The Man Behind the Iron Mask (8 page)

Two days later, Henrietta's party continued their journey to Boulogne alone, with farewells at the gates of Amiens. Buckingham, with his head in Anne's carriage, screened by the curtains, wept disconsolately and she was deeply affected. At Boulogne, contrary winds delayed Henrietta's departure and under the pretext of carrying a letter to the Queen Mother, Buckingham dashed back to Amiens to see Anne again. She had been so upset by the leave-taking that she was unwell and in bed surrounded by her ladies. Buckingham burst into her bedroom and threw himself down at her bedside, kissing the sheets and proclaiming his love in loud and reckless abandon. The Queen was flattered, the Court stupefied, the King outraged, and Buckingham was warned never to set foot in France again.

Whatever doubts Louis XIII might have had about his wife's disloyalty, they were reinforced the following year when the ‘Chalais Conspiracy' was uncovered. The ringleader was Anne's closest friend the Duchesse de Chevreuse. She had persuaded the Comte de Chalais, who was her lover, to join in a plot to assassinate Cardinal de Richelieu. The King's brother, Gaston, was found to have played a leading rôle in the conspiracy too. The accusation was made that with Richelieu out of the way the King was to be deposed and his marriage annulled so that Gaston could take his place on the throne and Anne could become Gaston's wife. When questioned about this by Richelieu in front of the King and the Queen Mother, Anne denied any knowledge of the plan and sought to argue her innocence with the remark that ‘she would have had too little to gain in the exchange.'

The coup was to have been carried through on the wave of a French Protestant uprising backed by English troops promised by Buckingham and when in the following year French government troops were sent against the Protestant stronghold of La Rochelle, Buckingham sailed to its defence with a force of 8,000 men. His expedition was a disaster, but, though forced to withdraw, he planned to return. In England, however, his star had waned. An attempt by Parliament to impeach him had been blocked by Charles I, but he was universally detested for his perpetual profiteering and endless bungling. On 23 August 1628, while with the fleet in Portsmouth supervising preparations for a second expedition, he was assassinated by one of his own officers. When the news reached Anne of Austria, she was stunned and incredulous. ‘It's a lie,' she is reported to have exclaimed. ‘I've only just recieved a letter from him.'

With Anne of Austria's honour called so evidently into question, the number of Iron Masks proliferating from her sullied reputation, whether as illegitimate progeny or as illicit progenitors, is legion. For those who claim that the Iron Mask was an illegitimate brother of Louis XIV, Buckingham is the favourite candidate for father and, since the only direct contact he ever had with the Queen was limited to the last week of May and the first week of June 1625, the birth date of this Iron Mask is established as the beginning of March 1626.
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A popular alternative to Buckingham is Mazarin: ‘You will like him, Madame,' Richelieu is supposed to have said when presenting Mazarin to the Queen. ‘He looks like Buckingham.' The champions of these theories do not explain how it was possible for the Queen to conceal a pregnancy throughout its full course and bear a child in secret, but it is a fact that at one time she did manage, for a while at least, to keep a pregnancy hidden.

At the beginning of 1631, she was taken ill with what has since been established was a miscarriage. The fact that she kept that pregnancy secret has allowed the conjecture that it was not her husband's child and that after some hesitation she underwent an abortion. If in fact the King was the father of this child he gave no sign of being so either by mark of tenderness before the pregnancy or show of disappointment after the miscarriage. Those who propose that the King was not the father place the date of this conception to a time in September 1630, known later as the Day of the Dupes, when the King was so ill that everyone assumed he would die. Since at that date he had no son and heir, the crown would have passed to his brother Gaston, and in anticipation of this the Queen Mother made the mistake of ordering Richelieu's arrest. At that same time, so the theory goes, the Queen also did some anticipating: she sought to preserve her position as Queen by becoming pregnant. Who it was she employed to impregnate her on command is not specified, but whoever he was he too has won a place among the candidates for the Iron Mask.

