AUBIGNÉ, THÉODORE-AGRIPPA d'. – Born at St-Maury (Pons-Saintonge) on 8 February 1552, died at Geneva on 9 May 1630. A man of arms and poet, an uncompromising partisan of the Calvinist sect in the religious wars of his time, he fought under the banner of the prince of Condé; having escaped the St. Bartholomew’s Night, he entered the service of Henry of Navarre and followed him in all his undertakings as squire, courtier, court poet, field marshal, governor of Maillezais, vice-admiral of Guienne and Brittany. The king’s conversion found him unyielding. After Henry IV was assassinated, he opposed the regency of Marie de’ Medici, lost his offices, and resumed the struggle, taking part in the Huguenot uprisings under Louis XIII. Unwilling to continue living in the France that Richelieu was pacifying, and threatened by four capital sentences, he took refuge in Geneva, where he married for the second time, composed his final works, and died, it seems, of grief at the apostasy of his eldest son.
He was one of the most eminent figures of that dark age, the true type of the intrepid and uncompromising partisan and sectarian in the struggles of which an idea is conveyed not only by his Memorie, but also by those of Brantôme, Montlué, and La Noue. He was a pupil of the reformer Theodore of Beza, who had succeeded Calvin. While still almost a child, he translated the Crito and learned Latin, Greek, and Hebrew at a very early age. After the failed Calvinist conspiracy at the château of Amboise, he witnessed, at the age of ten, the execution of his relatives, and is said to have sworn before their scaffold to avenge them.
He figures in French literary history chiefly for his poem Les Tragiques (donné au public par le larcin de Prométhée), begun in 1577 and completed in 1598.
After the king’s conversion, d’A. withdrew to write a Histoire universelle depuis 1550 jusqu'en 1601, condemned to the flames by Parliament for its sectarianism. Other violently anti-Catholic works of his are: La confession catholique du sieur de Sancy; Les aventures du baron de Folneste, another pamphlet containing violent satires against the Catholic Church and salacious anecdotes about the men of the court and Henry IV himself; a Histoire secrète de Th.-Agr. d'A. écrite par lui-même; another poem, memoirs, and poetic collections. One of d’A.’s sons was the father of Madame de Maintenon.