Roux in his usual fashion had wished to make an impression and Ragny soon heard enough of his hothead-talk to destroy him. Sometime towards the end of 1668 he was in touch with French intelligence, possibly with La Grange, and at the beginning of 1669 was contacted by a French agent named Mazel.
Captain in the light cavalry and equerry to Maréchal Turenne, Mazel had already proved his abilities as a special agent on a secret mission in 1667. His background made him a perfect choice to lead the commando squad assigned to kidnap Roux. He had been born and raised in Calvisson, Roux’s own village near Nîmes, was the godson of Roux’s own niece, and knew the man personally. He was moreover a Protestant, eager to demonstrate his loyalty to the regime by thwarting the subversive intentions of Protestants like Roux. A legal expert, barrister and doctor of law, he could also be counted upon to effect a kidnapping on foreign territory as discreetly as possible. The commando squad were all Protestants from the same cavalry regiment and included Mazel’s elder brother. Their plan was to use Ragny to capture Roux the next time he appeared in the Franche Comté.
Soon after Roux arrived at Saint-Claude he realized that he was being followed, and at the beginning of May he moved to Balthazar’s house at Prangins. Ragny wrote to him there inviting him to a party at the home of another priest at Les Rousses just north of Saint-Claude near the French border. Ragny’s valet brought the letter and stayed to act as Roux’s guide. Early on the morning of Sunday 12 May, Roux left Prangins on horseback with Ragny’s valet and one of the two lackeys he had brought with him from England. At the Saint-Cergue pass, on the mountain road from Nyon, he was ambushed by Mazel and his men. Ragny’s valet, thinking the attackers highwaymen, put up a fight and was shot. The lackey fled and Roux himself was taken. His captors tied his wrists to the pommel of his saddle, his ankles under the belly of his horse, and hurried him off at a gallop, leaving Ragny’s valet for dead on the road. As the group passed under the walls of Bonmont Abbey, Roux began to shout for help and had to be gagged. The Swiss gave chase, but the frontier was crossed without incident; that night Roux was securely lodged in France, locked up in the fort at Ecluse, six miles from Bellegarde. Ragny’s valet meanwhile had been found alive and taken back to Nyon, but died some days later. Ragny himself had made his escape from Saint-Claude just half an hour before troops arrived to arrest him. On 14 May, Roux was in prison in Lyon and on 17 May a general order was issued to assist his transfer to the Bastille.
Balthazar at first wished to pretend to the French that Roux had merely visited him on his way from somewhere else, but Roux told his captors that all his papers were at Balthazar’s house. He persuaded Mazel to let him write a letter to Balthazar, asking him to send documents he had which proved that he was an envoy of the English. Mazel took the letter with Roux to Paris, but sent some of his men to Gex to prepare a raid on Prangins. Balthazar, warned of their intention, burned all the papers he had and went into hiding. Meanwhile the Council of Berne, in whose territory the abduction had taken place, was highly indignant. The kidnappers were cited before a tribunal and condemned to death by default. The significance of this was purely formal, but the judgement was posted on the door of Turenne’s house in Paris, and he was sufficiently put out by it to send his secretary around the embassies to sound out the general feeling. The English ambassador also received a visit from the Spanish ambassador who insisted that he intercede for Roux but, knowing nothing of the man except what he had heard from the French, he refused. On 25 May, Louis XIV wrote to Croissy announcing Roux’s capture and instructing him to deliver the news in person to Charles II and his ministers, starting with Arlington. He was to observe their faces carefully for any sign of discomfort or alarm, and to report back in detail. The English, however, were ready for Croissy. They intercepted the letter, deciphered it and summoned the ambassador to Whitehall to tell him the news, three days before they allowed the letter to reach him. Charles II met him in private. Having announced that a Frenchman named Roux, who claimed to be an envoy from England, had been arrested by the French in Switzerland, the king informed him that Roux had never been commissioned by the English to do anything whatsoever, not even to treat the question of the regicides in Switzerland; and that Arlington, who had met the man and listened to what he had to say, had considered him altogether untrustworthy and had merely given him a little money to be rid of him.
Roux persisted in the claim that he was employed by Charles II and professed to have things of such importance to say that he could reveal them to no one but Louis XIV. Lionne was sent to interrogate him in the Bastille, but days of questioning achieved nothing of relevance, except Lionne’s private conviction that the man was mentally deranged. Rumours began to circulate that the French had nothing with which to charge Roux, and were going to put him on trial for some trumped-up crime of forgery or rape supposedly committed many years before in Nîmes. On 5 June the process of interrogation was handed over to magistrates of the criminal court and, after a week or so, Roux’s spirit began to break. Meanwhile Lionne heard from Croissy that Roux’s former valet in London, a Frenchman called Martin, might be useful as a witness; on 12 June, he replied that the man would be well-rewarded if he returned to France to give evidence. Mazel had been kept in Paris for that purpose, as had Ragny who, by way of recompense for the service he had rendered the King and compensation for the loss of his place at Saint-Claude, had already been given a pension of 3,000 livres.
