Henry IV, King of France

HENRY IV, King of France. - Son of Antoine de Bourbon, the prince of the blood closest to the reigning Valois line, and of Jeanne d'Albret, queen of Navarre, b. at Pau on 14 Dec. 1553, d. at Paris on 14 May 1610. Orphaned of his father at the age of nine, kept under close surveillance at the court of Paris, he escaped to Béarn and, upon the death (1569) of Louis I de Condé, his paternal uncle, succeeded him as head of the Calvinists. Under the auspices of the queen widow, Catherine de' Medici, he married her daughter, Marguerite (17 Aug. 1572), a pledge of peace between Catholics and Calvinists; but a week later, on the night of St. Bartholomew, that plan was brought to an end and Henry was saved, it seems, only through the intervention of Charles IX, but even after his abjuration (Sept. 1572) he was kept at court in veiled imprisonment. He fled from there in Feb. 1576, returned to Calvinism and became its military and political leader, also in rivalry with Henry I, duke of Condé, and as such was recognized by the Protestant powers; he nonetheless adopted a tolerant posture, so as not to break all bridges with the other side, in the event — ever less improbable — that he might find himself heir to the crown of France. That event indeed arose in 1584, through the death of Francis, duke of Alençon, the last brother of Henry III, who was without offspring. But a bull of Sixtus V (9 Sept. 1585), solicited by the Catholic Leaguers, deprived Henry and Condé of the rights of succession. As long as Henry III lived, he displayed loyalty to the king, supported him in his struggle against the Guises, and availed himself of the financial support of the Protestant powers, while the Catholic powers, and especially Philip II of Spain, supported the Guises. With the Guises and Henry III gone (1 Aug. 1589), Henry IV found himself to be king of France only for a part of his subjects: for the Calvinists, for the legitimist Catholics, for the «politiques» to whom it was not repugnant that the king might be of a faith different from that of the majority of his subjects, but not for the majority of the French, above all of the provinces of the north and the east and first and foremost of the capital, which set up against him as anti-king his uncle Charles, card. de Bourbon. Henry had to abandon his tolerant posture, to fight these unruly subjects and above all Philip II, who supported them with the weapons of the most skillful Alexander Farnese. But neither Ivry, Henry's victory, nor Lagny, Farnese's success, were decisive. What was decisive was that Henry perceived that only a Catholic king could give peace to France; what was decisive was that the Catholic Leaguers perceived that the continuation of the civil war would mean the dismemberment of France to the profit of Philip II. As the two opposing parties thus drew closer on the idea of the unity of France, Henry was able to carry through, without too much scandal, his second abjuration (25 July 1593), to have himself crowned at Chartres (27 Feb. 1594) and to enter Paris on the following 22 March. On 17 Sept. 1595 Pope Clement VIII absolved the relapsed king and thereby removed every religious justification from the war of Philip II and from the stubborn resistance of certain Leaguer cities. Finally the war ended through the financial exhaustion of the belligerents in the peace of Vervins (2 May 1598). Almost in the same days the Edict of Nantes guaranteed to the Protestant subjects the exercise of their religion, despite the reluctance of the provincial parliaments to register the unheard-of novelty; and of these parliaments, moreover, Henry IV does not hesitate to take little account, as in the case of the recall of the Society of Jesus (1603), imposed by the king against the Parliament of Paris.

But after Vervins, after having induced the restless duke of Savoy Charles Emmanuel I to peace as well (of Lyon, 1601), after having bent the last rebels, such as the duke of Biron (1602) and the duke of Bouillon (1606), all of Henry IV's cares were directed to healing the horrible wounds of the war and the poverty of the State treasury. Guided by a sort of fisiocratism ante litteram, by which his excellent minister the duke of Sully was inspired, only in part corrected by the mercantilist ideas of de Laffamas, the king brought France back, within the space of a few years, to a relative prosperity and to a leading role in great European politics: thus he exerted himself in 1607 in the bitter controversy between Venice and the Holy See and two years later in inducing Spain to a 12-year truce with the United Provinces of the Netherlands. But all this was paving the way for a planned armed anti-Habsburg intervention of his in Germany and in Italy in alliance with the German Protestant princes and with Charles Emmanuel I of Savoy, when the dagger of the fanatic François Ravaillac put an end to the grand dessein.

Ernesto Sestan