The Rest Is History - 411. The Man in the Iron Mask

Episode Date: January 22, 2024

In the late 17th century, during the glorious reign of Louis XIV, the Sun King, France was at its apogee, with royal absolutism at its zenith. But, beneath the gold and glamour of Louis’ reign, there lay a terrifying darkness: a prison system into which people could be disappeared without a trace. And at the very heart of this darkness there lurked an excruciating secret…a prisoner, his terrible crime unknown, moved from prison to prison, forbidden to speak, and whose face was encased at all times in a mask of steel. Who was he, if he even existed at all? An English spy? Louis’ long-lost father, driven into obscurity? Or, even more threateningly, his twin brother? Join Tom and Dominic as they explore one of the greatest mysteries of all time: the Man in the Iron Mask. Following in the footsteps of Voltaire and Alexandre Dumas, they definitively solve the case and reveal, once and for all, the identity of this enigmatic figure… *The Rest Is History LIVE in 2024* Tom and Dominic are back onstage this summer, at Hampton Court Palace in London!  Buy your tickets here: therestishistory.com Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishist'Artagnan had the key, they saw Monsieur de Saint-Mars directing his steps towards the chamber inhabited by the prisoner. Upon a sign from D'Artagnan, they concealed themselves in an angle of the staircase. What is it? said Athos. You will see, look, the prisoner is returning from chapel. And they saw, by the red flashes of lightning against the violet fog which the wind stamped on the bankwood sky, they saw pass pass gravely, at six paces behind the governor, a man, clothed in black and masked by a visor of

polished steel, soldered to a helmet of the same nature, which altogether enveloped the whole of his head. The fire of the heavens cast red reflections on the polished surface, and these reflections, flying off capriciously, seemed to be angry looks launched by the unfortunate instead of imprecations. In the middle of the gallery, the prisoner stopped for a moment to contemplate the infinite horizon, to respire the sulphurous perfumes of the tempest, to drink in thirstily the hot rain, and to breathe a sigh resembling a smothered groan. So that was The Man in the Iron Mask by Alexandre Dumas, which is a subsection of a colossal novel called The Vicomte of Bragelonne, which is the third in the series of novels that begins with the three musketeers,

all for one and one for all. Tom, are you a big Three Musketeers fan? I loved it. Didn't you? All that floppy hats, feathers, flashing rapiers, milady with the long black cloak and the beauty spot. Brilliant. Loved it. The one that I'm familiar with is the Oliver Reed. Yeah. Is he Porthos? Yeah. I think he is Porthos. Because he's the one who goes, oh, and he's kind of large, isn't he?

Yes, he is. And d'Artagnan, he's the embodiment of Savoie Faire, of French Dash. Yeah. Flashing Gaskin blade. He's like Theo, our producer, who purports to be French. Very similar. Yeah, he is. Yeah.

He is. Exactly so. And so the Three Musketeers, incredibly famous, and I had always assumed were fictional. Mais au contraire. No. Really? D'Artagnan was a real person? D'Artagnan was a real person.

He ended up captain of the Musketeers. Yeah. And he dies fighting for Louis XIV against the Dutch. So you'd probably approve of that, wouldn't you? I mean, a kind of martyr's death. It's a pity they can't both lose to him. So D'Artagnan is real. San Marz, the jailer in that passage, he is also real. But the question we're going to be exploring today is the man in the iron mask, is he real?

So the man in the iron mask, I have to confess right at the outset, like most people, I'm sort of vaguely aware of the man in the iron mask in the fact that he's a man, he wears an eye mask and he's locked up for a long time. And I remember seeing the film where I think Guy Pearce was in it. I can't remember who else was in it. It was Leonardo DiCaprio. Leonardo DiCaprio. Yes.

But other than that, I'm actually quite ignorant of this subject, Tom. Despite having heard me talk about it four times on the stage. Let me rephrase that. I'm going to pretend to be quite ignorant for the purposes of the podcast, because I always put the podcast first above my own personal prestige. So to explain to people, we've been on a tour of Australia and New Zealand, haven't we? Before that, we did a couple of shows in England. And in four of those, we did a kind of live show based around The Man in the Iron Mask.

Because I was always fascinated by it. So I did love The Three Musketeers stories. But I was also, I had a paperback book of mysteries that was kind of mysteries from history. So there was a ghostly Roman legion that was spotted in York. Oh, yes. Yeah. The Mary Celeste. Yeah.

El Dorado, things like that. Is that the Earthborn book? I think I had that book. No, it wasn't. It was a kind of small paperback book, but on the cover they had the man in the iron mask and it was a terrifying image. Right. You know, I'd kind of dare myself to look at it. So I've always been interested in it. And in this book, they had no doubt as to who the man in the iron mask was, that he was real. And I'll maybe reveal later on in the course of this episode who they thought it was.

