BOOKS.

THE MAN OF THE MASK.*

THE identity of the Man in the Iron Mask was coupled by Disraeli with the authorship of the letters of " Junius " among the subjects to be eschewed by the aspirant to conversational honours ; but it must ever remain one of the most fascinating of human problems. Modern research has narrowed the field of speculation, and exposed a long line of pretenders, without lessening the mystery of the masked prisoner. Like the once famous case of "Poor Peter Peebles against Plainstaues" be is at once a whetstone and a stumbling-block.

The bulk of tradition that has gathered round the Mask yields to the first touch of criticism. Neither Voltaire nor Dumas was serious when be found in him the twin brother of the Grand Monarque. Still wilder was the Bonapartist legend Which held him to be the real Louis, incarcerated to make room for a son of Mazarin and Anne of Austria, and becoming through a prison marriage the great-grandfather of Napoleon. In defiance alike of probability and of chronology, he is alleged to have been the Duke of Monmouth, the Due de Beaufort, the Comte do Vermandoia, the Grand-Intendant Foucquet, and a son of Oliver Cromwell. A more persistent and plausible theory has identified him with Mattioli, the double-dealing Mantuan who incurred the unquenchable animosity of the French King. But Mattioli entered the gloomy walls of Pignerol ten years later than the Mask, and he died at Sainte-Marguerite nine years before the latter was buried in the parish churchyard of the Bastille. Mr. Andrew Lang has lately come forward with a brand-new explanation. The Mask, he maintains, was an obscure valet Of French birth named Martin, who was supposed to have acquired some compromising secrets in the service of a Huguenot adventurer, Roux de Marsilly, and whose extradi- tion was being demanded from the English Government at the very moment when the dungeon was being got ready at Pignerol for an especially important prisoner of State. Mr. Lang's conjecture gave the title to a volume of studies pub- lished as The Valet's Tragedy, and in one of these, "The Mystery of James de la Cloche," the author expresses surprise that no one has ever put forward that transient and embarrassed phantom as the real Man in the Iron Mask. The challenge has been accepted, not a little, we fancy, to Mr. Lang's astonishment, by Monsignor Barnes in the book before us, and we propose to put as briefly as possible the main points of his thesis.

We are asked to accept James de la Cloche as the eldest son of Charles II., his mother being, by local tradition, a member of the ancient Jersey family of de Carteret. The amour dated from 1646, when the then Prince of Wales found shelter in the Channel Islands on his way from Scilly to France, and, out of regard for the rank and name of the lady, it was wrapped in a secrecy which has lasted for upwards of two centuries. It was not until 1862 that Lord Acton, utilising the researches of the Jesuit Father Boero, broke the seal in the Home and Foreign Review. According to his story, the young James Stuart was sent to Holland at an early age and educated as a Protestant. In 1665 Charles brought him to London, and secretly acknowledged him as his son. In July, 1667, he became a Roman Catholic at Hamburg under the auspices of the Queen of Sweden, who somehow or Other was aware of his parentage ; and in April, 1668, he entered on his novitiate in the Jesuit College at Rome. So far from being displeased, Charles wrote a warm letter to the General of the Jesuits, in which he lamented his inability to "find a single person to whom be could safely 'confide the affairs of his soul without leading the Court to suspect that he was a Catholic." For this purpose he desires that the young man should be prepared for ordination, and sent eventually under the name of Henri de Hoban to London. Existing documents

* The Man of the Mask: a Study in the Byways of /fistory. By Arthur otatqlton Barnes, MA., Chamberlain of Honour to HE. Pius N. With Itlyontinpieoe, London: Smith, Elder, and Co. 1.10a. Od. net.]

prove that James left Rome in the middle of October, 1668, that he safely reached England, and quitted it with a letter from his father dated November 18th announcing that "Mr. de la Cloche had desired to return to Rome in order that he might act as ambassador on an exceedingly important matter between the King and the General of the Jesuits." The letter is in existence, but from thenceforward the name of de la Clothe disappears absolutely front the records of the Society. Early in 1669 a young Cavalier calling himself James Stuart, and professing to be the son of Charles II., made his entrance into Naples. The King of England, on being applied to by the Viceroy, denied all knowledge of him, and he died shortly afterwards, leaving a son who perpetuated the story well on into the eighteenth century. The claim of "this princely cheat, or whatever he was," is dismissed by Lord Acton as an imposture; Mr. Lang has doubts, or had till recently.

What, then, had become of de in Cloche himself P Had he been murdered by James Stuart of Naples, or was he finishing his Jesuit course in France or Flanders under another assumed name P Monsignor Barnes finds the clue to his disappearance in "the exceedingly important and secret .matter" with which be had been charged by his father. Charles had long been a Roman Catholic at heart, and at this moment he was initiating the negotiations which found expression in the Treaty of Portsmouth eighteen months later. To announce his conversion openly meant the almost certain loss of his crown ; his brother, who had just taken the plunge, assured him that a dispensation might be obtained from the Pope whereby he could be received privately into the Church of Rome and yet bow his knee in the house of Rimmon until a convenient opportunity. De la Clothe, the author

suggests, was to find out through the good offices of the General of the Jesuits whether such a dispensation could be granted. An answer in the negative, whether brought by de In Cloche or not, was received in London about January 25th, 1669, and the King straightway set to -work to obtain the assistance of France in men and money to enable hint to

declare himself openly a Roman Catholic.

