The Man Behind the Iron Mask by John Noone Page B

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.
    â€˜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