Great Unsolved Crimes

by Rodney Castleden

  It was at that early stage that the first rumours started to circulate about the secret prisoner’s identity. Some thought he was a high-ranking soldier, perhaps a marshal. Saint-Mars was holding other distinguished prisoners besides the mysterious ‘Dauger’. He had Nicolas Fouquet in one cell and the Marquis de Lauzun in the cell below Fouquet’s.

  Isolating Dauger completely was impossible because of the social customs of the day. Wealthy and aristocratic prisoners usually had their manservants with them. Fouquet had one, a man called La Rivière. La Rivière was often ill, so Saint-Mars (after carefully applying to Louvois for permission in 1675) allowed Dauger to act as Fouquet’s servant. Louvois agreed to this, but stipulated that Dauger could only attend Fouquet while Fouquet was alone; if the Marquis de Lauzun were present, Dauger must not be there. Lauzun was expecting to be released, and would therefore be able to tell the outside world about Dauger. Fouquet on the other hand was never going to be released, so it did not matter if he met Dauger.

  The fact that Louvois, Saint-Mars, Fouquet and the prisoner were all prepared to go along with the idea of Dauger serving as a manservant is highly significant. It means that Dauger cannot have been a prince; he cannot have been the brother or half-brother of Louis XIV, still less the real Louis XIV.

  When Fouquet died in 1680, Saint-Mars found a secret hole connecting Fouquet’s cell with Lauzun’s. This was clearly made so that they could communicate with each other, and that almost certainly meant that Lauzun knew about Dauger’s existence and would have heard conversations between Fouquet and Dauger. Saint-Mars told Louvois what had happened, and Louvois gave instructions that Lauzun should be moved into Fouquet’s cell and told that Dauger and La Rivière had been released. Instead Dauger and La Rivière were to be moved to cells on the opposite side of the prison. When Lauzun was released in 1681, Saint-Mars was transferred to another prison, the fortress of Exiles, and he took Dauger and La Rivière with him. In 1687, La Rivière died, still a prisoner, and in the May of that year Saint-Mars took Dauger with him to the island prison of Sainte Marguerite. It was during that journey that rumours about Dauger wearing an iron mask began. If Dauger’s identity needed to be kept secret, then obliging him to wear some sort of mask while travelling might have seemed a good idea. In practice, it simply drew attention.

  The final transfer came in September 1698, when Saint-Mars became governor of the Bastille in Paris, taking his celebrity prisoner with him. The man in the mask was installed in a furnished cell in the Bertaudière Tower. Many of the details about him from this phase came from one of the prison staff, Lieutenant du Junca. It was du Junca who reported that the prisoner was given preferential treatment, had to wear a mask at all times, and that the mask was made of black velvet.

  Dauger, or whoever he was, died on 19 November 1703. He was buried the next day under the name Marchioly. All his belongings were destroyed. The nature of Dauger’s crime was still not revealed. It must be suspected, because of the kid-glove treatment he was given, that he was the victim of the crime of wrongful imprisonment. There were many such political prisoners. La Rivière shared Fouquet’s fate – life imprisonment – just by being his manservant. The French state committed judicial crimes against such people.

  There was a significant development in the 1890s. A French military historian, Louis Gendron, found coded letters and passed them to Etienne Bazeries, a military cryptographer. It took Bazeries three years to decipher some of the letters, which used Louis XIV’s Great Cypher. One letter related to a prisoner identified as General Vivien de Bulonde. Another letter, from Louvois, revealed the nature of de Bulonde’s crime. De Bulonde had been at the siege of Cuneo. Concerned about the impending arrival of enemy troops, de Bulonde had withdrawn in excessive haste, leaving behind munitions and his own wounded. Louis XIV was very angry and ordered his punishment; he was ‘to be conducted to the fortress of Pignerole where he will be locked in a cell under guard at night, permitted to walk the battlements during the day with a mask.’ The dates on the letters tally with the dates on the original records relating to the masked prisoner.

