ENRICO IV, king of FRANCE. — Son of Antonio di Borbone, the prince of the blood nearest to the ruling line of the Valois, and of Giovanna d’Albret, queen of Navarre, born at Pau on 14 December 1553, died in Paris on 14 May 1610. Orphaned by his father at the age of nine, and kept under close surveillance at the court of Paris, he escaped to Béarn and, upon the death (1569) of Luigi I di Condé, his paternal uncle, succeeded him as leader
of the Calvinists. With the support of the dowager queen, Caterina de’ Medici, he married her daughter, Margherita (17 August 1572), as a pledge of peace between Catholics and Calvinists; but a week later, on the night of St Bartholomew, that plan came to an end, and E. was saved, apparently, only through the intervention of Carlo IX. Even after his abjuration (September 1572), he was kept at court in disguised captivity. He escaped from it in February 1576, returned to Calvinism, and became its military and political leader, also in rivalry with Enrico I, duke of Condé; as such, he was recognized by the Protestant powers. He nevertheless adopted a tolerant posture, so as not to sever every bridge with the opposing side, in case—an eventuality that was becoming ever less improbable—he should become heir to the crown of France. That eventuality did in fact arise in 1584, upon the death of Francesco, duke of Alençon, the last brother of Enrico III, who had no offspring. But a bull of Stato V (9 September 1585), solicited by the Catholic members of the League, deprived E. and Condé of their rights of succession. As long as Enrico III lived, he ostentatiously displayed loyalty to the king and supported him in his struggle against the Guise family, availing himself of the financial support of the Protestant powers, while the Catholic powers, and especially Filippo II of Spain, supported the Guises. After the disappearance of the Guises and of Enrico III (1 August 1589), E. IV found himself king of France only for a portion of his subjects: the Calvinists, the legitimist Catholics, and the “politicals,” who did not object to the king’s belonging to a faith different from that of the majority of his subjects—but not for the majority of the French, especially those of the northern and eastern provinces and, foremost among them, the capital, who opposed to him as anti-king his uncle Carlo, cardinal of Borbone. E. had to abandon his tolerant posture, fight these rebellious subjects, and above all Filippo II, who supported them with the arms of the highly skilled Alessandro Farnese. But neither Ivry, E.’s victory, nor Lagny, Farnese’s success, was decisive. What was decisive was that E. realized that only a Catholic king could bring peace to France; and decisive also was the realization by the Catholic members of the League that the continuation of the civil war would mean the dismemberment of France to the advantage of Filippo II. Thus, as the two opposing parties drew closer to one another around the idea of the unity of France, it became possible for E. to carry out, without excessive scandal, his second abjuration (25 July 1593), to be crowned at Chartres (27 February 1594), and to enter Paris on 22 March thereafter. On 17 September 1595, Pope Clement VIII absolved the relapsed king, thereby removing every religious justification for Filippo II’s war and for the stubborn resistance of certain cities of the League. Finally, the war ended through the belligerents’ financial exhaustion with the Peace of Vervins (2 May 1598). Almost at the same time, the Edict of Nantes guaranteed Protestant subjects the exercise of their religion, despite the reluctance of the provincial parlements to register this unprecedented innovation. E. IV, moreover, did not hesitate to pay little heed to those parlements, as in the case of the recall of the Society of Jesus (1603), imposed by the king against the Parlement of Paris.
But after Vervins, after having induced the restless duke of Savoy, Carlo Emanuele I, to make peace as well (the Peace of Lyons, 1601), and after having subdued the last rebels, such as the duke of Biron (1602) and the duke of Bouillon (1606), all E. IV’s efforts were directed toward healing the dreadful wounds of the war and remedying the poverty of the state treasury. Guided by a sort of physiocracy avant la lettre, which inspired his excellent minister, the duke of Sully, and corrected only in part by the mercantilist ideas of de Laffamas, the king restored France, within a few years, to relative prosperity and to a leading role in great European politics. Thus, in 1607, he worked to mediate in the bitter dispute between Venice and the Holy See, and two years later induced Spain to conclude a twelve-year truce with the United Provinces of the Netherlands. But all this was a prelude to his planned armed intervention against the Habsburgs in Germany and Italy, in alliance with the German Protestant princes and with Carlo Emanuele I of Savoy, when the dagger of the fanatical Francesco Ravallac brought the grand dessein to an end.