On 14 June, Roux claimed to be ill, unable to urinate and in pain. The interrogation was suspended until a physician had examined him and decided that he was lying. On 17 June, he refused to eat, but the interrogation continued nevertheless, with a confrontation between him and Ruvigny and questions on information just received by Lionne from Croissy concerning his relationship with Veyras. On 20 June, he tried to commit suicide. Using a broken knife bought from one of the guards, he severed his genitals. His intention was to let himself bleed to death without the guards becoming aware, and as a pretext for any blood they might notice he also severed the little finger of his left hand. The guards did notice the blood and, finding a great deal of it, called the governor. Roux then pretended that he had passed a stone in his urine and some of the blood was a consequence of that. The prison governor had him stripped, saw the wound and called a surgeon to cauterize it. The bleeding was stopped, but loss of blood along with lack of food had left him so weak that there was a serious danger he might die before he could be judged. A hurried trial was held the next day, and judgement delivered the day after. Charged with high treason against State and King, Roux was found guilty and condemned to death. His execution took place that afternoon.
At 1 p.m. on Saturday 22 June 1669, he was brought haggard and fainting through the crowds which packed the square in front of the Grand Châtelet law courts and, on a scaffold there, was stripped and bound face-upwards across the executioner’s wheel. Stretched out to be killed, he lay shivering and panting while a magistrate read his sentence and a priest urged him to repent; then he begged the comfort of a Protestant minister. This was forbidden by government edict, but when his request was refused he raised his voice in such a powerful outburst of vilification that a minister was sent for. He lay in silence then until the minister’s arrival, at which he lifted his head and spoke out clearly, declaring that he was ready to die patiently like a good Christian. The minister pressed him to acknowledge his crimes, but Roux swore that he had never contrived nor wished evil against the person of the King and that in all his dealings with foreign governments he had never sought anything but the welfare of his fellow-Protestants. The minister was allowed to pray with him a while, then made to withdraw and leave him to his executioners, who went to work immediately with iron bars, breaking the bones of his legs, arms and back. After eleven blows, they left him to die. The priest exhorted him in his final agony to abjure his religion, but he reviled the King for his cruelty instead and could be silenced only with a gag. He was two hours dying. At four o’clock his body was taken down from the wheel, dragged through the streets at the tail of a cart and thrown onto a refuse-dump.
Two days later Croissy, who did not learn of Roux’s execution until 1 July, was still trying to persuade Roux’s valet, Martin, to go to Paris to give evidence. He had his secretary talk to the man about it, but without success. Martin did not like Roux and for reasons of his own had left his service, but he professed to know nothing of Roux’s political involvements. In Crossy’s view, he knew more than he was prepared to say. His pretence at ignorance was due, Croissy thought, to the fact that he had a wife and family in London, and did not want to take any risks. What seemed to frighten him was the possibility that the French authorities would assume he knew more than he did and once he was in their hands would keep him there. Croissy was sure that Martin could not be persuaded to go to France of his own accord and thought the best way to get him there was to have him deported. In a letter to Lionne, written on 1 July, just before he received the news from him of Roux’s execution, he proposed asking Charles II to have both Martin and Veyras arrested and sent to Calais. In a postscript, acknowledging receipt of Lionne’s news about Roux, he declared that he was nonetheless waiting for instructions concerning the arrest of Roux’s accomplice, Veyras.
When at the beginning of the month there is top-level talk of having a valet in London extradited and handed over to the French police at Calais,6 and when at the end of that same month a valet is arrested on the highest government authority by the garrison commander of Dunkirk, then it is ‘hardly conceivable’, as Lang put it, that ‘the two valets should be different men.’ The valet Martin and the prisoner Eustache Dauger, who was ‘only a valet’, were in Lang’s opinion one and the same. It is, of course, unlikely that Martin had anything of significance to contribute to what the French government already knew or suspected. His rôle in Roux’s secret affairs, apart from carrying letters to and from people like Arlington’s secretary, could not have been very important, and his knowledge of what was going on must have been limited to his assessment of the people he saw his master with and his interpretation of their overheard conversations. There, however, lay the tragedy described by Lang. The valet’s worst fears were realized: the authorities assumed that he knew more than he did and ‘he was locked up for not divulging what he did not know’. Once in prison he was ‘caught in the toils of the system’ and his ‘long and mysterious captivity … was the mere automatic result of the red tape of the old French absolute monarchy.’
