an old family of the Perche. He accompanied the duke of Anjc:i to Poland in 1573, and was appointed master of the wardrobe and captain of Vincennes when Anjou became Henry III. He remained in favour, despite the opposition of the queen-mother, Catherine de Medicis, fought at Coutras, defended Tours against the Leaguers, was named chevalier de Saint Esprit and governor of Touraine (1585), and was one of the first to recognize Henry IV. (1589), who subsequently entrusted him with the education of the dauphin. Louis XIII. rewarded him with the title of marshal in 1613. He died in Paris in 1626.
SOUZA-BOTELHO, ADÉLAIDE FILLEUL, Marquise de (1761–1836), French writer, was born in Paris on the 14th of May 1761. Her mother, Marie Irène Catherine de Buisson, daughter of the seigneur of Longpré, near Falaise, married a bourgeois of that town named Filleul. It was reported, though no proof is forthcoming, that Mme Filleul had been the mistress of Louis XV. Her husband became one of the king’s secretaries, and Mme Filleul made many friends, among them Marmontel. Their eldest daughter, Julie, married Abel François Poisson, marquis de Marigny (1727–1781); Adélaide married in 1779 Alexandre Sebastien de Flahaut de la Billarderie, comte de Flahaut, a soldier of some reputation, who was many years her senior. In Paris she soon gathered round her a salon, in which the principal figure was Talleyrand. There are many allusions to their liaison in the diary of Gouverneur Morris. In 1785 was born her son Auguste Charles Joseph de Flahaut (q.v.), who was generally known to be Talleyrand’s son. Mme de Flahaut fled from Paris in 1792 and joined the society of émigrés at Mickleham, Surrey, described in Mme d’Arblay’s Memoirs. Her husband remained at Boulogne, where he was arrested on the 29th of January 1793 and guillotined. Mme de Flahaut now supported herself by writing novels, of which the first, Adèle de Sénange (London, 1794), which is partly autobiographical, was the most famous. She presently left London for Switzerland, where she met Louis Philippe, duke of Orleans. She travelled in his company to Hamburg, where she lived for two years, earning her living as a milliner. She returned to Paris in 1798, and on the 17th of October 1802 she married José Maria de Souza-Botelho Mourão e Vasconcellos (1758–1825), Portuguese minister plenipotentiary in Paris. Her husband was recalled in 1804, and was offered the St Petersburg embassy; but in the next year he resigned, to settle permanently in Paris, where he had many friends, among them the historian Sismondi. He spent his time chiefly in the preparation of a beautiful edition of the Lusiads of Camoens, which he completed in 1817. Mme de Souza lost her social power after the fall of the First Empire, and was deserted even by Talleyrand, although he continued his patronage of Charles de Flahaut. Her husband died in 1825, and after the accession of Louis Philippe she lived in comparative retirement till her death on the 19th of April 1836. She brought up her grandson, Charles, duc de Morny, her son’s natural son by Queen Hortense. Among her later novels were La Comtesse de Fargy (1822) and La Duchesse de Guise (1831). Her complete works were published in 1811–1822.
See Baron A. de Maricourt, Madame de Souza et sa famille (1907); Lettres inédites de J. C. L. de Sismondi ... et de Madame de Souza (Paris, 1863), ed. St René Taillandier; Sainte-Beuve, Portraits de femmes (1844); and for Mme de Filleul, MM. de Goncourt, Les Maîtresses de Louis XV. (1860) and J. F. Marmontel (1804).
