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THE MAN BEHIND THE IRON MASK

THE MAN BEHIND THE IRON MASK is a work of historical detection which presents and examines the facts and fictions surrounding the mysterious masked prisoner whose fate has appalled and fascinated people for more than three hundred years. From his own time until today the questions of who he was and why he was treated in this way have never been satisfactorily answered. From the claim that he was the twin brother of Louis XIV to the pretence that he was Richard Cromwell, son and successor of the Lord Protector, Noone reviews and assesses all the theories and conjectures proposed to date, passing by way of such candidates as Monmouth and Molière, an Armenian archbishop and an Italian astrologer, assessing each one in the light of what documental evidence exists, and in his investigations into contemporary papers and government correspondence he traces the life in prison of the masked man back from his death in 1703 to his arrest in 1669. The author's own elucidation of the mystery, offered in conclusion, is so unlike anything suggested before that when the book was first published in 1988 it was hailed in France as "the Copernican revolution" of Iron Mask studies. The book was republished with revisions in 1994 and published again in a new revised edition in 2003. This edition amounts to 127,000 words and is illustrated with 36 low resolution photographs which, though adequate as on-screen illustrations, will not serve for reproduction on paper.Read more

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