Another variation on the same theme makes the Iron Mask the father of Louis XIV himself. Already in the seventeenth century it was rumoured that Louis XIII was impotent and that to furnish him with an heir his wife had to resort to a lover. Louis XIV, to his enemies, was always ‘the Great Bastard'. An example of this belief is the anonymous libel entitled
Les Amours d'Anne d'Autriche avec C.D.R
., published at Cologne in 1692. That version goes as follows: since Louis XIII is unable to have children, his brother Gaston, who is a widower with just one daughter for heir, is sure to succeed to the throne. Cardinal Richelieu, with an eye to the main chance, proposes his niece to Gaston in marriage, hoping thus to provide Gaston with a son and himself with a grand-nephew who would one day be king. Gaston rejects the offer and in the resulting quarrel strikes him. Richelieu, angry, humiliated and afraid, looks about for an alternative. Anne of Austria meanwhile has fallen in love with a young foreigner, whose name is given only as C.D.R., and Richelieu has the clever idea of arranging to get this young man into her bed so that she will conceive a child and cut Gaston out of the succession. His plan works perfectly and the fruit of this union is Louis XIV. The book sold well and, to the fury of the French government, was published again in 1693 and 1696. A sequel was promised in which the author was to relate the ‘fatal catastrophe' which overtook C.D.R. in consequence, but it never appeared. Fifty years later it was suggested that this ‘fatal catastrophe' was an iron mask and life-imprisonment.

As recently as 1934 this same ground was reworked by Pierre Vernadeau in his book
Le Médecin de la Reyne
, and made to yield yet another candidate for the Iron Mask. The account he gives is derived from two separate sources in the Limousin region of France; one a tale passed on by generations of the medical profession in Limoges, the other a local tradition relating to the village of Saint-Léonard, fourteen miles east of Limoges. The church of this village, also called Saint-Léonard, was the centre of an ancient fertility cult still popular in the seventeenth century: pregnant women prayed to the relics of Saint Léonard for a safe and easy delivery, while women who wished to be pregnant addressed their prayers to a curious object known as ‘the bolt of Saint Léonard'.

It is known for certain that in May 1638 the relics of Saint Léonard were taken to the Queen in Paris to assure the birth of her child, but the people of Limousin claim that the bolt of the saint was also taken to her some months before that to ensure the child's conception. The saint's aid in the act of fecundation was not officially acknowledged because the miraculous nature of the operation might have been questioned. Though people of faith would have attributed the longed-for conception to the power of Saint Léonard, there were sceptics who might have entertained the view that the success of the bolt was due to the potency of a not disimilar object belonging to the young man who invariably accompanied it, in this instance a certain Nicard, known to his fellow contrymen as ‘Beautiful Legs'.

Apparently Beautiful Legs also accompanied the relics of the saint to Paris in May and presumably went there again to collect them sometime after the Queen was delivered of her child in September. That he had the wonder-working bolt with him then as well and remained in Paris at the Queen's disposal until early the following year is thought more than likely since miraculously, just three months after the birth of her first child, the Queen conceived a second. Beautiful Legs was not, however, the Iron Mask, at least the people of Limousin do not make that claim. According to a Docteur Boulland of Limoges, who got his information from a Docteur Mazard, founder of the Limoges School of Medecine, the Iron Mask was nonetheless a man from Limousin, imprisoned for possessing the forbidden knowledge that Louis XIV was not the son of Louis XIII.