SOVEREIGN, originally an adjective, meaning “supreme,” especially having supreme or paramount power. The word in Middle English was soverain or sovcreyn, and was taken through Old French from Low Latin superanus, chief, principal. The intrusive “g,” which is due to a popular confusion of the termination of the word with “reign,” dates, according to Skeat, from about 1570. The form “sovran,” borrowed by Milton from Italian sovrano, soprano, is chiefly found as a poetical usage. As a substantive “sovereign” is applied to the supreme head of a state (see Sovereignty), and to the standard English gold coin, worth 20 shillings or £1 (see Pound). The gold sovereign was first struck in the reign of Henry VII. (1489); it was of gold of the standard fineness (994·8) and weighed 240 grains. It bore the figure of the king crowned, in royal mantle, seated on the throne, and holding the sceptre and orb. The sovereign was coined in successive reigns until that of James I., when the name “unite” was given to the coin to mark the union of the two kingdoms. The gold coinage of the kingdom was, until 1816, a secondary part of the monetary system, but in that year the silver standard was discontinued and a gold standard adopted. The sovereign was chosen the new unit of the currency, and the first issue took place in 1817. Its weight was fixed at 123·274 grains; its fineness at 916·66 or twenty-two carats. These standards of weight and fineness are those still in force. At the same time was issued the half-sovereign, of weight in proportion. The weight of 934½ sovereigns is exactly equivalent to twenty Troy pounds, and the weight of each individual sovereign is calculated on this basis. The sovereign is eleven-twelfths pure gold and one-twelfth alloy, copper being usual. The light colour of early Australian sovereigns was due to the use of silver instead of copper. Five-pound pieces were coined in the reigns of Queen Victoria and Edward VII. They were also authorized in the reign of George III. (as were two-pound pieces), but the dies were not completed before the death of that sovereign. Specimens were, however, subsequently struck. There were also some pattern pieces struck in the reign of George IV. Two-pound pieces were issued in the reign of George IV.; they were struck in the reign of William IV., but not issued for circulation; they are current coins of the reigns of Victoria and Edward VII. (See also Mint; Money.)
SOVEREIGNTY. The word sovereignty (Fr. souveraineté) is
said to be derived from the medieval Latin word supremitas, i.e.
supreme potestas, supreme power. (See Skeat’s Etymological
Dictionary as to various forms of the word, and Meyer, Lehrbuch
des deutschen Staatsrechts, 15, as to its derivation.)
Sovereignty may be viewed in three ways: there is the historical explanation of its origin and growth, its rude beginning in the savage horde, its completion in the modern state; there is the analytical or juridical explanation; there is also what (for want of a better phrase) may be called the organic explanation of sovereignty.
The following are some of the chief stages in the history of sovereignty: While society is in a rude state or only tribally organized there is no distinct sovereignty, no power which all persons habitually obey. Thus there is no sovereignty among wandering groups of Australian savages: each family is isolated, each horde is a loose and unstable History. collection. When the horde has become a tribe there may exist no definite sovereign. Distinct in time of war, the power of the chief may be fluctuating and faint in time of peace; even in time of war it may be subject to the authority of a council. Tribes of the same ethnic stock may form a sort of federation, permanent or temporary. “With the council of the confederacy,” it has been said, “and, more generally, in the confederacy, sovereignty arises and the true political tradition is evolved” (F. H. Giddings, Principles of Sociology, p. 285). When the city and the state are conterminous the seat of sovereignty becomes defined. Such was the condition of things in Greece, as considered by Aristotle in his Politics. He discusses the question what is the supreme power in the state (3. 10), which he defines as an aggregate of citizens (3. i.), and he recognizes that it may be lodged in one, a few, or many. In his view the distinctive mark of the state is not so much sovereignty (7. 4) as self-sufficiency; a state is not a mere aggregate of persons; it is a union of them sufficient for the purposes of life (7. 8) ; sufficiency being “to have all things and to want nothing” (7. 5. 1). The Roman jurists say little, and only incidentally, as to sovereignty. But in the middle ages, under the influence of the Roman law, and with the belief in the existence of an empire entitled to universal sway, an absolutist theory of sovereignty was developed in the writings of the jurists who revived the study of that law: the emperor was sovereign; “quod principi placuit legis habet vigorem” (Institutes, i. 2. 6).
Those jurists often justified the plenitudo potestatis conceded to the emperor by the fact that he stood at the b^ad of Christendom.
