Agrippa d'Aubigné

Life[edit]

Born at the Château of Saint-Maury, near Pons, in present-day Charente-Maritime, his father was Jean d'Aubigné, who was involved in the 1560 Huguenot Amboise conspiracy to seize power by staging a palace coup, kidnapping King Francis II of France, and arresting his Catholic advisors. After the defeat of the plot, d'Aubigné's father strengthened his Calvinist sympathies by showing him, while they were passing through Amboise, the heads of the conspirators exposed on the scaffold, and instructing him not to spare his own head in avenging their deaths.^[3]


According to the poet's own account he knew Latin, Greek and Hebrew at six years of age, and he had translated the Crito of Plato before he was eleven.


After a brief residence, d'Aubigné was forced to flee from Paris to avoid arrest, but was captured and threatened with execution. Escaping through the intervention of a friend, he went to Montargis. In his fourteenth year he was present at the siege of Orléans, at which his father was killed.^[3]


In 1567 he made his escape from tutelage, and attached himself to the Huguenot army under Louis of Bourbon, Prince of Condé. Aubigné studied in Paris, Orléans, Geneva (under the tutelage of Theodore Beza) and Lyon before joining the Huguenot Henry of Navarre as both soldier and counsellor. After a furious battle at Casteljaloux, and suffering from fever from his wounds, he wrote Tragiques in 1577. He was in the battle of Coutras (1587), and at the Siege of Paris. His career at camp and court, however, was a somewhat chequered one, owing to the roughness of his manner and the keenness of his criticisms, which made him many enemies and severely tried the king's patience. In his tragédie-ballet Circe (1576) he did not hesitate to indulge in the most outspoken sarcasm against the king and other members of the royal family.^[3]


Henry's accession to the throne of France required his conversion to the Roman Catholic Church and Aubigné left his service to tend to his own Poitou estates, even though more moderate Huguenots welcomed King Henry's decree of religious toleration, the Edict of Nantes. However, d'Aubigné never entirely lost the favour of the King, who made him governor of Maillezais. d'Aubigné remained an uncompromising advocate of the Huguenot interests. The first two volumes of the work by which he is best known, his Histoire universelle depuis 1550 jusqu'à l'an 1601, appeared in 1616 and 1618 respectively.^[4]


When Marie de' Medici became regent following King Henry's assassination in 1610, she embraced the Counter-Reformation. The third volume was published in 1619, but, being still more free and personal in its attacks against the Monarchy than those which had preceded it, the book was banned and ordered to be burned by the executioner.^[3]


Aubigné was outlawed in 1620 and fled to Geneva where he lived for the rest of his life, though the Queen Mother arranged for a sentence of death to be recorded against him more than once for high treason. Aubigné devoted the period of his exile to study, and supervising the fortifications of Bern and Basel which were designed as a defence of the Republic of Geneva against the Crown of France.^[3]


During the 1627–1628 Siege of La Rochelle, the poet's eldest son and heir, Constant d'Aubigné, leaked the plans of King Charles I of England and the Duke of Buckingham to send an English fleet to aid the city's Huguenot rebels to Cardinal de Richelieu, the Minister of State to King Louis XIII of France. As a result, Constant d'Aubigné was disowned and disinherited by his father.^[5]