  Some historians believe that this concludes the story. The identity of the man in the mask is revealed as General de Bulonde, and his crime was serious military impropriety, a kind of desertion, cowardice in the face of the enemy. There are nevertheless two snags with the de Bulonde scenario. One is that de Bulonde was not arrested in secret (it was in the press), and there was no reason for his detention or identity to be kept secret; that remains unexplained. There is also a discrepancy regarding the date of death. The man in the mask is recorded as dying in 1703, while de Bulonde died in 1709.

  On balance, it is more likely that ‘Dauger’, the man in the mask, was General de Bulonde than any of the other candidates proposed, simply because there is more solid evidence. Many of the other stories, especially those implicating Louis XIV or those close to him, were politically motivated. Louis XIV was in such a powerful position as an absolute monarch that scandalous rumour-mongering that cast doubts on his legitimacy was the only way of weakening it. The only other realistic candidate is Count Matteoli, who was imprisoned for having sold to Spain the details of the negotiations between Louis XIV and Charles III of Mantua. The main reason for thinking Matteoli was the man in the mask is that the masked man who was buried in November 1703 was named in the burial record as ‘Marchioly’, which is phonetically very close indeed to the count’s name.

  The Appin Murder: The Shooting of the Red Fox

  On 14 May 1752, Colin Campbell of Glenure was shot dead in a wood in Appin in the Scottish Highlands. The murder happened in the wake of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, the ’45, in which Scotland was being held down by garrisons of English soldiers and the clans were suppressed. Lands of Highland chiefs loyal to the Jacobite cause were confiscated and handed over to Lowlanders loyal to the Hanoverian cause. The murder happened on the land of the Appin Stewarts, who had fought in the final battle of the rebellion, the Battle of Culloden, in the front line of the Jacobite army, alongside their neighbours, the Camerons, and against the Campbells, who had supported the Hanoverian cause. Culloden had been a virtual massacre of the Jacobites.

  A Campbell mysteriously shot down in Appin Stewart country in the aftermath of Culloden and the retreat of Prince Charles Stuart looked suspiciously like a revenge assassination, and by whom else than one of the Appin Stewarts?

  Charles Stewart of Ardsheal, who had led the Appin Stewarts at Culloden, escaped to France. Meanwhile his estate was confiscated. The Hanoverian government appointed the owner of the neighbouring estate, Colin Campbell of Glenure, to administer Stewart’s estate and collect the rents. In a skilful and diplomatic manoeuvre, Colin Campbell appointed as his assistant James Stewart ‘of the Glen’, a farmer who was also half-brother of the exiled Charles Stewart. Having their rents collected by a Stewart might well be more palatable to the Stewarts than handing money over to a Campbell.

  James Stewart was foster-father to one of his own younger relatives, Allan Breck Stewart, who had been assigned to James by the boy’s dying father. In 1752, Allan Breck Stewart was about thirty years old and James was fifty; James would live to be no older. Allan Breck was a wild character. For excitement, he had joined the English army, then deserted in order to join the Jacobites. He fought alongside the rest of the Appin Stewarts at Culloden and after the battle, which was a virtual massacre, he had fled to France with Charles Stewart. Allan Breck Stewart came back to Scotland intermittently in order to recruit for the French army; he himself had joined a Scots regiment in the French army.

  Allan Breck Stewart was in continuous danger when he was in Scotland. He was wanted by the English authorities for being a deserter, a Jacobite and a recruiter for King Louis; he could have been hanged for any of these offences. He was a tall, round-shouldered man with large dark eyes and a face pitted with smallpox – hence his nickname ‘Breck’, which means ‘spotted’. In his French military uniform he was very conspicuous indee
d. It consisted of a long blue coat lined with red and fastened with yellow buttons, a scarlet shirt, black breeches, tartan stockings and a feathered hat. He looked like a character out of a pantomime, and the outfit was far too conspicuous for him to wear it when in Scotland. He naturally swapped the uniform for some of his foster-father’s clothes. Allan Breck Stewart was a man of unreliable character, a brigand. His own clan thought he was ‘an idle, fair-spoken, clever rascal’.

