Henry IV of France

Henry of Navarre, a Protestant prince from the Pyrenees, became King of France in 1589 as Henry IV, the first of the Bourbon line. To win Paris he converted to Catholicism, and with the Edict of Nantes in 1598 he brought decades of religious civil war to a close. His rebuilding of the kingdom made him one of the best remembered French monarchs, "Good King Henry", until a Catholic fanatic stabbed him to death in 1610.

Henry was born at the Château de Pau, in Béarn, in the night between 12 and 13 December 1553. His father, Antoine de Bourbon, leaned towards Catholicism, while his mother, Jeanne d'Albret, Queen of Navarre, was a committed Calvinist who brought him up in the Reformed faith. As a teenager he learned soldiering under the Huguenot leader Gaspard de Coligny during the Wars of Religion and first fought in 1570.

Henry became King of Navarre when his mother died on 9 June 1572. On 18 August he married Margaret of Valois, sister of the French king, in Paris. Six days later the St Bartholomew's Day massacre began, and thousands of Protestants who had gathered for the wedding, and many more across France, were killed. Henry survived by promising to become Catholic and was kept at court until he escaped in early 1576, renounced Catholicism again and returned to lead the Protestant side.

The death of the king's last brother in 1584 made Henry, a distant male-line descendant of Louis IX, heir to the throne. The Catholic League, led by the Duke of Guise and backed by Philip II of Spain, refused to accept a Protestant king, and France fought the War of the Three Henrys from 1587 to 1589. Henry III had Guise murdered in December 1588 and then joined forces with Henry of Navarre, but on 2 August 1589 a monk assassinated him in his camp outside Paris.

Henry IV now had to conquer his own country. Excommunicated by the pope and deserted by many Catholic nobles, he relied on English money from Elizabeth I and German troops, won at Arques and Ivry, but could not take Paris. On 25 July 1593 he converted to Catholicism. The famous remark that Paris was "well worth a Mass" is attributed to him, though perhaps wrongly. He was crowned at Chartres in February 1594, and the pope lifted the excommunication in 1595. Catholic leaders were won over partly with large payments, and in 1598 he ended the war with Spain at Vervins and issued the Edict of Nantes, which allowed Protestants to worship in defined places and gave them guarantees of their own.

With his minister the Duke of Sully, Henry worked to put royal finances in order, encouraged farming and manufacturing, and built roads, bridges and canals. In Paris he had the Pont Neuf built across the Seine, laid out the Place Royale, today's Place des Vosges, and extended the Louvre with its long Grande Galerie. He supported the expeditions of Samuel de Champlain to North America. Abroad, he took Bresse, Bugey and Gex from Savoy in 1601, funded the Dutch Republic against Spain and renewed France's alliance with the Ottoman sultan.

Henry survived at least a dozen attempts on his life. On 14 May 1610, as he prepared to intervene against the Habsburgs in the Jülich succession dispute, his coach was held up by traffic in a Paris street and François Ravaillac stabbed him. He was buried at Saint-Denis, and his widow, Marie de' Medici, governed for their son Louis XIII, then nine, whose chief minister would later be Cardinal Richelieu. He had a reputation for many love affairs, and his memory was celebrated by later monarchs, especially during the Bourbon Restoration.

Our 1600 map shows the Kingdom of France in the middle of his reign, two years after the Edict of Nantes and the peace with Spain.