Du Plessis-Mornay, Philippe

(1549–1623)

   Politician.

   Du Plessis-Mornay was born of a noble family in Normandy, and was educated in Paris. As a Protestant, he fled from France after the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre in 1572. During this period he lived for a time in London, where he published one treatise on the Church and another on the Christian religion. He became a leader of the Huguenot party and acted as a diplomatic agent for the Protestant Henry of Navarre. In 1589, he was appointed Governor of Saumur, where he built a new Protestant university. When Henry of Navarre succeeded to the throne of France as King Henry iv, he converted to Roman Catholicism. Du PlessisMornay did not follow his example; he continued to work for the toleration of Protestants, and the Edict of Nantes was signed in 1598. The same year his treatise on the Eucharist was published. This was challenged by the Roman Catholic Bishop of Evreux in a public debate before the King, and du Plessis-Mornay was humiliatingly defeated. Subsequently he published his Mysterium Iniquitatis sive Historia Papatus. His later career illustrates the gradual eclipse of the Protestant party in France after 1600. In 1621 he was compelled to retire from Saumur. The terms of the Edict of Nantes were frequently infringed throughout the seventeenth century and it was finally revoked in 1685.

   R. Patry, Philippe du Plessis-Mornay: un Huguenot Homme d’Etat (1933) [no English translation available];

   W.J. Stankiewicz, Politics and Religion in Seventeenth-Century France (1960).