  When Allan returned to Scotland he was on the lookout for recruits, but he was also collecting money to support Charles Stewart in France. The tenants on the estate were loyal, and voluntarily paid their rent twice, once to Campbell of Glenure and once to Allan Breck for Charles Stewart.

  Things were continuing uneasily but without aggression or violence until Colin Campbell, nicknamed the Red Fox, ordered the confiscation of James of the Glen’s land in Glenduror in 1751. It was to be given to another Campbell. The government then went a step further, ordering that by 17 May 1752 all the Stewart tenants were to be evicted from their farms. Colin Campbell served notices to quit in April, giving the tenants until 15 May to get out. James of the Glen was incensed by this cavalier and inhuman treatment. He went to Edinburgh to put the case of the tenants to the barons of the Exchequer. Unfortunately the court was not in session. Instead he met one of the barons, Baron Kennedy, who expressed sympathy for the tenants’ case and thought that they should be allowed to stay on their lands for the year while the matter was sorted out. But the fact remained that the barons would not be formally in session again until 3 June, by which time the evictions would already be over.

  James managed to get a Bill of Suspension on 18 April, which would have delayed the eviction, but this was revoked by Lord Haining, a government supporter. James was still given to understand that there was a hope of saving the tenants’ position if they were to make a formal protest in the presence of a lawyer and two witnesses. James was still trying to organize the presence of a lawyer when the whole process was interrupted by the murder of Campbell. It happened on 14 May, the day before the eviction, and James was in one of his potato fields, talking to a messenger he had sent to try to get hold of a lawyer. As they stood in the field talking, a rider came galloping up at high speed. As he passed, the rider shouted to them that Campbell of Glenure had just been shot dead in a wood four miles away.

  James quietly commented, ‘Well, whoever did the deed, I am the man they will hang for it.’

  While James Stewart had been in Edinburgh trying to save the tenants from eviction, Colin Campbell had been there as well, working against him. Probably the intervention of Lord Haining, revoking the Bill of Suspension, was at Campbell’s instigation. Once Campbell had his way over the evictions, he rode home, getting there on Saturday 9 May. On the Monday, two days later, he rode to Fort William, the nearest English garrison town in order to make arrangements for the forced evictions in Appin that were scheduled for Friday. He started back from Fort William on Thursday in the company of the sheriff-officer who was to supply the law-enforcement, his nephew Mungo Campbell who was an Edinburgh lawyer, and his servant Mackenzie.

  The road they took was the long straight road south-west from Fort William, along the shore of Loch Linnhe. There was open water to their right, and the mountains of Cameron country to their left. The Camerons had fought on the same side as the Stewarts at Culloden. Like the Appin Stewarts, the Camerons had lost their estates to Colin Campbell of Glenure as their new administrator for the Crown. The Camerons had an additional grievance against Colin Campbell. He was, on his mother’s side, himself a Cameron, so the Camerons saw Campbell as a traitor. As far as the Stewarts were concerned, Campbell was an enemy they might kill if they had an opportunity in an open fair fight. As far as the Camerons were concerned, he was someone who had put himself beyond any entitlement to fair play; they might kill him by stealth. They planned to do just that.

  As Colin Campbell, the Red Fox, rode along the side of the loch, there were Camerons stationed all along the way, up on the hillsides, all armed, all looking for an opportunity to kill him. But Campbell had been tipped off that an ambush had been planned. There was no danger from the right, where there was a broad open expanse of water. But Campbell was vulnerable to his left. What he did was to make Mackenzie ride close beside him to the left; he was using him as a human shield, in the knowledge that the Camerons’ code of honour would not allow them to risk shooting an innocent man. Campbell’s party reached the Ballachulish ferry, where the road was broken across by the branch of the sea loch called Loch Leven. Beyond Loch Leven lay Appin Stewart country, and Campbell could feel safer there. Once he had made the short ferry crossing, Campbell said, ‘I am safe now that I am out of my mother’s country.’

  They rode on and it was less than one mile into Stewart country when Campbell was shot. With his three companions he rode into the Wood of Lettermore, and it was there that he was ambushed, felled with a single shot by a sniper. Mungo Campbell described the incident a week afterwards.