Okay. Because basically everything in that book was rubbish. Oh no. I came to realise, I kind of thought, well, maybe it wasn't true. But then doing the reading for the stage show that we were doing, I discovered actually he really did exist. Oh, excellent. And there's quite a lot of evidence as to who he really was.

Okay. So that's what we're going to be doing today. We're going to explore that. Talk us through it, Tom. And I will pretend consistently that I don't know what's coming. No, you don't have to. You don't have to. You don't have to.

But Dominic, you will remember from the stage show we did that there are three contemporaneous pieces of evidence that refer to a prisoner wearing, if not an iron mask, then a mask. Right. And the first of these dates to the 4th of September, 1687. And it is written by a bishop. So he's a Jansenist bishop, which is a kind of slightly heretical kind of bishop. And so he's having to communicate to his priests with written newspapers. And this gazette that he writes on the 4th of September 1687 records the appearance

on the south coast of France by Cannes, so scene of the film festival, of an unknown man who's been brought from a prison in the Alps, a place called Exiles, by this guy, Saint-Mars, who is a top jailer. We love a top jailer. Yeah. So Saint-Mars has brought this prisoner all the way down to the coast by Cannes and they're preparing to board a ship and go over to this island called Saint-Marguerite, which is a prison island. So once you're on it, you can't escape it. Right. And the bishop in his gazette reports that this mysterious prisoner is a prisoner of the

state. So he's been condemned on the personal orders of the king and that he has been transported by san marz in conditions of the utmost secrecy right so no one has been allowed to know his name yeah he's been carried the whole way down from the alps down to the south coast in a sedan chair swathed in kind of black cloth so very stifling yeah i mean you know hot time of the year yeah and the whole way he has worn a mask d'acier a mask of steel so that even when the sedan chair is laid down to rest on the docks by can yeah and the prisoner gets out and steps into the boat people still can't see who he is because he is wearing this mask so to give you a preview of the next episode we're doing tom he looks a little bit like clitus in flash Gordon, played by Peter Wingard, who has sort of metal mask on the whole time. Anyway, that's by the by. Or perhaps Darth Vader,

who also features in it. Yes, giving people an exciting preview of what is coming. Anyway. Yes. So what happens to the prisoner? Well, he vanishes from public record after that fleeting mention for 12 years. And then 18th of September, 1698, an entry is made in a register that is kept at the Bastille. And the Bastille, of course, will be familiar to all fans of the French Revolution, the prison that gets stormed in 1789. But this is well before that. The Bastille is the great royal stronghold in the heart of Paris. And this register is kept by one of the jailers there, a guy called Etienne de Juncker. And he records the arrival from the island of Saint-Marguerite, so that prison island of Cannes, of the new governor of the Bastille. And who should this new governor of the Bastille be, Dominic? But Monsieur de Saint-Mars.

Who would have guessed? Our old friend. And he has brought a prisoner with him. And the name of this prisoner is never uttered, so nobody knows who he is. And Dionca reports the prisoner is always masked. And he is taken into the Bastille and again, vanishes from the public record. Until five years later on the 20th of November, 1703, Gianco makes another entry in the register. And this time he is recording the death the previous day. So the 19th of November

of this prisoner, the unknown prisoner, as he's described. And that afternoon of the 20th of November, so the shadows are spreading, in a nearby graveyard, the prisoner is buried in an unmarked grave. And at this point, de Juncker specifies that the mask that the prisoner is wearing is made not of steel, as the bishop had reported, but of black velvet. Very different connotations of a mask of black velvet, I would say, Tom. Yes, so there's some confusion there, but both are agreeing that he is wearing a mask and that he is not named. Although, intriguingly, a later entry by de Jonquay,

so he's written it in the margin in different ink, records the name of this prisoner. And the name that is given is Monsieur de Marchiel. Okay. So is this the name? I mean. Is that his name? Yeah.

But I mean, essentially, it's a pretty anonymous prisoner. If Marchiel is not actually his name, then he's completely anonymous. Yeah. And he's being buried in this wintry twilight. And by rights, his memory should have been utterly consigned to oblivion. But of course, it hasn't been because the identity of this mysterious prisoner described as wearing a mask either of steel or of black velvet has become one of the great mysteries in all history.

And this is the man in the iron mask. So the question, who is he? And why does he come to be described as wearing an iron mask? It's a good subject. So, Tom, let's do a bit of context. Where are we again? Late 17th century, early 18th. Tall in the reign of Louis XIV.

