4.5 France: Henry IV

Henry IV, 1589-1610

In 1589 an exhausted France looked with uncertainty at the 36-year old Protestant nobleman who was heir to the throne. Henry Bourbon of Navarre, through marriage (1572) to the sister of King Henry III, was heir to the throne of France.[1] Leader of the Huguenot forces that for some thirty years had been at war with the Catholic monarchy, Henry of Navarre became the heir to the throne when Henry III's youngest brother died. Opposed by France's Catholic leadership, Henry Bourbon succeeded to the throne on Henry III's death by assassination in 1589. All expected the bitter and draining Wars of Religion to continue. They did.

The new king, Henry IV, would surprise Europe. To win the support of the majority of his subjects, he would become a Catholic in 1593. He would secure a truce with his former followers and, several years later in 1598, grant them religious toleration. Once secure in power, he would resist the temptation to resume war with Hapsburg Spain and keep his kingdom at peace. He would undertake an ambitious mercantilist program to stimulate French economic growth. All of Henry's policies had one aim: to increase the sovereignty of the French crown. At the time of his death in 1610, the Bourbon monarchy of France was well on its way to becoming the most powerful monarchy in Europe.

What a contrast! In 1589 the monarchy that Henry IV inherited was weak, poor, and politically ineffective. Why? There were several factors at work explaining the weakness of the French monarchy in the sixteenth century.

Foreign wars over the first half of the century had put great strain on the royal treasury and French resources. These wars, known as the Hapsburg-Valois Wars, lasted from 1494 until 1559. French policy underlying the wars was to break the encirclement of France by lands held by Hapsburg Spain. The Hapsburg policy, of course, was to prevent French expansion. Fought largely in northern Italy, the wars proved inconclusive. In 1559 both sides agreed to a peace between them. The Catholic Reformation now demanded the attention of Catholic monarchs.

Religious civil war devastated France for the next three decades. The Wars of Religion (1560 - 1589) were waged by the French monarchy against the Calvinist Huguenots. Although the Huguenots numbered no more than ten percent of the French population, they were the French middle class. They had the wealth to raise and equip armies and proved a serious military challenge to the Catholic monarchy. The Wars of Religion were noted for their brutality, the most notorious example of which was the slaughter of thousands of Huguenots in Paris on St. Bartholomew's Day in 1572. By 1589 the civil war had exhausted the crown and divided the population into bitterly hostile opposing forces.

The succession of minority (child) kings also undermined the effectiveness of the monarchy. Between 1560 and 1589 France was ruled in succession by three young men, all brothers. Francis II succeeded in 1559 at the age of fifteen. On Francis' death a year later, ten year old Charles IX became king. When Charles died in 1574, Henry III, aged twenty, succeeded to the throne. All three of these kings reigned during the tumultuous Wars of Religion. As youngsters, they came under the influence of factions of ambitious nobles who jealously competed with each other for the favor of the Crown. The reigns of all three kings were dominated by their mother, Catherine de Medici. A strong Catholic, Catherine used her powerful influence to direct her sons and play off the nobles against each other. It was Catherine de Medici who engineered the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre.

Royal authority was also weakened by the fact that in 1589 there was no common system of justice operating uniformly throughout France. Northern France held the tradition of Germanic Law; the south, Roman Law. In fact, there were some three hundred legal systems all stemming from hundreds of years of feudal and local tradition. The Crown, consequently, could not make its influence felt through the exercise of royal justice.

The final factor explaining the weakness of the French monarchy was the strong tradition of provincial identity. In the Middle Ages feudalism caused France to break down into some thirty large regional entities called provinces. The names of the provinces survive today - Normandy, Brittany, Burgundy, Champagne, Anjou, Flanders, Alsace, Lorraine, to name a few. In the early and high Middle Ages the power of the feudal nobility made the provinces virtually autonomous. While later kings extended their sovereignty over the nobility as feudalism weakened, the provinces continued to retain numerous rights, privileges, and traditions. In 1589 the French provinces had their own regional governments, their own tax systems, their own systems of law, the right to collect tariffs and tolls on goods moving through them, and their own traditions of custom and culture. In 1589 most Frenchmen did not identify themselves as French, but as Normans, Bretons, Alsatians, or Burgundians.

This, then, was the France that Henry IV inherited in 1589. The challenge before him was immense.

