General Notes

Henry IV (of France) (1553-1610), first Bourbon king of France (1589-1610),
who restored stability after the religious wars of the 16th century.

Henry was born at Pau in Navarre on December 13, 1553. His father, Antoine
de Bourbon (died 1562), was descended in the ninth generation from the
13th-century king of France, Louis IX. His mother, Jeanne d'Albret
(1528-72), was queen of Navarre and niece of King Francis I of France.

The Wars of Religion

Although baptized a Roman Catholic, Henry was brought up as a Calvinist by
his strong-minded mother, a leader of the French Protestant (Huguenot)
movement, which during the 1560s became involved in a series of civil wars
with the Catholics. Henry's wedding in 1572 to Margaret of Valois, sister of
the reigning monarch, Charles IX, was followed by the Massacre of Saint
Bartholomew's Day, in which thousands of Huguenots were slain on the king's
order. Henry saved his own life by converting to Roman Catholicism, but he
remained a prisoner at court until 1576. After his escape he repudiated his
conversion and assumed the leadership of the Huguenot movement. Although he
accepted his unwilling wife at his court in Navarre, neither respected the
marriage vows.

Military Leader

Henry's storming of the fortress town of Cahors in 1580 launched his career
as an intrepid military leader. In many subsequent battles his white plume
was to be found wherever the fighting was fiercest. He won another brilliant
victory at Coutras in 1587, and two years later formed an alliance with
Charles IX's successor, Henry III, against the Catholic League, which was
dominated by the Guise family. When Henry III (the last king of the Valois
dynasty) was murdered by a league fanatic in 1589, the Huguenot leader, who
was next in line for the throne, proclaimed himself king as Henry IV.

Backed by Spain and the pope, however, the league refused to acknowledge a
Protestant as king of France, and many Catholic nobles who had served Henry
III against the league deserted the royal army. Henry won victories over the
league at Arques and Ivry and besieged the league stronghold, Paris, which
was eventually relieved by a Spanish army from the Netherlands. Henry
skillfully exploited divisions among the leaguers, and in 1593 he disarmed
his opponents by announcing his reconversion to Catholicism. A year later he
bribed the league commander of the capital to admit his army. One by one, he
defeated or bought over the magnates of the house of Guise who continued to
resist. In 1595, when he officially declared war on Spain, the pope granted
him absolution. He could no longer rely on the Huguenots, who drove a hard
bargain to secure a new edict of toleration. This was granted at Nantes in
1598, and it was followed by a peace treaty with Spain. After that, serious
resistance to his rule ended.

Henry as King

In 1599 Henry secured papal annulment of his first marriage, and the year
after he married Marie de Médicis, a distant cousin of the mother of the
last Valois kings. His leading minister, Maximilien de Béthune, duc de
Sully, reorganized the finances and promoted the economic recovery of France
after decades of civil war. Agriculture, manufacturing, and commerce were
encouraged, the burden of taxation upon the peasantry reduced, and the
nobility relieved from the pressure of debt by declaring a moratorium. The
system by which officials in finance and the judiciary purchased their
offices from the Crown was formalized in 1604 by a tax on office known as
the paulette. At the same time Sully pursued a policy of substituting royal
officers for those employed by local representative bodies. Until 1609 these
measures were accompanied by an external policy of peace. In that year Henry
began preparations to intervene in Germany against the Catholic Habsburg
dynasty, a move that was opposed by some French Catholics. The king was
about to join his army when he was assassinated by a Catholic extremist on
May 14, 1610, in the Rue Saint-Honoré in Paris.

Henry IV's genial informality, bravery, gallantry, perseverance in
adversity, and readiness to bend religious principle to political advantage
have earned him a special place in French history. Not only did he restore
order and prosperity to his ruined kingdom but he also ensured that the
monarchy would be Catholic and absolutist.