Louis XIV's France. And Louis XIV, what did he reign from? 1638 to 1715. So, 72 years. Le roi soleil, Theo is reminding me. The sun king. The French producer sticking up for his monarch because of course louis the 14th ruled longer even than our own late beloved queen oh

that's poor isn't it if she'd held out for two more years she would have pipped him that's bad form from louis the 14th because also he took over as a baby so i think that's cheating isn't it that is cheating that's absolutely cheating so this is obviously the heyday of the wig, the rapier. Yeah. Fountains. The bubbling fountain. The ridiculous court hierarchy of Versailles and stuff. It's French absolutism.

Yes. Yes. Cardinal Richelieu, Cardinal Mazarin. Waves of cardinals. Yeah. But I think the key issue and why Louis XIV provides such a telling context for the man in the iron mask is, as you said, this is the era of royal absolutism, which is a trend that has been building in France for many centuries. I mean, going right the way back to the time of the Hundred Years' War, which we talked about, but has particularly intensified in the 17th century under Louis XIV and before him, his father, Louis XIII, guided by, as you say, the cardinals, first Richelieu and then Mazarin. And when Louis comes to the throne, noblemen who have been resentful of royal control

under Louis XIII, they start making trouble. Because if you have a boy on the throne, then there's opportunities. And when Louis is 10, so in 1648, this kind of basically an attempt to throw off the shackles of royal absolutism that comes to be known as the Fronde breaks out. And it takes its name from the French for sling because crowds gather with slings in the streets of Paris and use their slings to kind of break the windows of supporters of Mazarin, who is seen as this kind of sinister controlling spider behind the throne. And Louis' government, he's got the nobility, he's got various royal princes, he's got the parliament, the law courts, and they're all against him. But he emerges triumphant, and he's absolutely resolved that never again will he face an analogous threat.

I suppose he's also thinking about what's been happening in Britain, right? In England, Scotland and Ireland. Of course. The wars and yeah. Absolutely. And so the great symbol of this resolve is, as you said, the Palace of Versailles, which is built shortly after. So Versailles, it's 12 miles west of Paris, 13 miles west of Paris, something like that.

And it had originally been used by Louis XIII as a hunting lodge. And then he'd kind of had it built up into a chateau. But Louis XIV builds it into this kind of enormous palace. I mean, lots of people will have visited if you haven't. I mean, it's one of the great tourist attractions in the world. And it's commissioned almost a decade after the front has been brought to an end. And it's inspired specifically by a visit Louis makes to a palace that is owned by basically his kind of financial guru, the superintendent of finances, a guy called Nicolas Fouquet. And Fouquet, using his position as the guy in charge of France's finances, is spectacularly wealthy. And the castle and the entertainments that he lays on stupefy Louis. And this, of course, is very foolish because Louis is, I mean,

he's determined, first of all, to build Versailles to put Fouquet's palace in the shade. But he's also alarmed that Fouquet may be corrupt and may be using the money that he's skimming off to kind of build up a rival power base to the king himself. And so a month later, Fouquet is arrested by none other than D'Artagnan. Oh, no way. Yeah. So D'Artagnan is actually quite a bad fellow. He's a henchman. No, he's obeying the king's orders. I mean, he's a loyal servant of the king. He's the head of the musketeers. He's a henchman, Tom. He's a hired goon. No, he's loyal to his king. I mean, he has sworn an oath. Yeah.

He's dashing. He's got a great moustache and beard. Of course, he's not a goon. Terrible thing to say. So, poor old Fouquet is put on trial, and the trial lasts three years. And at the end of it, he is convicted, and he's sentenced to be exiled from all the centres of power. And again, d'Artagnan escorts him all the way from Paris down to the Alps, where there is a royal fortress called Pignerol, which stands near the Italian border, guarding the road that leads down into Italy. He arrives there in December, 1664, and d'Artagnan

hands him over to the commander of this royal fortress. And who is the commander of this royal fortress? If not, our old friend, Monsieur de Saint-Mars. I have no sense of Monsieur de Saint-Mars. Paint a picture of him for me, Tom. Okay. So Saint-Mars is a guy who basically goes around a succession of royal fortresses and into these royal fortresses, various prisoners are sent. So he is commanded pina roll yeah when fouquet gets sent to him he commands exiles which is the fortress from which he brings the man in the iron mask san margarit and then the bastille and the bastille obviously is you know if you're a jailer that is the one that you ultimately want to command so basically

he reaches the top of the jailer tree he's not one of those sort of great jailers, you know, who'd be played by, I don't know who would play him, John Candy. No. A big sweating man with a massive ring of keys. No, I think it's more the kind of, you know, the banality of evil kind of guy. Ah. He's not evil.

