5/27/2016 Oxford DNB article: Bourbon, Armand de http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/printable/109568 1/3 Bourbon, Armand de, marquis de Miremont (1655–1732), army officer and diplomat by Lionel Laborie © Oxford University Press 2004–16 All rights reserved Bourbon, Armand de, marquis de Miremont (1655–1732), army officer and diplomat, was born on 12 July 1655 at the château of Lacaze in Languedoc, southern France, the second of the five children of Louis de Bourbon, second marquis de Malauze (1608–1667), and his second wife, Henriette de Durfort-Duras (fl. 1633–1687), daughter of Guy Aldonce de Durfort, marquis de Duras. Miremont's elder brother was Guy-Henri (1654–1706), later third marquis de Malauze, and his younger siblings were Charlotte (1658/9–1732), later Mademoiselle de Malauze, Henriette (1661–1668), and Louis (1667–1690), comte de Lacaze. Miremont belonged to the house of Bourbon-Malauze, an illegitimate branch of the Bourbon family, founded before the Reformation. His great- grandfather Henri I de Bourbon-Malauze (1544–1611) had been a leader of the protestants in the Rouergue province and a close friend of Henri IV. Miremont was also related to Louis XIV through his father and by his mother to William III, prince of Orange—two rival kings who directly shaped his life and career. The increasing persecution of the Huguenots in the 1670s and 1680s led to divisions within the Bourbon-Malauze family. Miremont's brother Guy-Henri converted to Roman Catholicism in 1678 and pursued a military career in the French service thereafter. His sister Charlotte had not abjured by May 1686, seven months after the revocation of the edict of Nantes had rendered protestantism illegal; she was ordered to enter a convent, but probably fled to England at about this time. His mother converted in 1687, while his brother Louis joined William of Orange's forces and was killed at the battle of the Boyne in 1690. Miremont, a staunch advocate of the Huguenots, also refused to abjure and so—following his brother's death—became the last protestant member of the Bourbon family. Although exile was a capital offence, he obtained permission from Louis XIV to leave France for Hungary on 9 March 1685 and departed in the summer, shortly before the revocation of the edict of Nantes. On leaving France, Miremont intended to serve the Holy Roman empire in Hungary against the Turks. At a date between 1686 and 1688, he joined his sister Charlotte in London, where they lived under the protection of their maternal uncle, Louis de Durfort-Duras, second earl of Feversham. A personal friend of James II, as commander-in-chief of the English army Feversham had defeated the duke of Monmouth's army at the battle of Sedgemoor in July 1685. Although Miremont initially intended to return to Hungary under the English flag, James II ordered him to raise a cavalry regiment for the king's defence on 22 September 1688, as the threat of a Dutch invasion of England loomed. Following William's invasion Feversham disbanded the army on James's orders on 10 December; Miremont and his regiment immediately declared for William. By then he was living in London— at Somerset House on the Strand—where Feversham had allocated him some rooms. There he became an intimate friend of the writer Charles de Saint- Évremond, who had long been resident in London. In the aftermath of the revolution of 1688 Miremont travelled to the Dutch republic, Germany, and Switzerland to raise funds for the Huguenot refugees who had recently arrived in Geneva from southern France. He reached Zürich in June 1690 and began fomenting invasion plans against France to relieve protestants