B.A. On the 1st of December, 1655, when he was still without any settled
means of support, he married Elizabeth St. Michel, a beautiful and
portionless girl of fifteen. Her father, Alexander Marchant, Sieur de St.
Michel, was of a good family in Anjou, and son of the High Sheriff of
Bauge (in Anjou). Having turned Huguenot at the age of twenty-one, when
in the German service, his father disinherited him, and he also lost the
reversion of some L20,000 sterling which his uncle, a rich French canon,
intended to bequeath to him before he left the Roman Catholic church. He
came over to England in the retinue of Henrietta Maria on her marriage
with Charles I, but the queen dismissed him on finding that he was a
Protestant and did not attend mass. Being a handsome man, with courtly
manners, he found favour in the sight of the widow of an Irish squire
(daughter of Sir Francis Kingsmill), who married him against the wishes of
her family. After the marriage, Alexander St. Michel and his wife having
raised some fifteen hundred pounds, started, for France in the hope of
recovering some part of the family property. They were unfortunate in all
their movements, and on their journey to France were taken prisoners by
the Dunkirkers, who stripped them of all their property. They now settled
at Bideford in Devonshire, and here or near by were born Elizabeth and the
rest of the family. At a later period St. Michel served against the
Spaniards at the taking of Dunkirk and Arras, and settled at Paris. He
was an unfortunate man throughout life, and his son Balthasar says of him:
"My father at last grew full of whimsies and propositions of perpetual
motion, &c., to kings, princes and others, which soaked his pocket, and
brought all our family so low by his not minding anything else, spending
all he had got and getting no other employment to bring in more." While
he was away from Paris, some "deluding papists" and "pretended devouts"
persuaded Madame St. Michel to place her daughter in the nunnery of the
Ursulines. When the father heard of this, he hurried back, and managed to
get Elizabeth out of the nunnery after she had been there twelve days.