He's not evil. But I mean, he's basically an apparatchik. Right, right. I mean, he's not a musketeer. Yeah. You know, he's not flashing his blade or that kind of thing. I mean, he is looking after prisoners in royal fortresses. He's trusted, but he's not a key player. But I mean, he is very close in the chain of command to Louis XIV himself. So if we think

of Louis XIV, you know, the Le Roi Soleil, you think of the blaze of his light because he is ruler over France when France is at its absolute apogée. He is the dominant figure, not just in France, but in Europe as well. Yeah, of course. He's a great hate figure for the English, isn't he? But also kind of object of emulation. So in due course, the Duke of Marlborough, you know, he'll defeat Louis XIV's armies at the Battle of Blenheim and be awarded Blenheim Palace by a grateful nation. But Blenheim Palace is just, you know, I mean, it's a feeble echo of the splendor and glory of Versailles. Tom, this is unbelievable. Very poor.

So Louis XIV, I mean, he's a domineering, powerful, glamorous figure, but he's also quite a sinister figure, I think. Right. Because am I not right in thinking that in the 1930s, let's say, there were some French historians who would say of Louis XIV, oh well, the sinister nature of his regime prefigures, I mean, maybe this is too strong, but slightly prefigures the detainment of the 20th century. People being thrown into prison, musketeers doing his bidding, a sort of sense of the absolutism, that an absolute monarchy is something to dread. Well, yes and no. It's absolutely true that people do vanish. People who offend Louis can kind of, you know, disappear into the prison system for years at a time. Although it's important to say that the prison system is obviously, you know, it's not a gulag system.

Yeah, sure. He said, I am the state. He wants to be the embodiment of the law. He doesn't want to feel that the law has no status whatsoever. And so although people can vanish, it's all done legally, as Louis would see it. So he issues these things that are called lettres de cachet. Right. So they're sealed letters, aren't they? Sealed letters. There is no need to specify what crime the offender has committed, nor is there any need to specify how long an offender can be imprisoned. And so we've already discussed this once before

on The Rest Is History with reference to the Marquis de Sade. So if you remember, the Marquis de Sade's mother-in-law obtained a letter to Cachet from the king, and this is what enabled Sade to be imprisoned without a trial. And the chain of command that links a prisoner to the king is very, very short. So you have the prisoner, then you have Sam Mars, you know, or the jailer or whatever, who's looking after him. And then between the jailer and Louis, there is one other person who is the minister of war. And in the case of Louis XIV, this is a guy called the Marquis de Louvois, who's very, very able. I mean, this is the guy who is providing Louis with the war machine that enables him to throw his weight around and put all Europe in his shadow. Well, Europe's largest army. Yeah.

We love a cliche on the rest of his history. Surely not. And so this is, I think, why the man in the iron mask has such a resonance because he seems to kind of symbolize the darkness that is the counterpoint to the blaze of Versailles. This sense that anyone can vanish into one of the royal fortresses, that identity itself can be erased, and that once you are locked up in a fortress, there are eyes watching you all the time. So I think that in the 18th century, the man in the iron mask becomes a symbol of this. Okay. And the man who makes him a symbol is Voltaire, is that right? Absolutely. So Voltaire, the great philosoph, polemicist, wit, who in the long run will become

one of the people who helps to inspire the French Revolution. And the French Revolution, of course, casts itself as being set against the tyranny and absolutism of the French monarchy. The man in the iron mask, again, he's playing a role in that kind of demonology. And it is Voltaire who basically creates him and who coins the phrase, the man in the iron mask. So Voltaire comes across the story of the man in the iron mask because he himself ends up in the Bastille. So he gets sent there in 1717. So that's two years after the death of Louis XIV. And it's the measure of how long Louis has ruled that Louis is succeeded not by his son, not by his grandson, but by his great grandson. So he, of course, inevitably is also called Louis. So louis the 15th and you need to have a

regent so the guy who rules as regent for louis the 15th is his great uncle the duke of orleans and the duke of orleans is quite a scandalous figure and is darkly rumored to have been having an incestuous relationship with his own daughter dominic okay that's poor conduct tom even for a well even for a frenchman even for a French nobleman. Yeah. So Voltaire can't resist making a joke about this. The Duke of Orleans is furious, has him arrested, chucked into the Bastille. And while Voltaire is there, he is able to learn stories of the man in the iron mask

who died only 14 years previously. So he gets information from the jailers, gets information from the various prisoners. And when he gets released, he keeps his notes. And decades pass, and then in 1751, so a few decades after he's been released, he publishes a book called The Century of Louis XIV. And in this book, there is an entire chapter about the man in the iron mask. And this is where the guy gets defined for all time as wearing an iron mask. And Voltaire describes it. And so he says that it has a chin piece with steel springs that enabled the prisoner to eat while wearing it. And the mask itself is a kind of helmet, like a kind of big egg that's been soldered around his head. So very

like the description that we got in the Dumas passage that you read at the start. His guards have orders to kill him if he so much as kind of tries to shift it too much. You know, any hint that he's trying to take it off, that's no good. But here is the strange thing. Even as the prisoner has to suffer this excruciating imposition, he is also treated with the utmost respect. So Voltaire describes the Marquis du Louvois, the minister of war who had sentenced him. He comes into the presence of the man in the iron mask and he stands while the man in the iron mask sits. And this is incredible because the age of Louis XIV is an age where etiquette and propriety and hierarchy are absolute principles. So the idea that a Marquis would stand up in the presence of a sitting common prisoner is unthinkable.

