e. This prison was the fortress of
Sainte-Marguerite, and from there he was taken to the Bastille, where he
died. The Turkish Government continually clamoured for his release till
1723, but the French Government persistently denied having taken any
part in the abduction.

Even if it were not a matter of history that Arwedicks went over to the
Roman Catholic Church and died a free man in Paris, as may be seen by an
inspection of the certificate of his death preserved among the archives
in the Foreign Office, one sentence from the note-book of M. de Bonac
would be sufficient to annihilate this theory. M. de Bonac says that
the Patriarch was carried off, while M. de Feriol, who succeeded M. de
Chateauneuf in 1699, was ambassador at Constantinople. Now it was in
1698 that Saint-Mars arrived at the Bastille with his masked prisoner.

Several English scholars have sided with Gibbon in thinking that the
Man in the Iron Mask might possibly have been Henry, the second son of
Oliver Cromwell, who was held as a hostage by Louis XIV.

By an odd coincidence the second son of the Lord Protector does entirely
disappear from the page of history in 1659; we know nothing of where he
afterwards lived nor when he died. But why should he be a prisoner of
state in France, while his elder brother Richard was permitted to live
there quite openly? In the absence of all proof, we cannot attach the
least importance to this explanation of the mystery.

We now come to the promised extracts from the 'Memoires du Marechal de
Richelieu':

"Under the late king there was a time when every class of society was
asking who the famous personage really was who went by the name of the
Iron Mask, but I noticed that this curiosity abated somewhat after his
arrival at the Bastille with Saint-Mars, when it began to be reported
that orders had been given to kill him should he let his name be known.
Saint-Mars also let it be understood that whoever found out the secret
would share the same fate. This threat to murder both the prisoner and
those who showed too much curiosity about him made such an impression,
that during the lifetime of the late king people only spoke of the
mystery below their breath. The anonymous author of 'Les Memoires de
Perse', which were published in Holland fifteen years after the death of
Louis XIV, was the first who dared to speak publicly of the prisoner and
relate some anecdotes about him.

"Since the publication of that work, libe