Protestant Exiles from France/Volume 2 - Book Third - Chapter 13 - Section X
Boileau de Castelnau.
The surname of Boileau is of great antiquity, and achieved celebrity in the person of Etienne Boileau, Grand Prevôt of Paris in 1258; his great-grandson was ennobled by Charles V. of France in 1371; and from him descended the family of Boileau de Castelnau-Mauvissiere which has long been extinct. (One of that family was an envoy from Charles IX. to the Scottish Court, and is in our State-papers styled Monsieur Castelnau, Sieur de Mauvissiere; this seigneurie of Castelnau was in the Pyrenees.)
The ancestor of our honoured refugees was created in or rather before 1538, Seigneur de Castelnau, his seigneurie being near Nismes. At this date neither the surname of Boileau nor the territorial designation of Castelnau were uncommon. The new edition of Haag’s La France Protestante introduces us to this nobleman, Jean Boileau, first Seigneur de Castelnau, Treasurer of the Court-Seneschal of Nismes, the first of his family who embraced the reformed faith. His ancestry is not recorded, but the date of his being ennobled is satisfactorily ancient. This Seigneur married, on 6th February 1538, Anne de Montcalm, and died in 1562. His eldest son, Jean Boileau, second Seigneur de Castelnau, married — 1st, on 15th July 1571, Honorade, daughter of Robert Blanc, Sieur de la Rouviere; and 2dly, on 15th October 1576, Rose, daughter of Nicolas de Calviere, Sieur de Saint-Colme. In 1600 he was deputed by the inhabitants of Nismes to represent them at an assembly at Montpellier for maturing the inauguration of the observance of the Edict of Nantes. In 1605 he was first Consul of Nismes, and Syndic of the Diocese; he died on 10th May 1618. The third Seigneur was his eldest son Nicolas, born 21st December 1578; in his youth he had travelled in Italy, Germany, Holland, and England. At the date of his father’s death, he was forty years of age, and had acquired great reputation at the bar. His wife’s maiden name was Anne de Calviere de Boucoiran. The year of his death was 1657.
The son and successor of the learned Seigneur was Jaques Boileau, fourth Seigneur de Castelnau, born 15th January 1626; a Councillor of Nismes in 1652. He married, in 1660, Francoise Vignoles (daughter of Jaques de Vignoles and Louise de Baschi), and had twenty-two children. He was a nobleman of great piety, and a staunch Protestant, and stood firm at the mournful and terrible crisis of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The consequence was, that he was torn from his family on 12th January 1687, and immured in the Castle of Pierre-Cise (or Pierre-Eccise), where he suffered an unbroken imprisonment of ten years and a half. He died a martyr, although he did not actually draw his last breath in the prison. Being prostrated by paralysis, he obtained leave to try the baths of Balaruc, and died at St. Jean-de-Vedas near Montpellier, on 11th July 1697, in his seventy-second year. His wife, after suffering imprisonment in convents, had, in February 1690, found her way to Geneva; at the date of her husband’s death she had been for five years with her children in Brandenburg. In 1698 she returned to Geneva, where she died on 4th January 1700. The fourth son, Maurice, remained in France, and, according to French law, was the fifth Seigneur de Castelnau.
The three elder sons were military refugees in Brandenburg. The third, named Charles, ultimately settled in England. His elder brothers fell in battle, Jean-Louis being among the killed at the battle of Hochstedt in 1703, and Francois-Henri falling at the siege of Tournay in 1709. Accordingly, our refugee, on the occasion of the baptism of a son, named after the Earl of Galway, is registered at Southampton on 9th October 1712, as Monsieur Charles Boileau de Castelnau.
This seigneur (by right of birth) on coming to England, had been admitted to the army, and joined Farringdon’s regiment. After having seen service, he was an ensign still in 1698 at the Peace of Ryswick, but in 1703 he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant. In 1704 he was taken prisoner, and was released on the occasion of an exchange of prisoners on 1st February 1709, at Valenciennes. He left the army in 1711, and resided at Southampton till 1722, when he removed to Dublin. He became a wine-merchant in Bride Street, and the ancestral business and premises now belong to John George Boileau, one of his descendants. The gallant refugee died in Dublin on 7th March 1733 (n.s.), aged sixty. His will was proved on 22d May; in it he resigned to his brother Maurice all right to his French title and estate; he left £5 to the French Conformist Church in Dublin, and £5 to the Children’s Society at Nismes. He had married in Holland in 1704, Marie Magdelaine, daughter of Daniel Collot d’Escury, late Major-en-second of Galway’s Horse, and had ten children. The headship of the family was descended on an eldest son, Daniel Philip Boileau, with whom it rested till 1772, when he died without heirs. The second surviving son, Simeon Boileau, born in 1717, became a wholesale druggist and chemist and made a fortune; he married in 1741, Magdalene, daughter of Theophilus de la Cour Desbrisay, and died on 15th July 1767. Simeon’s eldest married son was Solomon Boileau (born 1745, died 1810), cashier in one of the Dublin banks, whose heir was Simeon Peter Boileau, merchant (born 1772, died 1842); father of Major-General Francis Burton Boileau, of the Royal Bengal Artillery, the head of the family in 1871. (See Chapters xxiv. and xxvi.)