So then the question is, well, who is this mysterious figure? Somebody noble or whatever, presumably. Well, that's the implication. And yet here is a further puzzle, which Voltaire himself draws attention to. So I'll quote him. Here is the astonishing thing. Even as the prisoner was being sent to the Ile de Saint-Marguerite, so this is the island where he gets taken over by Saint-Mars, no man of any consequence in Europe was reported to have disappeared. Yet such the prisoner undoubtedly was. For during his first few days on the island, he was served his meals by the

governor himself. So a curious case, Holmes. Very, very curious. And well, you know my methods. I think this is a time for a break, isn't it? I think it is time for a break. So after the break, we will return and the Sherlock Holmes of 18th century France, Monsieur Thomas Hollande, will be going through the theories about the man in the eye mask. And Tom, am I right in saying you will be literally unmasking him? Well, not literally. You will be.

I know what you mean. You will be unmasking him. Very exciting. I think I will. Return after the break for this extraordinary drama. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment

news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip, and on our Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes, and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. To mix my metaphors, my detective metaphors,

the suspects have been assembled in the library, the knight is drawing in, Poirot has closed the curtains, and he turns to face the vicar, the retired colonel, the flapper, and all these other people, and he begins to tell them who was the man in the eye mask. Hercule, take it away, please. Well, so I thought what we could do, is go through the lists of the various candidates that have been proposed to have been the man in the iron mask. And the most famous suggestion, the suggestion that is kind of the great plot driver in Dumas' novel, is the idea that the man in the iron mask is actually somebody who is royal. And this is

what Voltaire in his book had been hinting at. And in fact, in 1771, he openly confirms it. He states blankly that the man in the iron mask was an elder brother of Louis XIV. And this is Voltaire's own theory, but it exists in the context of what is indisputably a historical fact, which is that Louis XIII, who is Louis XIV's father, and his mother, Anne of Austria, who despite being called that is actually from Spain, had real trouble in getting an heir. So Louis XIV was born 23 years after his parents had been married. And when he was born, it was so surprising that the infant boy came to be known as Dieu Donne, God-given. It seemed to be a miracle. And so where there are miracles, there are people who are keen to debunk them.

And there were various theories as to who Louis XIV's father might actually have been, because the idea was that, well, it had taken so long, so obviously Louis XIII was having trouble getting his wife pregnant. So if not Louis XIII, then who? So inevitably, one popular theory is Cardinal Mazarin. Of course. Because everyone loves a sexually predatory cardinal in the 17th century. We do, yeah.

And to be fair, he had actually been very close to Anne of Austria. The two were kind of very close political allies. Another theory was the Duke of Buckingham, who was the favourite of James I of England, James VI of Scotland. Of course, very long legs. Very long legs, swathed in silk, friend of the guy who becomes Charles I, and who appears in The Three Musketeers. Yes, he does.

So he's a kind of big character in that. And in fact, the Duke of Buckingham had visited Paris in 1625 with the future Charles I and was rumoured to have had a relationship with Anne. So these are the swirl of rumours that lie behind gossip about who Louis XIV's father was. And all Voltaire does is to ratchet up the degree of scandal by saying that actually, Louis XIV was the son of Louis XIII and Anne of Austria, so he was legitimate. But there was this illegitimate elder brother who was floating around. This is the one who had to be locked up, had to be kept safely out of the way. Right, right, right. Yeah.

So that's Voltaire's theory. But there is another theory that is actually earlier than Voltaire's, which in a way is even more sensational and in fact makes more sense. And that is that the man in the iron mask isn't just Louis XIV's brother, but his identical twin brother. Oh my word. This is Leonardo DiCaprio, isn't it? Yeah. So this is what drives the plot in Dumas' novel.

Because of course, if it's an identical twin, then who's to say which is the king and which is the prisoner? I mean, lots of scope for a romantic novelist. But actually, it's not invented by Dumas. It's originally reported in a letter to another of the great philosophers of the 18th century, Denis Diderot, a famous atheist, author of the great encyclopedia. And he says that he's heard it from a German journalist who had heard it from the niece of Louis XIV, who had heard it from her father, who heard it from Louis XV,

who of course is the great grandson and heir of Louis XIV. Okay. So that seems a very plausible chain of transmission. Yeah, in that case, it's obviously true. I mean, no doubt about it. And the story is that Anne of Austria goes into labour. She gives birth to the future Louis XIV. It's all done in public. Everyone's kind of gathering around to witness the birth of the heir. The baby future Louis XIV is carried off, fireworks, gunfire, all that kind of thing.

