Château de Suscinio

Married to the Breton heiress Alix de Thouars in 1213, the French king's cousin Pierre de Dreux took the guard of the duchy and began the first manor of Suscinio, probably between 1213 and 1237; the place is first named in a letter of his in 1218. It was substantial enough by 1238 to hold the lord of Lanvaux prisoner, and was described then as recently begun and built by the said duke. His son Jean I le Roux, who took over around 1237, is credited with the great north curtain and the western quadrangular tower, and from 1286 Jean II raised the great north-east tower, called de l'Épervier. The dukes kept their archives and money treasure behind those walls, which could lodge about a hundred people when a duke was in residence.

The Breton War of Succession set Charles de Blois, backed by France, against Jean de Montfort, backed by England, and ended with the Montforts on the ducal throne. Suscinio itself seems to have held no important military place in that war, but the deeds stop calling it a manoir and start calling it a chastel, and heavy work to strengthen its defences followed. The castle was fortified and enlarged at the end of the 14th century, the Montfort dukes adding a new seigniorial residence block with a large corner tower, the Tour Neuve, and a casemate for artillery at the end of the 15th.

From 1471 to 1484 the castle housed Jasper Tudor, Henry Tudor — later Henry VII of England — and the core of their exiled Lancastrians, some 500 of them by 1483; since Suscinio could hold only about a hundred, the rest must have been billeted around it, at Kermoizin and other villages. Francis II of Brittany kept them against every Plantagenet demand that he surrender them, and for eleven years the place was an armed camp, alert to any attempt to seize the two Tudors and carry them back to England, where they lay under attainder and would have been executed as threats to Yorkist rule. The duke backed the failed Lancastrian invasion of 1483 with 40,000 gold crowns, 15,000 soldiers and a fleet of transports.

When Francis fell into one of his periods of incapacitating illness, his treasurer Pierre Landais agreed to hand Henry Tudor to the representatives of Richard III in return for a pledge of 3,000 English archers to defend Brittany against a threatened French attack. Word of the plot reached the exiles in time: both Tudors escaped separately into France, hours ahead of Landais's soldiers, and were received at the court of Charles VIII. When the duke recovered his faculties he offered the 400 Lancastrians still at and around Suscinio safe conduct into France and paid their expenses — perhaps the last official use of the castle by the dukes of Brittany.

Francis II died in 1488, leaving his eleven-year-old daughter Anne of Brittany, the last ruling duchess and twice queen of France. French troops took the castle in 1491, in the fourth French invasion campaign, and it was granted to Jean de Châlon, prince of Orange; Anne recovered it at his death and halted there in 1505, when the estate accounts show it being furnished, its windows mended and food bought for the queen and her suite. She died in 1514 and Brittany's autonomy went with her. The crown gave the castle to a former mistress of Francis I in 1523 and in 1543 to Diane de Poitiers; her daughter's family by marriage, the Brézé, made it a capitainerie under Guillaume de Montigny, one of Diane's own agents, who kept the post after Charles IX bought Suscinio back in 1562.

A violent storm carried off the roofs and chimneys in 1599; Henri IV deplored the state of the place, ordered repairs and had a sum set aside each year. In 1641 Richelieu's cousin Jérôme du Camboult was made governor, and a garrison was still stationed in the castle in 1644. Careless management and the poverty of the peninsula's inhabitants, who had to help pay the upkeep, told against it, and by the eve of the Revolution the buildings were storing harvests while the owners' heirs resolved to use only the parts that were not yet falling down. Sold as national property in 1798 to the merchant Pascal Lange for 5,000 francs, it was stripped of everything reusable, roof timbers and cut stone alike.

Prosper Mérimée saw the ruins in 1835 and had the castle classed in 1840 on the first list of historic monuments. The vicomte Jules de Francheville bought it in 1852 and his family did what it could, until the department of Morbihan bought it in 1965 and began consolidating the north curtain and its tower the following year.