Lang closed the case at this point, confessing himself as baffled by the solution as by the mystery. He was apparently unable to admit that he might have been misled by a simple coincidence, and was presumably unaware that in the middle of that same July 1669, the ambassador in London got word from the minister in Paris that the valet Martin was no longer wanted. On 13 July Lionne replied to Croissy’s letter of 1 July explaining that, since Roux had been found guilty and executed, Martin’s presence was no longer necessary and Veyras was simply not important enough to bother with. For the sake of argument one could always imagine that the ambassador went ahead with his plan to have Martin extradited anyway, that the English refused to co-operate and that the French then assumed that Martin was concealing important information damaging to the English; the minister, believing that any letter he sent to the ambassador would be intercepted, deliberately sought to deceive the English by saying Martin was no longer wanted, but soon after that letter was sent an agent, possibly Vauroy himself, was dispatched to England to kidnap Martin in secret. Even with such an hypothesis to buoy it up, however, the theory is still too full of holes to stay afloat.
Why was the prisoner’s name changed from Martin to Eustache Dauger? What difference could it have made to Saint-Mars or anyone else that his real name was Martin? Why was there such concern that he might have revealed the secret of how he had been employed before his imprisonment? What difference could it have made to the French government if La Rivière or anyone else had found out that he had once been the valet of Claude Roux? It is difficult, even for the sake of argument, to imagine answers to these questions, much less to the key question: why the mask? Lang gave the disgruntled reader no help at all, but in a footnote to his conclusion he produced the next best thing: a suggestion for an altogether different theory. ‘One marvels’, he wrote, ‘that nobody has recognized in the mask James Stuart (James de La Cloche), eldest of the children of Charles II. He came to England in 1668, was sent to Rome, and “disappears from history”.’ Later in the same volume, Lang presented his version of this young man’s story in an essay entitled The Mystery of James de La Cloche but, believing as he did that Eustache Dauger was ‘undeniably’ the valet Martin, he made out no case for him as the Iron Mask. That case was championed just one year later, however, by Edith Carey in a book entitled The Channel Islands, and again as recently as 1965 by Marcel Pagnol, who in his book, Le Secret du Masque de fer, amalgamated both of Lang’s suggestions and came up with the claim that ‘James de La Cloche … was Eustache Dauger after having been the valet Martin.’ Clearly the story of James de La Cloche is rich in possibilities. The known facts and what must be the most reasonable interpretation of them are as follows.
On 11 April 1668, a strange young man turned up at the central Jesuit novitiate in Rome and asked to be admitted as a postulant. He had no money at all and, apart from a hairbrush and a few extra clothes, no personal belongings of any kind. He gave his name as James de La Cloche, his age as twenty-four and his nationality as English, though in fact he spoke nothing but French. Presumably the Jesuit authorities were not very enthusiastic about accepting him, but their reservations were quickly dispelled when he produced three extraordinary documents for their perusal: two in French, handwritten by Charles II of England, and one in Latin, handwritten by Queen Christina of Sweden, to all appearances authentic in style, signature and seal. The young man, it emerged from these papers, was an illegitimate son of Charles II, secretly recognized and protected by him. The Jesuits, realizing the immense possibilities of having such a remarkable young man in their midst, were now only too eager to welcome him into the Society. And remarkable he certainly was, though not for the reasons they supposed. The documents were forgeries.
The earliest in date was a certificate written by Charles at Whitehall on 27 September 1665, in which he recognized the young man to be his natural son, James Stuart; by the King’s command, he had lived all his life under the name of James de La Cloche du Bourg de Jersey in France and other countries outside England and was to continue to live incognito, keeping the secret of his birth until after his father’s death. The second document in date was a bequest written by Charles at Whitehall on 7 February 1667 in which he willed that after his death the sum of £500 per annum should be paid to his son, James de La Cloche, on condition that he lived in London and remained an Anglican. The third was an attestation written by the ex-Queen of Sweden in Hamburg on 26 July 1667 in which she declared that James de La Cloche, whom she knew to be the natural son of Charles II, born in Jersey and raised in the Protestant religion, had renounced his Calvinistic faith and become a Roman Catholic.