Henry IV

The background of Henry’s emergence in the political life of France was that of the Wars of Religion. To trace his life before 1589 is like finding one’s way through two intersecting mazes, so complex are the combinations of personalities and experiences that shaped his development. Very simply, his parents were French nobility; his mother Huguenot; his father Catholic. He began life as a Huguenot. Four times in his life he changed religions, switching as the political circumstances demanded. As a youth he was captured following his father’s death in battle and taken to the royal court where Queen Catherine de Medici allowed him to have Huguenot tutors. He was married in 1572 to Princess Margaret, daughter of Catherine and sister of King Charles IX. Shortly after his marriage, Catherine ended the truce with the Huguenots by launching the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and the Wars of Religion resumed. Under threat of death, Henry converted back to Catholicism. He appealed to the pope to forgive his past heresy and became close to the leader of the Catholic League, Henry Duke of Guise. The Catholic League was an alliance of reactionary Catholic nobles opposed to any accommodation with the Huguenots. However, away from Paris as royal governor in the southwest, he again converted to Protestantism and raised an army. In 1574 Charles was succeeded by his brother, Henry III. Henry of Navarre found himself again caught up in a war against Henry III, at times allied with Henry of Guise and at times allied with Henry III against Guise. Guise had aspirations for the throne and attempted to play off Henry III against Henry of Navarre. The death of Prince Francis, Catherine’s fourth son, in 1584 made Henry of Navarre, by virtue of his marriage to Margaret, the heir to the French throne. The three-way “war of the three Henrys” continued. In 1588 Henry III’s bodyguards assassinated Guise and other leaders of the Catholic League were arrested. The country again slipped into chaos. The Catholic League revived as Guise’s family sought revenge. Refusing to accept Henry of Navarre as heir, the Catholic League then recognized Cardinal Charles of Bourbon as the royal heir. Henry III, king of Catholic France, now found himself in alliance with Henry of Navarre, leader of the Huguenot opposition. Together their armies marched on Paris, the center of the Catholic League’s resistance. In August 1589 Jacques Clément, a Catholic monk, assassinated Henry III. The Protestant Henry of Navarre was the lone heir to the French throne.

Henry’s accession did not mean immediate peace. The Catholic League was not yet defeated and Philip II of Spain now sent troops to aid the opposition to Henry. Paris refused to welcome Henry as the legitimate king and, with Spanish support, resisted Henry’s attempts to take the capital by force.

In his political thinking, Henry was a Politique. Taking their lead from the political writings of Jean Bodin (see note at the end of this reading), the Politiques were those (both Catholic and Huguenot) who believed that the civil order took priority over the divisiveness of religion. Civil order, however, could only come through the exercise of sovereign power. Sovereign power must be absolute, sharing its authority with no other institutions – church, parliaments – nor be bound by any “constitutions” (feudalism) of rights, privileges, or liberties. Under a strong sovereign government, it would be possible for peoples of differing religious faiths to live in peace with each other. France was being devastated by religious civil war, as Germany had been earlier. Henry and the Politiques put France above faith.

Knowing that religious civil war could go on indefinitely, Henry in 1593 abjured Protestantism and was again baptized as a Catholic. He was, after all, the hereditary ruler of a country that was 90 % Catholic. “Paris is worth a mass,” he is reputed as saying. It worked. Moderate Catholics resented Spanish intervention and were willing to make peace with their Huguenot enemies. In 1594 Henry was crowned at Chartres and from there made a triumphant entry into his capital. In 1595 he declared war on Spain, further winning popular support from the French people, both Catholic and Huguenot. The pope lifted Henry’s excommunication (first pronounced in 1585 and again in 1591). French armies defeated the Spanish in the Franche-Comté. In 1598 the Catholic League surrendered and peace was arranged with Spain. On the background of the conditions characterizing France for the last sixty years (described above), Henry could now give his full attention to making his monarchy sovereign.

Henry IV as King

Henry’s overall goal was to build the royal absolutism necessary to make the French monarchy sovereign. There were several means to that end: securing religious peace; exercising financial responsibility; and initiating mercantilist policies to increase the overall real wealth of France.

