Claude Philippe De Richebourg (d. by 20 March 1719), Huguenot minister, was born in France, possibly in the province of Berry in the 1660s and possibly of noble family. He may have been related to Isaac Porcher, a Huguenot who settled in South Carolina. There is little verifiable information about his parents or his early life and education. De Richebourg, possibly a convert from Roman Catholicism, was one of the hundreds of thousands of Protestants who left France following the revocation in 1685 of the Edict of Nantes, which removed the legal protections French Protestants had enjoyed. He may have lived in exile in Switzerland before traveling by 1700 to England or Ireland. He married a woman named Anne whose maiden name was probably Chastain, but whether before or after leaving France is not known.

De Richebourg and his wife arrived in Hampton, Virginia, on 23 July 1700 aboard the Mary and Ann, the first of four ships that carried several hundred Huguenot refugees to the colony. Under the leadership of Olivier, marquis de la Muce, and Charles Perrault de Sailly, they formed a settlement on the James River above the fall line at the site of an old Monacan town, briefly called King Williams Town and then Manakin Town. Even though there is no record that the Church of England ordained him, de Richebourg was identified as a minister, and following the arrival later in the year of an ordained clergyman, Benjamin de Joux, he acted as de Joux's assistant in the new King William Parish. Sometime after de Joux died at the end of March 1703, de Richebourg became minister of the parish. In 1705 the General Assembly passed a law naturalizing de Richebourg and the other Huguenot immigrants, an act that enabled them to acquire and sell land and to exercise the other rights of Englishmen. While living in Virginia, de Richebourg and his wife had at least three sons, and they had two more sons and one daughter after leaving.

On several occasions de Richebourg, members of the parish vestry, and members of the Manakin Town congregation engaged in sharp disagreements. It is possible that he did not understand that unlike in the French Protestant churches with which he was familiar, members of Virginia vestries served without limits on their tenure. De Richebourg objected that vestry members held their seats illegally, and in March 1707 he and one vestryman got into a heated argument in church at the end of the service about who should control the vestry book. De Richebourg seized the book, and the meeting erupted into angry threats and insults. He complained to the governor and Council, and a member of the vestry filed a countercomplaint. Two years later the Council sent two of its members to Manakin Town to attempt to resolve the disputes. Even though de Richebourg and his neighbors cooperated in November 1710 in asking for permission to reapportion among the heads of households then in residence there the 10,000 acres of land that the assembly had allowed them, he eventually resigned. He was still resident in Manakin Town as late as 21 November 1711, when he received final payment for services he had rendered through 15 June, including hauling timber and providing bread and wine for communion.

De Richebourg, his family, and other Huguenot settlers joined some other former residents of Manakin Town on the banks of the Trent River in North Carolina, but they lived there for less than a year. Attacks by Tuscarora and Coree tribes during 1711 and 1712 resulted in the deaths of more than one hundred colonists in the area, and by the summer of 1712 de Richebourg had moved to Jamestown, on the Santee River in Craven (later Berkeley) County, South Carolina, site of a Huguenot settlement founded in the 1680s. De Richebourg became the rector of Saint James Santee Parish, where he fell into conflict with his parishioners, some of whom quarreled with him and drew their swords at the church door after a service. Early in 1713 de Richebourg accepted the invitation of a Huguenot congregation in neighboring Saint John's Parish to act as its pastor in addition to his responsibilities at Saint James Santee. He sparked controversy there by administering the sacraments in the Huguenot, or Calvinist, tradition, rather than according to the form prescribed by the Book of Common Prayer. De Richebourg promised to end the practice, but a later report to the bishop of London from his personal representative in the colony described continued violations and advocated revoking de Richebourg's license to preach. The bishop took no action.

Fighting between frontier settlers and Indigenous peoples in the vicinity in 1715 caused many of de Richebourg's parishioners to flee. His home became a garrison, and much of his property was destroyed. On the verge of insolvency, he received a grant of £30 from the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts and chose to remain. Claude Philippe de Richebourg signed his will on 15 January 1719 and died, most likely in Craven County, South Carolina, on an unrecorded date between then and 20 March, when the South Carolina commissary reported his death to the bishop of London.

Sources Consulted:
Biographies in Bobbie Morrow Dietrich, "Claude Phillipe de Richebourge: A Sense of Noblesse Oblidge," Daughters of the American Revolution Magazine 113 (1979): 1012–1014, and William C. Simpson Jr., The Descendants of the Reverend Claude Philippe de Richebourg and His Wife Anne Chastain (2000), with birth ca. 1670 in Sainte Severe, Berry, France, and erroneous death year of 1718 on 1:115; Henry R. McIlwaine, Wilmer L. Hall, and Benjamin J. Hillman, eds., Executive Journals of the Council of Colonial Virginia (1925–1966), 3:46, 61, 143, 153–154, 162, 222, 225, 261–263; naturalization in Waverly K. Winfree, comp., The Laws of Virginia: Being a Supplement to Hening's The Statutes at Large, 1700–1750 (1971), 39–41; correspondence of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, including one letter de Richebourg cosigned, abstracted in part in Edgar Legaré Pennington, ed., "The South Carolina Indian War of 1715, as Seen by the Clergymen," South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 32 (1931): 259–261, 263; Charles Weiss, Historie des Réfugiés Protestants de France depuis la Révocation de l'Èdit de Nantes Jusqu'a nos Jours (1853), 1:378–379, 430–431; Robert A. Brock, ed., Documents, Chiefly Unpublished, Relating to the Huguenot Emigration to Virginia and to the Settlement at Manakin-Town (1886), 17, 21, 25, 45, 69–71 (printing a 1707 petition against de Richebourg, from Colonial Papers, Record Group 1, Library of Virginia; Robert H. Fife and R. L. Maury, eds., "The Vestry Book of King William Parish, Va., 1707–1750," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 11 (1904): 296–304, 425–429 (with signature transcribed on 303, 426); Arthur Henry Hirsch, The Huguenots of South Carolina (1928), 297–309; James L. Bugg Jr., "The French Huguenot Frontier Settlement of Manakin Town," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 61 (1953): 359–394; Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, From New Babylon to Eden: The Huguenots and Their Migration to Colonial South Carolina (2006), esp. 134–137; description of lost will in Philadelphia Presbyterian, 15 Dec. 1849; death reported in William Tredwell Bull to bishop of London, 20 Mar. 1719, printed in George W. Williams, ed., "Letters to the Bishop of London from the Commissaries in South Carolina," South Carolina Historical Magazine 78 (1977): 20.

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Teri L. Castelow.

How to cite this page:
Teri L. Castelow, "Claude Philippe De Richebourg (d. 1719)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2025 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=De_Richebourg_Claude_Philippe, accessed [today's date]).

Return to the Dictionary of Virginia Biography Search page.