Hurrah, hurrah. Anne of Austria collapses back into her pillows, exhausted by the strains of labor. And then four hours later, contractions start again. And she gives birth to this second twin, identical twin. And the reason why this would be threatening to Louis XIV, to have an identical twin who's born four hours after him isn't just the danger that their identities could be confused, but also that according to a theory that was very popular in France in the 17th century, the twin that is born second had been conceived first. Okay. I suppose there's a weird biological logic in that is there yeah well let's not go into it too deeply as it were um so this might give people who wanted to

get rid of louis the 14th you know justification and opportunity and so this is why the unfortunate twin brother has been banged up right that, I think, is an excellent theory. There is one final theory, which actually originated in the 20th century with a Tory MP. So that's Lord Quickswood. He was part of the Cecil family, the big Cecil dynasty. So he was Lord Hugh Cecil, he was, and he was Churchill's best man, Tom. And he had a big moustache, did he? He had an enormous moustache.

Right. I'll tell you what, he would not be popular with the community manager of our Rest His History club, James Regan, because he was a sworn foe of H.H. Asquith. And James is a massive Asquith fan, as we know. Of course he is. Yes, of course he is. Okay. But, I mean, that doesn't necessarily invalidate him. No.

As a kind of a scholar of… Of the man in the iron mask. The man in the iron mask. So he comes up with a great theory. And his theory is that the man in the iron mask. So he comes up with a great theory. And his theory is that the man in the iron mask wasn't Louis XIV's brother, but his father. And his theory is that Richelieu, who is Louis XIII's agent, you know, chief minister, is very, very anxious that Louis XIII doesn't have an heir. Because if he doesn't have an heir, then the next king is someone

who's a sworn enemy of Richelieu. So he's absolutely determined to get Anne of Austria pregnant. And so basically he employs a substitute father. A stud. To do the business, a stud. And Anne of Austria duly gets pregnant. And the stud is then paid off by Richelieu. He's packed across the Atlantic to go and live in America. And the expectation is that no more will be heard of him. The problem is that when Louis XIV comes of age, who should come knocking at the door but Papa. Oh no. And he's trying to blackmail his son.

Very foolish. And so Louis is not having that. And so the father banishes into the prison system and is made to wear a mask. And that is the end of that. Now, you may wonder, what is the evidence for this? And Lord Quickswood very cheerfully admitted there was no evidence for it whatsoever. But he did feel that it fitted all the facts. It does fit all the facts. I mean, it's a great theory. So it's his father, the stud, who's been trying to blackmail Louis. But as you say, if there's no evidence, I don't think we can really embrace that theory, Tom. I think the problem with all of these is that they are brilliant material for a novel. But generally, one of the lessons of history is that if stuff is brilliant material for a novel,

it probably didn't happen. Don't you think? I mean, depressingly. I mean, I'm thinking of JFK. Yes. Yeah. But, you know, exciting and glamorous assassins. Yes. Probably not. Do you know who would write a brilliant novel about this? Ren dan brown yeah he would wouldn't he very much an associate of the register's history the priori to say i would be behind it or something anyway go on so i don't think any of those are absolutely ruled out i think they are possibilities but i think they're

probably unlikely okay to be true yeah there is another lead, however, and listeners may remember that when the man in the iron mask died and was buried, an entry was put into the record of his death, written shortly after, giving him his name. Oh yeah, Monsieur de Marchiel. Monsieur de Marchiel. So what about that? Is there any evidence of a Monsieur de Marchiel having fallen foul of Louis XIV? And and the depressing truth is there isn't right there's no evidence of him at all and scholars know this because in the wake of the french revolution all the papers from the bastille get released they kind of get scattered they end up in russia they get brought back to france other records as well and so scholars have been through all these papers

with a fine tooth comb and there is no mention at all of a Martial. So instead they have looked for somebody who we know might have been imprisoned in the prison system, whose name begins with M. And there is such a character. And this is an Italian, he's a count and he's called Eccole Mattioli. And this is a guy who very foolishly tried to double cross louis the 14th so he was employed by the french spy service he then tried to you know be a double agent louis the 14th found out and had him kidnapped abducted and brought to pignerol which is the great prison uh where fouquet was in prison yeah high in the alps looking out out over Italy. And Mattioli is imprisoned in Pignerol alongside Fouquet. He is given a false name to disguise his identity. He is kept under very,