In the intrigue which followed Monsignor Barnes picks up the lost trail. At the request of Charles a secret agent whom he designates is sent over from Paris. He asks for a certain Father Pregnani, an Abbe of the Theatine Order, who has a

great reputation for astrology and for knowledge of chemistry. From the correspondence between Charles and Madame Henrietta we knew that Pregnani arrived in London on February 24th, and left it on July 5th, the 16th by the "new style" followed on the Continent. During this period be was constantly with the King, accompanying him, amongst other places, to Newmarket, where he ruined his reputation as an astrologer by his rash " tips " on that classic heath.

In the Abbe, undeniably a mysterious person, of whose ante- cedents we know nothing, Monsignor Barnes reeognises James de in Cloche, the most natural person whom Charles would desire to have about him, who was already in the innermost confidence of his Royal father, and who could speak to him on religious topics with a quasi-priestly authority. Louis, how- ever, knew nothing of the real history or lineage of his agent; be was impatient at the lack of results, and. he was alarmed at having entrusted so secret a mission to one whose bona fides he suspected. At the end of June Pregnani was abruptly recalled ; he left England, as we have seen, on July 5th (16th), and is not heard of again ; the receipt of an important despatch with which he had been entrusted is never acknowledged.

In the middle of July, 1669, M. de Saint-Mars, the Governer of Pignerol, a little fortress on the lower slope of the Alps, some twenty miles from Turin, and then an important French outpost, had notice to prepare for a prisoner of State who would be brought to him from Dunkirk

"There was no crime alleged against him, nor was it said of him, as often in similar cases, that he was a rascal whom the King desired to punish. The principal thing that was impressed upon Saint-Mars about him was that he must on no a000nnt whatever be given an opportunity of telling what ho know—See nouvelles—to any living, soul, not even to Saint-Mars himself. His prison must have no windows out of which he could look,.so as to make signals to those without. It must bo shut off by thick doors lest any sound of voice should pass out from within. No ono must see him but Saint-Mars, who must be in attendance daily to carry him food with his own bands. If he should attempt at any time to toll Saint-Mars or any one else 'that on which ha

• was employed before ho came to Pignerol,' he is to be told that it will cost him his life."

That this prisoner, known in the gaoler's books for the greater, part of his incarceration as " Eustaehe Dauger," was the Man in the Mask is beyond all doubt.. He entered the walls of Piguerol on August 21st, 1669, and from that hour till his death in 1703 he was under the strict surveillance of M. de Saint-Mars. He accompanied him to Exiles in 1681; in 1687 to Sainte-Marguerite, where he first assumed the mask, not of iron, but of silk, and where the legend that finds its most perfect form in The Vicomte de Bragelonne originated ; and finally to the Bastille in 1698. There he was placed in the " troisieme Bertandiere," the third floor of the Bertaudiere tower; there he died in 1703, his death being entered in the prison-books under the name of M. de Marehiely, a fact which mainly accounts for the identification with the long-deceased Maittioli. Monsignor Barnes is convinced that he was the vanished 'Pregnant, and theuoincidence of time and place and motive is almost overwhelming. The prisoner of the Mask is seized at Dunkirk at the very moment when the Abbe is due at Calais. The two secrets which Louis was most desirous of guarding from the world were the negotiations with Charles of England, regarding his impending conversion, and the con- spiracy against Holland; and Pregnani was up to the eyes in both. He knew too much to be left at large. And though after the Treaty of Portsmouth and the Dutch W " ses nouvelles" lost much of their importance, it was not the custom of the Ancien Regime to open the prison gates for those who had once enjoyed the King's hospitality.

But while we are strongly inclined to believe that the Mask was Prognani, Monsignor Barnes cannot convince us that Pregnani was James de la Cloche.- The reputation for occult and natural science which Pregnani had acquired in Paris is utterly at variance with all that we know of the brief carder "in the world of the young Jesuit novice. And if, as we are

• told, the Duke of Monmouth knew that he was only a "mock astrologer," it is inconceivable that he should have compelled him to "foretell the horse-matches." • Indeed, an atmosphere of suspicion hangs round the whole of the de la Cloche story. Monsignor .Barnes, very candidly, suggests that one at least of the de Is Cloche letters in the Jesuit College at Rome is a forgery ; and if so, why not the others P And without these letters, what authority have we for believing that a real . de la Cloche ever existed P Who ever saw him in the flesh ? , Mr. Lang, to judge from an article in the Morning Post of . December 4th, 1908, has now thrown up the sponge on behalf of Martin, but he will have none of the de la Cloche-Pregnani . hypothesis. He has drifted into the dull negation of despair.

• It has been impossible to touch even the fringe of the topic which Monsignor Barnes weaves so deftly Into his narrative, the character and the religioue convictions of King Charles II. Ulm author, who was trained in the old Oxford History School, is himself one of the most brilliant of the recent converts to the Church of Rome, and those of us who have been brought up in the orthodox Protestant tradition will welcome, though we cannot accept, the variae lectiones.