Henry IV

Biography

Henry IV (1553-1610), King of Navarre and then King of France from 1589, was the first monarch of the Bourbon dynasty. A Protestant who became a Catholic in order to reign, he brought more than thirty years of Wars of Religion to an end and issued the Edict of Nantes, before falling to Ravaillac's knife. Popular memory turned him into “Good King Henry”.

Born on 13 December 1553 at the Château de Pau, he was the son of Antoine de Bourbon and Jeanne d'Albret, Queen of Navarre, who brought him up in the Calvinist faith. On his mother's death, on 9 June 1572, he became King of Navarre, and on 18 August that year he married Margaret of Valois, sister of King Charles IX, in Paris. Six days later the St Bartholomew's Day massacre struck the Protestants who had come to the city in large numbers for the wedding; spared, Henry was forced to renounce his faith and was held at court for more than three years. He escaped in February 1576, returned to Protestantism and in 1584, on the death of Francis, Duke of Anjou, brother of King Henry III, became heir to the crown.

The assassination of Henry III on 2 August 1589 made him King of France, but the Catholic League, backed by Spain, refused to accept a Protestant sovereign and held Paris. Henry IV fought it on the battlefield, at Arques in September 1589 and at Ivry on 14 March 1590, without managing to take the capital. He then chose to convert: on 25 July 1593 he renounced Protestantism in the Basilica of Saint-Denis; the phrase “Paris is well worth a Mass”, attributed to him, is probably apocryphal. Crowned at Chartres on 27 February 1594, as Reims was in the hands of the League, he entered Paris on 22 March. In April 1598 the Edict of Nantes granted Protestants freedom of conscience, limited freedom of worship and fortified towns as guarantees, while the Peace of Vervins, signed with Spain on 2 May, ended the foreign war.

With his chief minister, Sully, he restored the finances of a kingdom ruined by civil war and had the Pont Neuf in Paris completed; legend credits him with the wish that every peasant might have a chicken in the pot on Sundays. He also supported expeditions to North America, and Samuel de Champlain founded Quebec in 1608. His marriage to Margaret of Valois having been annulled in 1599, he married Marie de' Medici in 1600, who gave him an heir the following year, the future Louis XIII. His many mistresses earned him the nickname “le Vert Galant”, and he survived several assassination attempts, including that of Jean Châtel in December 1594.

On 14 May 1610, as he was preparing to go to war against the Habsburgs, he was stabbed in his carriage in the Rue de la Ferronnerie in Paris by François Ravaillac, a Catholic fanatic. Buried at Saint-Denis, he left the throne to the eight-year-old Louis XIII, under the regency of Marie de' Medici. The king of reconciliation after the civil wars, he has remained one of the most popular monarchs in French history.