very close watch by St. Maas. Someone is listening into everything he says. And he gets imprisoned with another guy, a monk who goes mad. And Mattioli is reported to have boasted that he knew more than he could say, that he had secrets that would potentially bring down the monarchy. Okay. He's a good candidate, Tom. He is a good candidate. And I would say that until recently, he was probably the candidate who was viewed by people as being the likeliest person to be the man in the iron mask however new letters written by san marz have been found and they reveal that although

amatioli was taken down to san margarite he probably died shortly afterwards and he was definitely never taken to the bastille so it's not him so it's not him before we get into the person who you think it really was there there is an even more elaborate theory. Well, there are a couple of really elaborate theories on there. And they're both that the prison was English. Yeah. So one of them was 1687. Sam Mars writes a letter in which he says the people who live near the prison think that this might be the son of Oliver Cromwell.

Bizarrely. But couldn't be. No, because one of them is dead and another one is in exile. Yeah. Richard Cromwell, tumble down dick. Yeah, he lives forever and ever. So it's not him. Yes, he does.

Yeah. He lived into the reign of Queen Anne and it's definitely not him. Yeah. And then what's the other one? The Duke of Monmouth. Yeah. This is proposed again in the 18th century.

So it's quite a venerable one. And the Duke of Monmouth is the bastard son of Charles II, leads a rebellion against his uncle, James II, gets defeated. He gets taken to the tower, gets beheaded very horribly. Yeah, by a man called Ketch, who took about 57 strokes. And actually, Monmouth got up after the execution and said, carry on.

His head was kind of hanging off. Stop messing around. So it's obviously not him. No, I mean, it's obviously not him because he was executed. But the theory is that perhaps he got switched, but I mean, he didn't. It was a very public execution. And also there is another killer detail, which is that people did hear the man in the iron mask speak and nobody records that he had an English accent or indeed an Italian accent. So he does seem to have been French. Perhaps like me, Tom, he just spoke beautiful French. Maybe, maybe. But I think the likely explanation is that he's French. And to be honest,

the kind of the close study of all the available documentation, which really only happened in the 1960s, it's been since the 1960s that scholars have essentially been able to identify who the man in the iron mask actually was. And there are some key documents which show this. And these were written long before the earliest mention of the man in the iron mask. And they go all the way back to July, 1669. And these are letters that were written by Louis XIV and Louvois to St. Mars, who is then, you know, he's the commander of Pignerol, telling him to expect a prisoner. And we also have the Lettre de Cachet, which was issued by Louis XIV for this same prisoner.

So we know the name of this prisoner, and it was Dominic. Yes. It was Eustache de Gé. So, Tom, disappointingly, by the standards of a detective novel, this is somebody that you've not previously mentioned at all. Yeah, I know. I know. So who on earth is Eustache Doge? Well, so according to the documents, he is a wretch, a villain.

He's been arrested in Calais. He is to be kept in strict isolation. Sam Mars is to kill him if he talks about anything than his most basic needs and requirements. And there is an intriguing detail, which I think is rather unexpected for all of us who have been brought up on tales of Marquis standing in the presence of the prisoner, which is that Eustache Doge is only a valet. Okay. So why on earth was the governor standing in his presence and serving him his meals and stuff? Before we come to that question, we can track this guy right the way through the prison system. So all the way from 1669 to 1703. So he gets imprisoned in Pignerol, he gets imprisoned in

Exiles, he gets imprisoned in Saint-Marguerite, and he gets imprisoned in the Bastille. So it's clear this is the only guy who could have been the masked man who is seen being taken over to Saint-Marguerite and then arriving in the Bastille. So basically it has to be this guy, it has to be Eustache Doger. But of course, the question then is, well, might Eustache Doger be a pseudonym? I mean, might it be the pseudonym of someone in whose presence a Marquis would indeed stand? I mean, he is being housed in a prison for those considered dangerous to the state.

He's being surrounded by people who are counts and so on. Louis XIV and Louvois both seem to have taken a personal interest in him. Again, quite odd if he's just a valet. The name on the arrest warrant appears to have been added after the Lettre de Cachet itself was actually written. And then, of course, there's the question, why is he wearing?

Why the mask? A mask. Yeah. But, Dominic, I mean, let's look at an alternative theory. Yeah, let's. We should always do that when engaging in detective cases. Yeah. Let's suppose, for the sake of argument,

that Eustache de Gé was exactly what Louvois said he was. In other words, a valet, a gentleman's gentleman, a kind of Jeeves figure. And of course, there's backup for this possibility in that passage that I read from Voltaire, where he said that no one of any significance had vanished. In Europe, yeah. I mean, you know, because if it's just a valet,

no one would care, would they? No. And there is an, I think, kind of killer, in fact, a clinching detail, which is that in Pignerol, we know that Eustache de Gea was made to work as a valet. Oh, right. So Fouquet, his valet, I can't remember, dies or something. And so Eustache de Gea works for Fouquet as his valet, which is unthinkable if he'd actually been of noble or let alone royal status. But then that directly contradicts that account that you gave earlier that the governor stood in his presence and served him his meals,

because the governor would never have done that to a mere valet, Tom. He wouldn't, but where is the story coming from? It's coming from Voltaire, who's writing decades later and is very party-pre and is well known to, if he's got a case to make, he will make that case by exaggerating. Voltaire is the journalistic standards of The Guardian, Tom. Very good. Very good. Your centre-right banter, Donny.

