Claude II Leclerc de Pulligny

Claude II Leclerc de Pulligny was no minor nobleman. Born in 1532 to Claude Leclerc de Pulligny, valet de chambre to Duke Antoine and Auditeur of the Chamber of Accounts of Nancy, and to Catherine de Trèves de Xirocourt, he inherited a position at the very centre of the Lorraine ducal administration and entered ducal service in his own right.

He served as Argentier du Duc de Lorraine — the officer entrusted with the personal treasury of the sovereign — and as Treasurer to the company of the Count of Vaudémont, one of the most prestigious military households of the Duchy. He was also recorded as valet de chambre to Duke Charles III, placing him within the close personal circle of the reigning sovereign of Lorraine.

Contemporary records describe members of the Le Clerc de Pulligny family in this generation as creditors of the Dukes of Lorraine — an extraordinary indicator of standing. To lend to one's sovereign required not only exceptional wealth, but political weight, trusted status within the ducal administration, and membership of the small governing elite of the principality. Few noble houses of sixteenth-century Lorraine were rich enough, or sufficiently trusted, to advance capital to their rulers.

His life was transformed by the religious upheavals that swept the Holy Roman Empire and France during the second half of the sixteenth century. Lorraine, though an independent duchy between France and the Empire, remained a stronghold of Catholic reform under the House of Lorraine-Guise. Claude II nevertheless converted to the Protestant religion — a decision of immense personal and political consequence.

His conversion brought the confiscation of his nobility and the seizure of his property. Stripped of office and rank, he entered the household of Charlotte Catherine de La Trémoille, Princess of Tarente and a prominent Protestant noblewoman, as her secretary. The family's temporary loss of influence and privileges marks one of the defining crises in the history of the House of Le Clerc de Pulligny.

He eventually returned to Pulligny, where he was once again recorded as seigneur in part of the ancestral fief, and was buried in the parish church in 1598. Through his two marriages — first to Claudon Galland de Pulligny, and second to Claudon Mengin de Pulligny, both alliances reinforcing the family's ties to other established houses of the Pulligny seigneury — he was the father of two extraordinary sons, Jean and Alexandre Le Clerc, whose service in Venice and at the Lorraine court would secure the formal restoration of the family's hereditary nobility in 1623.