Maximilien de Béthune Sully, 1st Prince of Sully, Marquis of Rosny and Nogent, Count of Muret and Villebon, Viscount of Meaux (13 December 1560 – 22 December 1641) was a nobleman, soldier, statesman, and counselor of King Henry IV of France. Historians emphasize Sully's role in building a strong, centralized administrative system in France using coercion and highly effective new administrative techniques. While not all of his policies were original, he used them well to revitalize France after the European Religious Wars. Most, however, were repealed by later monarchs who preferred absolute power. Historians have also studied his Neostoicism and his ideas about virtue, prudence, and discipline.[1]
By his first wife, Anne de Courtenay (1564-1589), daughter of François, Lord of Bontin, he had one son, Maximilien, Marquess of Rosny (1587–1634), who led a life of dissipation and debauchery. By his second wife, Rachel de Cochefilet (1566–1659), the widow of François Hurault, Lord of Chateaupers, whom he married in 1592 and who turned Protestant to please him, he had nine children, of whom six died young.[3] Their son François (1598–1678) was created first Duke of Orval. The elder daughter Marguerite (1595–1660) in 1605, married Henri, Duke of Rohan, while the younger Louise in 1620 married Alexandre de Lévis, Marquess of Mirepoix.
His brother, Philippe de Béthune, was sent as ambassador to James VI of Scotland in May 1599.[6] He was given a good welcome and invited to Falkland Palace. He went on a progress with James VI to Inchmurrin and Hamilton Palace, after the king had written to the Laird of Wemyss for the loan of his best hackney horse and saddle.[7]
During his life, Sully inherited or acquired the following titles:
Les économies royales. Amsterdam: sn. 1638.
Les économies royales
Sully left a collection of memoirs (Mémoires, otherwise known as the Économies royales, 1638[10]) written in the second person. They are very valuable sources for the history of their time and as an autobiography, in spite of their containing many fictions, such as a mission undertaken by Sully to Queen Elizabeth I of England in 1601. One his most famous works was perhaps the idea of a Europe composed of 15 roughly equal states, under the direction of a "Very Christian Council of Europe", charged with resolving differences and disposing of a common army. This famous "Grand Design", a utopian plan for a Christian republic, is often cited as one of the first grand plans and ancestors for the European Union. Two folio volumes of the memoirs were splendidly printed, nominally at Amsterdam, but really under Sully's own eye, at his château of Sully in 1638; two other volumes appeared posthumously in Paris in 1662.[11]
For a partial modern edition, see David Buisseret and Bernard Barbiche, "Les Oeconomies royales de Sully," 4 vols., Paris 1970-2019
The (Pavillon de l'Horloge) of the Palais du Louvre is named in honor of the Duc de Sully.
Pavillon Sully
The Ormeau Sully, an ancient field elm , reputedly planted by Sully, survives (2016) in the village of Villesequelande near Carcassonne.
His ancestry is traced at length and his career more briefly, reproducing original documents, in the monumental Histoire généalogique de la Maison de Béthune by the historian André Duchesne (Paris, 1639)
In the 1938 Die Vollendung des Königs Henri Quatre book by [12]
Heinrich Mann
Sully is the chief protagonist of the 1893 romance by Stanley Weyman.
From the Memoirs of a Minister of France
Barbiche, Bernard and Segolene de Dainville-Barbiche, "Sully" (Paris, 1997)
Buisseret, David. Sully and the growth of centralized government in France, 1598-1610 (1968)
