Coligni, Henrietta

, countess de la Suze, a French poetess, whose works have been printed with those of Pellison and others in 1695, and 1725 in 2 volumes 12mo, was the daughter of Gaspar de Coligni, the third of that name, marshal of France, and colonel-general of infantry. She was very early married, in 1643, when she could not be more than seventeen, to Thomas Hamilton, earl of Haddington, according to Moreri, but we find no mention of this in the Scotch peerage. After his death she espoused the count de la Suze, of an illustrious house in Champaigne. But this second match proved unfortunate, owing to the furious jealousy of the count her husband, whose severities towards her made her abjure protestantism, and profess the catholic faith, which occasioned queen Christina of Sweden to say, “that she had changed her religion, that she might not | see her husband, neither in this world nor the next.” Their antipathy became so great that the countess at last disannulled the marriage; and to induce the count to accede to it, she offered 25,000 crowns, which he accepted. She then gave herself up to the study of poetry, and became much admired by the geniuses of her time, who made her the subject of their eulogiums. Her fort lay in the elegiac strain, and those works of hers which have come down to us have at least a delicate turn of sentiment. Her other poems are songs, madrigals, and odes. The wits of her time gave her the majesty of Juno with Minerva’s wit and Venus’s beauty in some verses, attributed to Bouhours: but her character in other respects appears not to have been of the most correct kind. She died at Paris, March 10, 1673. ¹