Some forty miles south of Bayonne, on the right bank of the Gave, lies the little town of Orthez, the ancient capital of Béarn. Famous for the obstinacy of its resistance to the apostolic spirit of Louis XIV. and the excellence of its manufactured cloth, Orthez was further distinguished during the Wars of Religion by the possession of a Protestant university founded by Jeanne d'Albret in which Theodore Beza was professor. In 1664, the most Christian King sent his intendant Foucault to deal with the nest of heretics. Foucault did not waste time in theological subtleties, but gave the inhabitants twenty days in which to conform under penalty of a dragonnade. They did so unanimously, but there still remain more Protestants in Orthez than in any other town of Béarn. Among the cloth merchants of Orthez none were more distinguished than the Labouchères. According to the Frères Haag, the compilers of _La France Protestante_, their name should be Barrier de Labouchère, the patronymic which they came to adopt being in reality the name of a property in the possession of the family. The earliest known ancestor of the Labouchères seems to have been a {2} certain Jean Guyon Barrier, who married in 1621 one Catherine de la Broue. Pierre-César, the founder of the British branch of the family and the grandfather of the subject of this memoir, was born at The Hague in 1772. He was the second son of Matthieu Labouchère and Marie-Madeleine Molière. His father, who, in consequence of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, had been sent to England for his education, had subsequently settled in Holland. Pierre-César was sent at the age of thirteen to learn his uncle Pierre's business at Nantes,[1] where he remained until 1790, at which date he entered the house of Hope at Amsterdam as French clerk. In this humble position he laid the foundations of the great fortune and financial career which were to be his. The rise of the young French clerk was rapid. In six years he was a partner in the house of Hope and had married Dorothy, sister of Alexander Baring, who had become a partner in the Dutch firm at the same time as his French brother-in-law. The well-known story of the clever ruse by which Pierre-César won the hand of his bride and also his partnership in the house of Hope was told to the present writer some twenty years ago by the Rev. Alexander Baring[2] as follows: