Henry IV of France

Anyone asking who was Henry IV of France must begin far from Paris, in the Pyrenean foothills of Béarn. Henry was born on December 13, 1553 at the Château de Pau, the seat of his maternal grandfather Henry d'Albret, King of Navarre ^[1]. His mother, Jeanne d'Albret, was heiress to the small Pyrenean kingdom of Navarre, and his father, Antoine de Bourbon, was a prince of the blood, a direct male-line descendant of King Louis IX of France. That Bourbon descent, remote as it seemed in 1553, would eventually carry Henry to the French throne ^[2].

His upbringing was deliberately rustic by the standards of royal children. Family tradition held that he was raised among peasant children in Béarn, fed simple food, and allowed to run in the mountains, an image his later propagandists were happy to repeat ^[1]. The formative fact of his childhood was religion. Jeanne d'Albret declared publicly for Calvinism in 1560 and raised her son as a Protestant, making the boy a natural figurehead for the Huguenot cause in a kingdom that was sliding toward confessional war ^[3].

The French Wars of Religion broke out in 1562, when Henry was eight. His father died that year of wounds received while fighting, confusingly, on the Catholic royal side at the siege of Rouen. Henry spent portions of his youth at the French court, where Catherine de' Medici kept a close watch on him, and portions in the Protestant south with his mother ^[2]. By his teens he had seen enough of both worlds to develop the pragmatism that later defined his kingship.

Jeanne d'Albret died in June 1572, and the eighteen-year-old Henry became King of Navarre. Two months later, on August 18, 1572, he married Marguerite de Valois, sister of King Charles IX, in a wedding intended to reconcile Catholic and Protestant France ^[1]. It did the opposite. Six days after the ceremony, on Saint Bartholomew's Day, Catholic mobs and royal soldiers massacred thousands of Huguenots who had gathered in Paris for the festivities. Henry survived only by abjuring his faith under duress, and he was then held at court as a semi-prisoner for more than three years ^[3].

In February 1576 he escaped, rode south, and promptly returned to Protestantism. From his base in the southwest he emerged as the military and political leader of the Huguenot party, commanding its armies through the intermittent campaigns of the late 1570s and 1580s ^[2]. He proved a gifted cavalry commander, personally brave to the point of recklessness, and unusually willing to negotiate with opponents.

Dynastic accident transformed his position. In 1584 the death of the Duke of Anjou, younger brother of the childless King Henry III, left Henry of Navarre as heir presumptive to the French crown under Salic law ^[1]. The prospect of a Protestant king horrified much of Catholic France. The Catholic League, led by the Guise family and backed by Philip II of Spain, mobilized to bar him from the succession, opening the conflict historians call the War of the Three Henrys. Navarre answered on the battlefield, defeating a royal army at Coutras in October 1587, the first major Huguenot victory in a pitched battle during the wars ^[3]. When Henry III broke with the League and was assassinated by a fanatical friar in August 1589, he recognized Navarre as his successor on his deathbed. Henry IV was now king of France in name, though most of his kingdom, including Paris, refused to accept him ^[2].

The new king inherited a crown without a capital, a treasury, or the loyalty of most Catholic subjects. He had to conquer France piece by piece. In September 1589 he beat a much larger League army under the Duke of Mayenne at Arques, near Dieppe, and in March 1590 he won a decisive cavalry victory at Ivry, reportedly urging his men to follow his white plume into battle ^[1]. Yet victories in the field did not open city gates. His siege of Paris in 1590 reduced the population to starvation but failed when a Spanish army marched from the Netherlands to relieve the city ^[2].

Henry concluded that he could not take Catholic France by force, so he took it by conversion. In July 1593, at the basilica of Saint-Denis, he formally renounced Protestantism and was received into the Catholic Church ^[3]. The abjuration, his second, was widely seen as calculated, and the remark long attributed to him, that Paris was worth a Mass, is almost certainly apocryphal, though it captures how contemporaries read the decision. The gamble worked. He was crowned at Chartres in February 1594 because Reims, the traditional coronation site, was held by the League, and Paris opened its gates to him a month later ^[1].

Mopping up took several more years. Henry combined amnesty with hard cash, buying the submission of League governors and grandees at enormous but arguably worthwhile expense. He declared war on Spain in 1595 to strip the League of its foreign patron and won a notable action at Fontaine-Française that year. Pope Clement VIII absolved him in 1595, removing the last religious obstacle to his legitimacy, and the Peace of Vervins with Spain in May 1598 ended the fighting ^[2].

Any account of Henry IV of France achievements starts with the Edict of Nantes, signed in April 1598. The edict granted French Protestants liberty of conscience throughout the kingdom, the right of public worship in specified places, full civil rights including access to offices and universities, and roughly a hundred fortified towns as guarantees of security ^[3]. It did not create religious equality, and it satisfied neither zealous Catholics nor many Huguenots, but it ended thirty-six years of civil war and made France the first major European state to attempt a durable legal coexistence of two Christian confessions ^[1].