The Jesuits, like the true writer of the letters, seemed unaware that Charles and his court were not in Whitehall in September 1665. In that month the population of London had been reduced to half its normal size by the ravages of the Great Plague. In June there were 590 deaths, in July 6,137, in August 17,036, and in September 26,230. No one stayed in the city unless he had to, and the King and his court were in fact in Oxford. Pepys, recording the desolation of London in September, observed that ‘grass grows all up and down White Hall court’. Nor did the Jesuits seem to appreciate that in April 1668, when the young man gave his age as twenty-four, Charles himself was not yet thirty-eight; to have been the father it would have been necessary for him to conceive a child at the age of thirteen which, though not impossible, was nonetheless unlikely. In addition, the Jesuits did not find it suspicious that Charles should refuse public recognition to this illegitimate son, his supposed eldest, when for many years he had publicly recognized another. In 1668 the other illegitimate son had already been at court for six years and, at the age of nineteen, was Duke of Monmouth and Captain of the King’s Bodyguard.
Who the young man really was is not known. That he was an imposter using false credentials is certain, but like all convincing liars his stories were constructed on a basis of truth. For example, the starting point for his hoax had its foundation in a real state of affairs in Jersey. There, just twelve years before his arrival in Rome, a certain Jean La Cloche had ennobled his name, at least in appearance, by changing it to Jean de La Cloche, following his marriage to Marguerite de Carteret, a daughter of the most noble family on the island. Ten years before his marriage, that is in 1646, it was this same Marguerite who, at twenty years of age, had first fired the heart of the then Prince Charles, visiting Jersey at the age of sixteen. By all accounts this youthful romance was altogether innocent, and certainly there exists no evidence or tradition that a child was born to Marguerite as a result. In any case the young man would have been two years old when Charles and Marguerite met. There is moreover no reason to believe that Marguerite had a child before she met Charles. The story told by the young man had evident links, however forged or forced, with the history of Jean La Cloche and his wife Marguerite, but in fact there exists no record nor rumour of anyone on Jersey called James de La Cloche.
The key piece of invention in the young man’s confidence trick was also founded upon a circumstantial truth. He fabricated a major rôle for himself in a perfectly plausible story based upon a secret which Charles II had shared with only the highest authorities of the Roman Catholic Church. Any uncertainty the General of the Jesuits might have had would have been removed the moment the young man gave him to understand that he knew this secret. How the young man had got access to such knowledge one cannot say, but presumably he or someone helping him had managed to acquire inside information on a special mission sent by Charles to Rome in November 1662. The King’s envoy had been Richard Bellings, the private secretary of the King’s mother, Henrietta of France, and he had been commissioned to make two requests: one, known to the King’s ministers, was to solicit a cardinal’s hat for the chaplain of the Queen; the other, known to no one but the King, was to beg dispensations which would allow Charles to declare himself a Roman Catholic and bring his kingdom back within the Roman Catholic Church. The dispensations had not been granted and without them Charles had not dared to change his religious allegiance, but the fact that he had been frustrated in his wish to become Catholic at that time formed the basis of the story with which the Jesuits were to be swindled.
For four months, while the young man played the part of earnest postulant, there were no further developments, until in August two letters arrived by some secret means, both supposedly written by Charles II himself; one was addressed to the Father-General, the other to ‘the Prince Stuart’. The writer of the letters did not realize that never under any circumstances would the illegitimate son of an English king receive the title of Prince, but fortunately for him the Father-General was not aware of this either. Both letters, moreover, spoke of the King’s mother as being with him in London, whereas she had been living in France since 1665.
The letter to the Father-General was dated from Whitehall on 3 August and was written in French. In it, Charles confided that for a long time he had been a Roman Catholic by conviction, but as head of the Anglican Church he had been unable to embrace his faith openly and afraid to practice it secretly. The only priests at court were those in the service of his mother and his wife, and no matter how discreetly he might have arranged to see one of them, the suspicions of his anti-Catholic ministers and courtiers would have been aroused. How providential it therefore was that his own son should wish to become a Roman Catholic priest and might in the future join him at court to administer the sacraments to him in secret. His ordination, however, was not to take place in Rome. Charles himself could arrange for that to take place in London. Meanwhile, the Father-General was not to contact Charles directly for any reason nor to speak of his son’s true identity to anyone, not even to the Queen of Sweden. As soon as possible, he was to send the young man to London so that Charles might talk with him, and if there was any way in which Charles could secretly help the Jesuit Society, he would be only too pleased to hear about it from his son when he arrived.
