The Man Behind the Iron Mask Read Online Free Page A

the hunt, he was a true barbarian: a superb athlete and a prodigious fighter, uncouth and almost illiterate, simpleminded, thick-skinned and self-assertive. He saw himself as acting a central rôle in the affairs of the state and played to the gallery for all it was worth, propelling himself into the spotlight whenever the opportunity offered. His oafish lack of manners and his naive lack of discernment made him a figure of ridicule at court; but it was this very absence of education and refinement, this honest muddle-headed blundering in search of a hero’s rôle, which drew the ordinary people to him, while his genuine courage and energy in war and adversity earned him the admiration of all.
    In 1636, at the age of twenty, he had already won honour and favour by distinguishing himself in action against the Spanish, but in the intrigues of court he took the side of the disgraced Queen, Anne of Austria, and the enemies of Louis XIII’s minister, Cardinal Richelieu. His father had always been prominent in the factions hostile to Richelieu and from 1626 to 1630 had been imprisoned at Vincennes for involvement in the Chalais Conspiracy. In 1642, he himself was implicated in another conspiracy against Richelieu, having to take refuge in England, but later that same year Richelieu died and so he was able to return. The Queen had absolute confidence in him. In her own words he was ‘the most honest man in France’ and, on the eve of the King’s death in May 1643, she entrusted her children to his safekeeping, afraid that the King’s brother, Gaston, or the Prince de Condé, who was commander-in-chief of the army, might attempt to kidnap the future King.
    In the power struggle which followed, however, the Queen as Regent found her true champion not in the plain he-man Beaufort but in the wily con-man Mazarin. Opposition to Mazarin rallied behind Beaufort, but in September 1643 the Queen had him arrested and imprisoned at Vincennes. There he remained, rejected and ignored, until in May 1648 he managed to slip past his guards and escape. By that time the political situation had degenerated into an open squabble between Mazarin and the Parlement of Paris, the first of a confused series of violent conflicts, known later under the general name of the Fronde. Mazarin had the backing of the Queen, but the people of Paris gave their support to the Parlement with such vigour that she and her children fled the city and appealed to Condé for protection. The only other great military commander in France at that time, Maréchal Turenne, was sympathetic to the Parlement, but he failed to win over the troops under his command and so took refuge with the Spanish. Beaufort then offered his services to the Parlement and with a group of other nobles was given command of a newly raised army of 12,000 men.
    These troops, untrained, undisciplined and ill-equipped, were so ignominously routed by the forces of the Queen led by Condé that their generals were ridiculed and their efforts turned to laughter. Condé himself called the conflict ‘the war of the chamber-pots’ and said it should only be recorded in comic verse. For Beaufort however the experience turned out to be a personal triumph. The common people of Paris were captivated by him and their adulation was not diminished by his defeat. In the time the conflict lasted he lived in the heart of the city and mixed with his raggle-taggle neighbours on equal terms, drinking and joking with them, gossiping and arguing, brawling and womanising. His enemies called him the ‘King of the Market’ but at a time when the King of England had just been executed by his people 2 and the King of France was in hiding from his, it was not a title to be scoffed at.
    In the course of 1649 everyone changed partners. Condé and the generals who had been opposed to him joined forces against the rest and in January 1650 the rest collaborated to have three of the