  Upon entering the middle of a thick wood, poor Glenure was shot, and had power to say no more than, ‘Oh, I’m dead: Mungo, take care of yourself; the villain’s going to shoot you.’ On which I immediately dismounted and being a few paces before him I returned to where he was, and started up the brae where I imagined that the shot came from, and saw a villain with a firelock in his hand, who on seeing me, though unarmed, made off without firing. Glenure still kept his horse; and I removed him off, unable to utter a word, but opened his breast to show me the wound. We had two servants along with us but not a nail of arms among the whole. Immediately I despatched one of them to bring us some people. . . Judge then on my situation, in the middle of Appin, surrounded by my enemies, and the doleful spectacle of my uncle dead before us, expecting every moment to be attacked and entirely defenceless. In this situation, however, I continued about an hour and a half, when the Appin people flocked about me in shoals (none of whom but pleased at everything had I shared my uncle’s fate). I got a boat and conveyed the corpse to a house in Appin Glenure.

  Apart from Mungo Campbell, there was one other witness who saw the murderer. She was More MacIntyre. In her sworn statement she said, ‘upon that foot road in the Wood I met a man running very hard, of whom I asked if he had seen Glenure. He told me he was a little before me on the road.’ Mor MacIntyre was sure she had never seen the man before. Significantly, she was not called on to give her evidence at the trial. What she saw did not fit what would become the official version of events. The only evidence for identification that was admitted at the trial was Mungo Campbell’s – and he diplomatically altered his description to fit what the authorities wanted.

  The man the authorities wanted to incriminate was Allan Breck Stewart. He would be their gunman, and he had James of the Glen as his accomplice. At the time of the trial, Allan was of course safely back in France, leaving James to hang alone. James knew, the moment he heard that Campbell had been shot, that he would be hanged for it. His speech at the trial, after sentence had been passed, was a model of dignity and restraint.

  My Lords, I tamely submit to my hard sentence. I forgive the jury and the witnesses who have sworn several things falsely against me, and I declare, before the great God and this auditory, that I had no previous knowledge of the murder of Colin Campbell of Glenure and am innocent of it as a child unborn. I am not afraid to die, but what grieves me is my character, that after ages should think me capable of such a horrid and barbarous murder.

  James of the Glen continued to maintain his innocence on the scaffold, and to make clear that none of the Appin Stewarts would have shot Campbell in an ambush.

  To do my friends justice, as far as I know I do declare that none of my friends, to my knowledge, ever did plot or concert that murder; and I am persuaded they never employed any person to accomplish that cowardly action. . . there is none of my friends who might have a quarrel with that gentleman but had the honour and resolution to offer him a fairer chance
for his life than to shoot him privately from a bush.

  But could he really vouch for his wayward foster-son, Allan Breck? As it happens, Allan Breck’s movements and clothing on that day are well known. The evening before the murder he spent at Ballachulish House, right beside the ferry and half a mile from the place where the murder took place. On the morning of the murder, he helped with farm work and then after a midday meal he decided to fish, took a fishing rod and went up to a stream on the hillside. He found a vantage point from which he could see all the surrounding country and also see the route Campbell would follow: the road coming round the hill to the north-west as he approached the ferry.

  As if to remind everyone in the neighbourhood that he was there, Allan Breck came down the hillside in the afternoon, went to the ferry and asked the ferryman if the Red Fox and his party had crossed yet. He knew they had not, so he can only have had one motive in coming down – to show himself in front of witnesses. He went back up the hillside and disappeared into the trees, but without a gun.

  Allan’s motive in establishing so emphatically that he was there that afternoon is difficult to interpret. It is possible, indeed likely, that he knew just as Campbell knew that the Camerons were plotting to assassinate him somewhere along the Loch Linnhe lake shore. If he believed that Campbell was going to be murdered in Cameron country, and he also knew that he would be a prime suspect for the murder, he may have needed to establish his alibi. He made very sure that several people knew that he was on the south side of Loch Leven all morning and all afternoon, and therefore could not have assassinated Campbell somewhere to the north of the Ballachulish ferry.