Jean II d'Estrees (3 November 1624-19 May 1707) was a Marshal of France during the reign of King Louis XIV.
Biography[]
Jean d'Estrees was born in Solothurn, Switzerland in 1624, the son of Marshal Francois Annibal d'Estrees. He became a colonel at the age of 23 and a lieutenant-general at the age of 33, and he served under Louis, Grand Conde at the 1648 Battle of Lens, under Henri de la Tour d'Auvergne in Lorraine from 1652 to 1653, and then in Flanders, being captured at Valenciennes in 1656. He remained loyal to the Royal family during the Fronde, and he joined the French Navy in 1668 and became a Marshal of France in 1681. D'Estrees fought four campaigns in the Caribbean, co-commanded the Anglo-French fleet in the English Channel during the Third Anglo-Dutch War/Franco-Dutch War, and attacked the Dutch possessions in South America from 1676 to 1677, destroying the Dutch fleet off Tobago. He then planned to attack Curacao, but nine ships were lost when his fleet blundered into the Las Aves archipelago on 11 May 1678. D'Estrees returned to France and was exhonerated of personal responsibility for the disaster, and he died in 1707.