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  of the younger son, who escaped from the massacre, and was sheltered by his relative the Baroness de Biron. This was Jacques Nompar de Caumont, Duc de la Force, Marshal and Peer of France; he married, on 9th February 1577, Charlotte de Gonthault. The Marshal’s two sons, Armand and Henri Nompar, successively succeeded to the dukedom, the former dying without issue. Henri was the grandfather of the next Duke, Jacques Nompar de Caumont, fourth Duc de La Force, whose children by his first wife, Marie de St. Simon de Courtemer, did not survive. He married, secondly, Susanne de Beringhen, who was the mother of two dukes:— (1) Henri Jacques, fifth Duke, who married Anne Marie de Beuzelin, but whose issue did not survive; (2) Armand, sixth Duke, who, in 1713, married Elizabeth Gruel, and whose son and heir was Jacques, seventh Due de la Force.

At the time of the Revocation, the heads of the family were the fourth Duke, and his second wife (née Susanne Beringhen). It was an illustrious Protestant family, but unhappily the only refugee was the Duchess. “The Duke de la Force,” says an anonymous historian, “after having his children taken away, was confined in a monastery, insomuch that at last he yielded. But no hard usage was able to overcome the constancy of my lady the Duchess, who, after having tired out the cruelty of her persecutors, obtained leave to come over into England a few days after the death of her husband in 1699. God gave him grace to repent of his weakness, and to die in the profession of the true religion.”

Under the year 1699 Oldmixon’s History chronicles that, “before the Earl of Jersey returned from his embassy in France, he obtained leave for the Duchess de la Force, a Protestant, to quit that kingdom where, upon the death of the Duke, her husband, she was thrown into a nunnery at Evreux in Normandy. She had endured fourteen years’ persecution, with invincible constancy, on account of her religion. She came over to England with the Countess of Jersey, and lived here to a very great age.” Narcissus Luttrell writes, “1699, June 10. The Bishop of London, and several eminent clergy, have been to wait on the Dutchesse d’la Force, arrived from France, where she was persecuted on account of her religion; and the princesse has given her an apartment in St. James’s house.”

Jean Marteilhe, of Bergerac, in his own autobiography of “un Protestant condamné aux galères de France, pour cause de religion,” informs us that the Chateau of La Force was near his native town, in the province of Perigord. The good Duchess’s son, the fifth Duke, had, in 1699, become a bigoted Papist, and obtained a commission to convert the Huguenots in his estates. After having tortured some of his victims to death, and compelled the survivors to utter an abjuration of their faith, he held a riotous festival in the village of La Force, and made “a bonfire of a magnificent library, composed of the pious books of the reformed religion, which his ancestors had carefully collected.” On the 25th May 1731 (says the Gentleman’s Magazine), died at her house in St. James’s Place, London, the Duchess de la Force, “grandmother of the present Duke de la Force, a Marischal and Peer of France.” From her Will it appears that in 1726 she had a house at Sunbury near London. This Will (as translated from the French by Peter St. Eloy, notary public), is so characteristic of the pious Duchess, that I give it to my readers at full length:—

“In the name of God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, one only God, blessed eternally. Amen. I, underwritten, Susanne De Beringhen, Duchess Dowager of La Force, considering the great age that it has pleased God to permit me to attain to, and the weak state of health that I have laboured under for a long time, I have thought proper, since God has granted me still the free liberty of my mind, to dispose of my temporal affairs, to the end that at the time of my decease nothing may interrupt rue from the thoughts of an Eternity, which I desire to be only employed in upon that important occasion. Before all things I render to God my most humble thanks for all those graces which he has favoured me with in this world, and particularly that he has caused to be born, to be educated, and to persevere, in the Christian Protestant Reformed Religion, in which I declare I will live and die — with the assistance of the Holy Spirit, which I implore for that purpose with all my heart. I beseech heartily from this Great God, with great concern and extreme confusion, the pardon of all my great and innumerable sins, and of the criminal abuse which I have made of all his favours and of all his benefactions, desiring him with all my soul to pardon them all by his infinite merits, and to wash them entirely in the blood which His Holy Son, my only Saviour, has shed for me upon the cross, and to grant me the love of this Divine Redeemer — all the faith, all the repentance, and all the charity, which are necessary to me for to have a part in the precious fruits of his death and of his resurrection.

“I recommend to this good God, whereof the compassions are infinite and extend themselves to a thousand generations, my most dear and unfortunate children, whereof the deplorable state has always (after a bitter thought of my sins) been the subject of my greatest