François Sublet de Noyers

[2] Sublet de Noyers held the posts of intendant des finances, then of Secretary of war,[3] reorganizing the army in Picardie and Champagne, an example of the developing tradition of professional administrators in the kingdom.

He came from an aristocratic family with a history of service to the French monarchy and an unshakeable Catholic faith, that came to prominence at Blois with the sons of Jean Sublet, two of whom were ennobled towards the end of the reign of Charles IX.

At the end of the 16th century the family found itself established in the Marais quarter of Paris and in Normandy, where the demesne of Noyers lay in the baillage of Gisors.

In 1613 he married Isabelle Le Sueur, daughter of a maître des comptes, who brought him a solid dowry and further connections with the noblesse de robe.

At the beginning of the 1630s Richelieu placed him in supervision of the armies of Champagne and Picardy in which post Sublet de Noyers distinguished himself in particular with the fortifications undertaken under his surveillance, and he gained useful field experience.

The King, who considered him at first merely one of Richelieu's "lost souls", warmed to him by degrees, won over by his austere piety and his service to the party of the Dévots; eventually Louis entrusted him with even the low duties of evicting from court the Cardinal's enemies, like Cinq-Mars.

His extensive modernizing of the French army ranged to recruitment, provisioning, troop payments, lodging, the creation of military hospitals, put in place a reformed bureaucracy more directly dependent on royal will, but effected through a hierarchy of nepotism and patronage.

Sublet de Noyers' recent biographer, Camille Lefauconnier, estimates that at the height of his career he enjoyed an income of approximately 50,000 livres tournois, from his official emoluments, from the rents on his properties in Normandy and in Paris, and the dowry of his late wife.

The death of Louis XIII soon afterwards gave him some hopes of returning, with the favour of Anne of Austria, for whose account he continued his place at the Bâtiments, where he was disappointed in his expectations of reimbursement.