Reconstruction was the other great work of the reign. Henry entrusted the finances to Maximilien de Béthune, later Duke of Sully, a Protestant comrade from the war years. Sully restored order to the tax system, reduced the crushing burden of debt, cut some direct taxes on the peasantry, and accumulated a treasury surplus by the end of the reign ^[2]. He promoted agriculture, drained marshes, and pushed an ambitious program of roads, bridges, and canals, including the beginning of the Briare canal linking the Loire and Seine basins. The saying associated with Henry, that he wished every laborer to have a chicken in his pot on Sundays, became shorthand for a kingship that measured success in ordinary prosperity ^[1].

Henry also rebuilt Paris. The Pont Neuf, begun under Henry III, was completed and opened during his reign, the first Paris bridge built without houses on it. He created the Place Royale, now the Place des Vosges, and the Place Dauphine, early exercises in planned urban squares that shaped French city building for two centuries ^[4]. Beyond France, his reign launched the country's North American empire: with royal backing, Samuel de Champlain founded Quebec in 1608, planting the settlement from which New France grew ^[5]. Manufacturing received attention too, notably state support for silk production and the luxury trades that later made French goods famous.

Henry's marriages were as political as everything else in his life, and considerably less successful. His union with Marguerite de Valois produced no children and effectively collapsed years before it was annulled in 1599 ^[1]. In 1600 he married Marie de' Medici, niece of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, a match that brought a massive dowry from a family to which the French crown was heavily indebted. The marriage produced six children, including the future Louis XIII, born in 1601, and Henrietta Maria, later queen consort of England ^[2].

His love affairs were notorious even by the relaxed standards of Renaissance courts, and they earned him the nickname the Vert Galant. The most consequential mistress was Gabrielle d'Estrées, who bore him three children and whom he seriously considered marrying before her sudden death in 1599; another, Henriette d'Entragues, extracted a written promise of marriage that caused years of political embarrassment ^[1]. Henry legitimized several of his children born outside marriage and raised them alongside his heirs.

Contemporaries described a king who was informal, quick-witted, physically restless, and careless of ceremony, fond of hunting, gambling, and soldiers' company. He smelled of the camp and joked about it. That accessibility, unusual in a French monarch, fed both his popularity with ordinary subjects and the disdain of some courtiers ^[3].

Peace never made Henry entirely safe. His conversion had not convinced everyone, and he survived a string of assassination attempts, including a knife attack by Jean Châtel in 1594 that cut his lip and broke a tooth ^[1]. Militant Catholic preaching continued to describe him as a relapsed heretic whose killing might be lawful, an idea circulating despite official condemnation.

By 1610 Henry was preparing for a new war. A disputed succession in the duchies of Jülich and Cleves on the lower Rhine threatened to hand strategic territory to the Habsburgs, and Henry assembled an army to intervene against them ^[2]. On May 13, 1610 Marie de' Medici was crowned queen at Saint-Denis, a ceremony arranged partly so she could act as regent during the coming campaign.

The following afternoon, May 14, 1610, the king's coach halted in the rue de la Ferronnerie in Paris, jammed in traffic. A Catholic zealot named François Ravaillac leaped onto the wheel and stabbed Henry twice, the second blow severing a vessel near the heart. The king died within minutes, at fifty-six ^[3]. Ravaillac, who insisted under torture that he had acted alone to prevent a war against the Pope's allies, was publicly executed. Louis XIII, aged eight, succeeded under his mother's regency, and the planned German intervention was abandoned ^[1].

Death completed Henry's rehabilitation. A king who had spent years excommunicated and at war with most of his subjects became, within a generation, 'Henri le Grand' and then 'le bon roi Henri', the good king remembered for peace, cheap bread, and the chicken in the pot ^[1]. The affection was real and durable. His equestrian statue on the Pont Neuf, erected in 1614, was the first royal statue on a public street in Paris; revolutionaries melted it down in 1792, and the restored Bourbons rebuilt it in 1818, making Henry the only French king whose statue the Revolution's successors chose to restore ^[4].

His substantive legacy is easy to identify in any list of Henry IV of France facts. He founded the Bourbon dynasty, which reigned in France until 1792 and again from 1814 to 1830, and whose branches still occupy the thrones of Spain and Luxembourg. The Edict of Nantes stood for eighty-seven years as Europe's most significant experiment in legislated religious coexistence until Louis XIV revoked it in 1685 ^[3]. The fiscal and administrative recovery he and Sully engineered gave the French monarchy the foundation on which Richelieu and Louis XIV later built.

Historians writing a Henry IV of France biography today tend to balance the legend against the record. He was an opportunist who changed religion at least five times, a spendthrift in his pleasures, and a ruler who bought loyalty as often as he earned it. He was also a genuinely tolerant politician in an intolerant age, a soldier who preferred ending wars to prolonging them, and the rare monarch whose popularity rested on the welfare of peasants rather than the glory of conquest ^[2]. Few kings of France are argued about less and liked more.