The second letter was also from Whitehall and dated the day after the first. Though addressed to the Prince Stuart, it was obviously meant like the other to be read by the Father-General. In it Charles declared that the Queen and the Queen Mother were both delighted at his son’s decision to become a priest and eager to see him, but anxious about his weak constitution. He should visit London in autumn only if his health permitted, otherwise he should wait until spring. In the near future Charles planned to recognize him publicly and at that time, since his mother was noble, he could expect to receive precedence over the Duke of Monmouth. Indeed one day, if the kingdom were to return to the Roman Church and Charles and his brother were to die without issue, the crown of England would fall to him. Charles was well aware of his obligations to the Jesuits and it was his intention to recompense the Society in some important way. Meanwhile, the large sum of money which Charles had set aside for his upkeep and had given into the care of Queen Christina of Sweden had been borrowed by her for her own use. He was in the process of rearranging the matter, but in the meantime unfortunately there was no way that he could secretly send money to him in Rome.
Nothing then until the beginning of September, when unexpectedly the young man’s plan hit a snag. News reached the novitiate that the Queen of Sweden was on her way to Rome. To save the situation the plan had to be advanced and so another letter suddenly arrived, supposedly sent from Whitehall on 29 August, in which Charles warned the Father-General not to let Queen Christina meet his son. He had written to her himself, he said, and told her that his son was leaving Rome for England so that Charles could arrange some financial settlement for him, a bank deposit of 40 or 50,000 écus. She was so badly in need of money that, if she saw his son, she might raise suspicions by trying to borrow money from him. Charles had told her that his son had not revealed his true identity to the Jesuits and that so far as they knew he had gone to Jersey to visit his mother, who had expressed a wish to become a Roman Catholic. His son was to leave Rome for London as soon as possible. Secrecy was of the utmost importance and the Father-General was to communicate with no one on the matter except Charles himself, through the intermediary of his son.
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 doubloons7 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 scudi8 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.
So ends the strange story of the odd young man who claimed to be the Prince Stuart, alias Jacobo Enrico de Bovere Roano Stuardo, alias Henri de Rohan, alias James de La Cloche du Bourg de Jersey. ‘Hee was buried in the Church of San Francisco di Paolo out of the Porta Capuana,’ wrote the British agent at Rome in his report to London on 7 September 1669, ‘… and this is the end of that Princely Cheate or whatever hee was.’ As James de La Cloche he had swindled the Jesuits of Rome out of a large sum of money, but as Jacobo Stuardo he had deceived no one except an illiterate Neapolitan family who were altogether ready to be deceived. Since in Naples he had proved such a wretched clown, it seems certain that in Rome he had been masterminded by someone else. Of this accomplice nothing is known, but presumably he was the Frenchman who had been with the young man when he first arrived in Naples. No doubt it was there that they divided their ill-gotten gains and the accomplice, who had been the brain of the operation, took the lion’s share before embarking on a ship for Malta. Whoever he was, he must have been an extraordinary character, and it is tempting to believe that he possessed the intelligence and wit to enjoy the hoax for its own sake as well as for the money it brought him. The family name of the innkeeper he chose to leave the young man with was ‘Corona’, and presumably he appreciated the aptness of this, just as he enjoyed giving the young man the name ‘de La Cloche’. To call someone ‘de la cloche’ in French is to call him ‘a beggar’, while the word ‘corona’ in Italian means ‘crown’.
As a footnote to the story of James de La Cloche, offered with no intention of proving or disproving, approving or disapproving anything, one might add that though in general the names used in the hoax were derived from some knowledge of the Stuart, Rohan and La Cloche families, two were not: the ‘Marquisate of Juvignis’ and the ‘Barons of Saint-Marzo’. Apparently both were fictitious. What inspired the invention of the words ‘Juvignis’ and ‘Saint-Marzo’ is not known and presumably not important, but one of them presents a strange coincidence which, though no doubt lacking in any real significance, is nonetheless forcefully surreal: ‘Marzo’ in Italian is ‘Mars’ in French, and it is not a common name in either language.
NOTES
1. Waldensian: proto-Protestant movement originating in the 12th century.
2. Lord Arlington: 1618–1685, served Charles II in exile, was his Secretary of State from 1662 and his chief minister from 1667.
3. Orange: independent non-French principality within France until confiscated by Louis XIV in 1673.
4. Charles IV, Duc de Lorraine, 1604–1675.
5. Marquis de Croissy: 1629–1696, brother of Colbert.
6. Calais: In Lang’s day it was not possible to say where exactly Dauger was arrested. However in 1987, at the International Symposium on the Iron Mask held in Cannes, Stanislas Brugnon revealed the existence of a document establishing with near certainty that Dauger was indeed arrested in Calais. This document is an order for the reimbursement of expenses which was issued to Vauroy for his journey with Dauger in August 1669, and it specifies that Vauroy went from Dunkirk to Calais and from there to Pignerol.
7. doubloon: Spanish gold coin.
8. scudo: Italian silver coin.