Oh, very good. Right, so basically so much of the story comes from Voltaire. I mean, he is drawing on a prisoner who clearly had been made to wear a mask, even if not of iron. But all the stuff about people standing in his presence, I mean, he could very easily have made that up. And I think that the evidence suggests that he did make it up. What about the mask? Is that made up? No, that's clearly not made up because we have these different contemporaneous pieces of evidence for that. So that clearly isn't being made up. But again, you have to wonder, is this kind of showboating perhaps by Sanmas? Because that thing that you mentioned about people saying that the prisoner is the son of Cromwell, he's saying this in a tone of some pride. And we know from other

correspondence that he's written that he says, I have told kind of exaggerated stories about the prisoner. I think because he knows that the fact that he's wearing a mask makes him a topic of gossip. And this redounds to St. Mars' credit. It makesIV and Louvois, there's no orders to put the prisoner in a mask. So as far as we can tell, this seems to have been Saint-Mars himself who is doing it. So I think that the likely explanation is that he is what Louvois said, that he was a valet and that all the kind of stuff that have made people think perhaps he was a member of the royal family, was exaggerated by Voltaire, who had his own reasons for doing that. So if he was a valet though, I mean, why has he attracted the interest of Louis XIV? And valets are close attendants on very powerful people. And so that puts them in prime position to see things perhaps that they shouldn't and if you bear in mind where he's arrested and when we said he was arrested in Calais in Calais in 1669 okay so the obvious implication of that so Calais of course across the channel from Dover

and at the end of the 1660s Charles II of England is in secret talks with Louis XIV of France about a deal which will become the a further twist to this, which is that Charles II, who effectively is a Catholic and would like to be a Catholic, but not publicly, that he will publicly convert to Catholicism and presumably lead his country back into the fold of the Roman Catholic Church, which of course he never does, does he, Tom? He reneges on that part of the deal because he knows it would cost him his throne. But is it plausible that Eustache Doge was the manservant to somebody involved with the negotiations, do you think? So this is a theory that's been proposed by a number of historians. And I mean, it certainly seems possible that perhaps he was Livoire's own valet. Perhaps he was the valet of someone

involved in the negotiations. perhaps he was employed as an english agent i mean we don't know right but the timing and the place where he's arrested because of calais obviously you know you could imagine that he's going there to perhaps to cross to dover does suggest that this is a very plausible theory another theory might be that he is a dutch agent right that he's kind of working against the french there's also a quite complicated theory that i think is less probable that he had embezzled money from charles i widow henrietta maria yeah who was living in paris at the time lou the 14th aunt so lots of possible theories and i think unless further correspondence is discovered, we will never know the actual truth.

So there's a historian called Georges Mangredien, who was the guy who, in the 60s, basically compiled all the documentation. And although he never said who he thought it was, it's pretty clear that he thought it was Eustache Doge. And he suggested that there might be further correspondence to be discovered. So that is one possibility that might conceivably reveal that Doget, what he'd actually done. But I mean, we don't know. But I think that the whole story is intriguing because it's a kind of classic illustration that trying to cover something up can draw attention

to it. I mean, it's the lesson of Watergate, isn't it? Right. Burn the tapes. So the man in the unmask in a way is Louis XIV's Watergate, you might say. Right. That the attempt to bury this guy in complete oblivion has made him incredibly famous, even though we still can't be absolutely certain as to what he did. So an intriguing story, I think with a kind of solution. Right. Fascinating. So the lesson of that is if you try to cancel somebody, Tom, people will be talking about them 300 years later.

Well, so in one of the letters that Samar writes to Louvois, he boasts about how he has kept the identity of his prisoner a secret. And he writes, I can assure you, Monsignor, that no one has seen him and that the manner in which I have guarded and conducted him during the journey makes everybody try to guess who he is.

And here we are, centuries on, and we are still trying to guess who the man in the iron mask was. Very good, Tom. A very nice note on which to end. That was, dare I say, un tour de force. Ah oh merci uh thank you uh ericule or sherlock or whatever i was calling you earlier that was really good fun and the man in the iron mask let the conversation end the mystery is solved and on that bombshell we'll see you all next time. Thank you, Tom, and goodbye. Au revoir.

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