Adrien-Louis de Bonnières, duc de Guînes

Who was Adrien-Louis de Bonnières, duc de Guînes?

Adrien-Louis de Bonnières, comte then duc de Guînes was a French nobleman at the court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, whose favourite he was. He was French ambassador briefly at Berlin, 1768-69 then at London, during a period when Britain and France were not at war, 1770–76, returning to Paris when the French aid to the American colonies occasioned a diplomatic breach.

Following a brief military career during the Seven Years' War, which found him a brigadier in the French army, Bonnières entered upon a diplomatic career, buoyed and hampered by a dry wit: "It was a most lively animated gazette," M. de Genlis reported after a visit to the prince de Conti in 1766, with Guînes in the company: "his whole reputation hangs on a manner of spying out all the little ridiculous trifles and of an ill grace, which he relates in few words with an amusing manner". A protégé of the Choiseul and the Noailles, and a friend of Frederick II of Prussia, who had visited him in 1766, he was named ambassador at Berlin in 1768, but soon fell out of favour to such a degree he was recalled in November 1769.

As a consolation, at the urging of the queen, he was named ambassador to the Court of St. James's the following year, and remained at that post, with periodic recalls to Versailles, until 1776. His reputation in London was magnificent, in stark contrast to his predecessors Châtelet, Guerchy and Durand. His affair with Lady Elizabeth Craven was overlooked, in part because of her beauty and charm. It was said of him that when the noon gun was fired, and someone in his entourage asked what that was, he retorted "I think they've sighted the sun." He made a wider reputation with the awkward "Guînes affair" in which he pressed charges, 20 April 1771, against his secretary, Barthélemy Tort de la Sonde, whom he accused of having used his name in speculating in the public funds. Tort, on being arrested, asserted that he had acted upon Guînes' directions and for his account. In Paris the duc d'Aiguillon, named secretary of state for foreign affairs, 6 June, took Tort's part, whereas the queen defended her friend Guînes, and the affair was taken up by the antagonistic parties of Choiseul and Aiguillon. Guînes was eventually found not guilty, by a narrow margin, in a special commission of councillors of state, who had been named by the king. The affair rankled; it served among the reasons for the dismissal of Aiguillon, under the queen's lasting displeasure.