We have seen how he undertook to bring his country religious peace – his personal conversion to Catholicism. While this was distressing to his Huguenot supporters and viewed with skepticism by Catholic conservatives, it did, in the long run, work. The religious warfare eventually came to an end. The relationship between Catholics and Huguenots remained strained. In 1598 Henry took another significant step to pacify his country. When in the city of Nantes, he issued a royal edict granting specific legal rights and freedoms to the Huguenots. (An edict was a royal order or decree having force of law.) The Edict of Nantes had the following provisions:

Huguenots were granted freedom of worship. Public Protestant worship (church services) was limited to specific towns and cities but was excluded from Paris. Protestant worship in private homes was made legal throughout the kingdom.

Political autonomy (self-government) was granted to some 100 towns and cities in which Huguenots were the majority of the population.

Huguenots would have the right to self-defense (armies and fortifications) in those same towns and cities.

Huguenots would hold the same civil and legal rights held by Catholics.

Huguenots would have equal access to education as Catholics. Huguenots could attend Catholic schools and universities and establish their own schools.

The Edict of Nantes made France the first state in Europe to make religious toleration official state policy. The Catholic Church remained the national church of France but was no longer the established church. For conservative Catholics, the Edict was unacceptable and several of the Parlements (courts) refused to approve it as law, but there was no serious outbreak of opposition. Most Huguenots were delighted, especially as Henry had granted them the right to self-defense. They saw this provision as a guarantee of the King’s good faith to his former followers. Other Huguenots were disappointed with the Edict’s limitation of public worship. Nonetheless, Henry had secured the religious peace upon which the future success of his monarchy would depend. He could now direct his attention to building the financial strength of the crown.

One of the most serious problems that Henry inherited was the financial weakness of the French crown. If his government were to be sovereign, it must have wealth. Henry undertook several policies to address the problem. As war was expensive and, as he thought, wasteful, he made it his foreign policy to do all that he could to keep France at peace. He likewise took other cost-cutting measures, limiting spending on the maintenance of the royal court and palaces. But the major concern for the King was the collection of taxes. Not everyone in France paid taxes.

The nobility and the Catholic clergy, the two wealthiest elements of the French population, were exempt from royal taxation. This was the result of an earlier agreement between the crown and the Estates General (a body similar to the English Parliament representing the three "estates” – clergy, nobility, and commoners – of the French population). In return for the exemption from taxation by the first two estates, clergy and nobility, the Estates General granted the crown the virtually unlimited power to tax the commoners. The tax burden, therefore, fell heaviest on the middle class and the peasants. Nonetheless, the system of royal tax collection failed to produce sufficient revenues.

According to traditional practice, royal tax collection was by "tax farming." That is, the crown sold the right to collect taxes to individuals (usually nobles) who then collected royal taxes in their districts or regions. Tax farmers, as these tax collection officials were called, were given set minimum amounts to collect that were to be turned over to the royal government in Paris. Anything additional that they collected they could keep! It is easy to imagine that in such a system, there would be great opportunity for tax farmers to cheat the government. Corruption was so great in fact that less than one-fourth of the money to be collected actually reached Paris.

In dealing with this problem, Henry elected neither to expand the tax base nor change the collection system. The Church and nobility would remain tax exempt. Why? With France just beginning to emerge from many years of religious conflict, he needed their support. Peace was important - and, inexpensive. And, were he to tax them, they in return would want a voice in royal government. Henry wanted the French monarchy to be sovereign. If the nobles and clergy had a deciding voice in government, the crown could not be sovereign. As for the abuse of tax farming, Henry decided that it would be too costly to replace tax farmers with a new body of royal tax collectors. Instead, he required that the government exercise closer supervision of the tax farmers, insisting on their honesty and punishing those who abused the system. While it was impossible to do away with all corruption, royal revenues did begin to increase.

In his financial policy Henry sought the economic expertise and advice of the Protestant Maximilien de Bethune, Duke of Sully. Appointed the royal superintendent of finances, Sully realized that in order to increase the wealth of the crown, it was necessary to increase the wealth of France. It would not be necessary to raise taxes upon those who paid them. Instead, by making the taxpayers wealthier, the same tax rates would yield greater revenues, and the overall real wealth, and therefore power, of France would increase. The methods employed by Henry included founding new industries, building roads, bridges, and canals to stimulate internal economic growth, encouraging the export of French products, attempting to achieve a favorable balance of trade, and founding France’s first overseas colony. These methods were based on economic theory and practice known as mercantilism. (Mercantilism is considered in the next reading.)