The Queen's physician referred to in the title of Vernadeau's book was a certain Pardoux Gondinet who was born and raised in the village of Saint-Yrieix twenty-five miles south of Limoges, studied medicine at Bordeaux University and took up practice in Paris. He was appointed physician to Anne of Austria on 5 November 1644 and after her death in 1666 returned to Saint-Yrieix, where he continued to practice with the title of ‘physician to the late Queen' until his own death in 1679. In the following year, on 14 December 1680, his son-in-law Marc de Jarrigue de La Morelhie also died, or at least that is what the official records show; in fact tradition has it that he was kidnapped by the French secret police, was imprisoned in the fortress of Pignerol, and died in the Bastille twenty-three years later, masked and anonymous. While sorting through the private papers of his late father-in-law, Morelhie had come across the report of an autopsy carried out upon the body of Louis XIII, in which appeared clear proof that the King had been incapable of reproduction: the corpse had been found to have the testicles of a child. Unable to keep the evidence to himself, Morelhie foolishly confided the secret to his fellow-countryman, Nicolas de La Reynie who though his friend was also the King's Lieutenant-General of Police. La Reynie informed Louvois, the Minister of War, who informed the King, and the result was that both Morelhie and the autopsy report were made to disappear in double quick time. How it had been possible for Gondinet to come into possession of this fateful report is not very clear. As Vernadeau heard the story, Gondinet had actually participated in the autopsy, but that is hardly likely. He was after all physician to the Queen, not the King, and in any event was not appointed to that position until the year after Louis XIII's death.
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One other theory which relates directly to Louis XIV's own birth was a claim put about at the end of the eighteenth century as propaganda for the House of Orléans, the junior branch of the Royal House of Bourbon. According to this, the Iron Mask was a woman. Inspiration for the idea probably came from one of Voltaire's informants, a certain Madame Cathérine Cessis of Cannes, who in 1759, when she ‘was close on one hundred years old', maintained that she had been allowed to meet the Iron Mask just before his departure for the Bastille. She claimed that he had removed a glove to take her hand and that she had recognized at once from the smoothness and softness of his skin that in fact he was a woman. Las Cases gives an account of the theory in his report of the conversation with Napoleon already mentioned. ‘It was supposed that Anne of Austria, pregnant after twenty-three years of sterility, gave birth to a daughter, and the fear that she might not have another child led Louis XIII to remove this daugher and fraudulently substitute for her a boy who later became Louis XIV.' Thus the Iron Mask was revealedto be a tender maiden disguised as a man and the mask became a necessity to hide the napless delicacy of her cheek and chin. There were convents aplenty where this hypothetical daughter could have been safely hidden away, but her parents, the King and Queen, preferred to hand her over to prison guards and turnkeys. The point of the story as put about in Paris was political, however, not romantic, as Las Cases went on to explain. ‘The year after, the Queen gave birth again, this time to a boy, Philippe,
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the Head of the House of Orléans. Thus he and his offspring were the legitimate heirs, while Louis XIV and his offspring were nothing more than intruders and usurpers.' In the events which led up to the Revolution, the then Duc d'Orléans
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sided with the people against the old regime and voted for the execution of Louis XVI, but his popularity, while it lasted, had nothing to do with any claim he might have had to the throne. ‘A pamphlet on the subject,' Las Cases concluded, ‘was circulating in the provinces at the time of the fall of the Bastille, but the story was not successful and died out without ever catching on in the capital.' Nevertheless the story was still going the rounds as late as 1895, when it was reported in the press that a former mayor of Cannes by the name of Mero had disclosed to a friend that one of his ancestors of the same name had served as doctor to the Iron Mask during his imprisonment on Sainte-Marguerite; he too had claimed that the prisoner was a woman.

The fall of the Bastille led to innumerable revelations and disclosures relevant to the Iron Mask. Soon after the supposed discovery of a mouldering skeleton in a rusted vizor, a journalist published a story about the discovery of a document hidden in a wall. He claimed that in late July 1789, when the Bastille was given over to sightseers and demolition workers, a Venetian tourist hunting for souvenirs was approached by a mason who wanted to sell an old piece of paper covered in writing. He had found it, he said, hidden in the wall of the Third Chamber of the Bertaudière Tower, the very room where the Iron Mask had been lodged on his arrival at the Bastille in September 1698. The mason wanted 3 livres for the paper, but the message it contained made it cheap at the price. The prisoner who had written it was one of Louis XIV's own sons, the Comte de Vermandois, who by all accounts had never been a prisoner at any time, and he had written it in 1701 when officially he had been dead for eighteen years. The journalist made no attempt to produce the tourist or the document, but the supposed text he reproduced in full:

In the name of the Holy Virgin, protecting Saint of all the French, in my despair. May God concede, at her intercession, that one day all mankind is made to know the dreadful fate, kept secret from the world, to which the orders of a barbarous father have unjustly condemned me. I am Louis de Bourbon, Comte de Vermandois, Grand Admiral of France. As punishment for a rash and foolish act I was imprisoned in Pignerol Castle and after that on the island of Sainte-Marguerite and finally in the Bastille, where I will probably finish the course of my sad life. I have already tried several times to make it know that I am still alive but always in vain and so I write this note and hide it in a hole in the wall of my chamber hoping that some turn of fate will make it known to men. I have written and hidden this paper on my birthday, 2 October 1701, at six o'clock in the evening. They are going to make me move rooms and thus may Heaven grant that my prayers will be answered. Signed: Louis de Bourbon, Comte de Vermandois, the most miserable and the most innocent of men.