Abstract
In 1613 Pierre de Beaufort aged 18, left the French town of Sedan for the Dutch Republic. At his death in 1661 in Hulst he had become a man of distinction. More than 200 years later on 30 May 1868 his direct descendant Pieter de Beaufort received from the Hoge
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Raad van Adel (High Court of Nobility) a diploma signed by King Willem I in which he was raised to the peerage. This elevation indicates that Pieter de Beaufort belonged to the prominent families of the country. The patent of nobility refers moreover to a number of special circumstances in the family history: the arrival of the ancestor to the Netherlands, marriages with offspring from prominent families and the incorporation in the nobility of a far relation on basis of a German patent of nobility. In this study the fortunes of the De Beaufort generations have been described against the background of the society in which they lived. Important issues are: how in the Dutch Republic the integration took place and the patronage networks were used. Furthermore, how they could function in a non-native layer of administration in the area of tension between a distant Hague authority and a largely Roman-Catholic local population in the so-called Gen-erality Lands. Afterwards the contacts between the family and the court of the stadholder will be discussed, how they dealt with the riots during the Patriot disorders and how they spent their private life during the Batavian French time. In the last chapter the new opportunities of the first decades of the Kingdom of the Netherlands are considered and how the aristocratic life style of the family was rewarded with their incorporation in the Dutch nobility. An im-portant question is why only a part of the De Beaufort family wanted to participate in the re-quest for elevation to the peerage. The social position of the members of the De Beaufort family puts their family biog-raphy on the level of an investigation of the élite. In the history of an individual family large scale social developments can be made visible and, the other way round, the history of a fami-ly may lead us to intimate and often unknown aspects of “la grande histoire”. In my biography of the De Beaufort family I will discuss the development and transfer of administrative positions, the family- and marriage-policy, the increase of financial power and the related inheritance planning during each generation. The self-image of the family dur-ing the years will be leading and in particular will be expressed in the way they tried to main-tain and direct the family-identity. The question how the ‘social power’ of the family was established and kept will be answered. To give the De Beaufort family history a place in the élite history is not without problems. Not much is known about the social and administrative development of regent families in the areas captured from the Spanish. From this family biog-raphy it must become clear whether the development of the reputation of the De Beaufort family went along similar lines as was usual in élite families in governing circles in the Dutch Republic or that the family followed a course of its own.
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