With Sully's solid advice, Henry granted subsidies to new ceramics and glassware industries and encouraged the development of a French silk textile industry – the beginnings of Paris becoming a center of international women’s fashion. Roads, bridges, and canals were repaired or constructed. He declared all navigable rivers to be open waterways under royal domain and forbade any interference with river traffic. With Henry’s financial backing, the French explorer Samuel de Champlain undertook a voyage of discovery along the coasts of North America. Sailing up the river he named for St. Lawrence, Champlain laid claim to “New France,” what is today Canada. France took its first overseas colonial venture by founding in 1608 a small settlement called Quebec.

So how did Henry do? When Henry became king in 1589 the total revenue through royal taxes was seven million livres, and the crown was 300 million livres in debt. At the time of Henry's death in 1610, crown income was 23 million livres, the debt had been paid, and the royal treasury had a surplus of some 13 million livres. Henry's mercantilist policies worked. The crown was secure and financially strong and France was well on the way to becoming the major power in Europe.

As a personality, Henry IV has been described as handsome, intelligent, unpretentious, good-natured, forgiving, and fun-loving. He enjoyed satire, even when directed against him, telling risqué stories, and gambling. Above all, he was a womanizer, able to charm and seduce, a legacy of his years as a soldier. Henry’s affairs, often flaunted in public, eventually led to the papal annulment in 1600 of his marriage to Queen Margaret. Henry and “Margot,” as Margaret was known, were childless and had spent most of their married life apart. The condition of the papal annulment, however, was that Henry marry Marie de Medici, daughter of the Grand Duke of Tuscany. Henry agreed. Marie came to France with a sizeable dowry, including the waiving of French debts owed Medici banks. His marriage to Marie resulted in the birth of an heir, the future Louis XIII, in 1502. While Henry remained attracted to his mistress, he and Marie had a total of seven children. Following Henry’s death, Marie commemorated her relationship with him through a series of celebrated paintings by the Dutch artist Peter Paul Rubens.

As Henry moved France to greater prosperity and his crown to greater strength, he was not without enemies. There were a dozen attempts on his life and numerous conspiracies to overthrow him. Nobles feared that he might become strong enough to deprive them of their traditional feudal liberties. Conservative Catholics still resented his accommodation with the Huguenots. In all cases but the last, the plotters failed. In May 1610, as Henry was going by carriage to visit an ill Sully, he was stabbed to death by one François Ravaillac. Ravaillac, a Catholic fanatic, was a teacher who had hoped to become a Jesuit. Rejected, he decided to make himself a martyr by killing the one he saw as his church’s most heretical enemy – the king. Immediately captured, Ravaillac was tried, convicted, and executed. As if in anticipation of his death, Henry had only the day before presided at coronation ceremonies making Queen Marie regent for Prince Louis should Henry die before Louis reached adulthood. Henry was 55 at the time of his death. The new king, Louis XIII, was only eight.

Henry IV is today one of France’s most beloved kings. While he does not come close to Louis XIV or Napoleon as a powerful ruler, he is fondly remembered for having brought France out of chaos and for the strengths and weaknesses of his humanity. His legacy was a France that was at peace with itself and its neighbors. Its mercantilist economy was rapidly expanding. Its middle class, largely Huguenot, was one of the most prosperous in Europe. Henry had laid the foundations for making the French crown one of the strongest in Europe. Now, France had another child-king. As in 1589, France again looked ahead with uncertainty. Would all that Henry created hold together?

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Jean Bodin (1530 - 1596), the guiding spirit behind the thinking of the Politiques, was a French lawyer, historian, political philosopher. In 1576 he published his work, The Six Books of the Republic, calling for an end to the civil wars, by examining the structures upon which successful states have survived and prospered. He used the word “republic” to mean state. Although Catholic in religion, Bodin saw the state as superior to the Church and concluded that hereditary absolute monarchy was the most effective form of government.

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The image of Henry IV is from a Wikipedia source.

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Sources for Henry IV

Castries, Duc de. The Lives of the Kings and Queens of France. New York: Knopf, 1979.

Durant, Will and Ariel. The Age of Reason Begins. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961.

Knapton, Earnest. Europe 1450 – 1815. New York: Scribners, 1958.

Merriman, John. A History of Modern Europe. New York: Norton, 1996.

Palmer, Robert R. et al. A History of the Modern World. Boston: McGraw Hill, 2002.

Russell, Lord. Henry of Navarre. New York: Praeger, 1970.

[1] Navarre was a small principality on the border of France and Spain.