HENRY IV., king of France and Navarre, surnamed "The Great," and "Tire Good," was born in Beam in 1553. Henry was the third son of Antoine de Bourbon and Jeanne d'Albret, daughter and heiress of Henry, king of Navarre and Bearn. Ills father's death placed him under the sole control of his mother and grandfather, at whose court he was trained to the practice of knightly and athletic exercises, and inured to the active habits and rude fare common to the Bernais mountaineers. His mother, who was a zealous Calvanist, was careful to select learned men holding her own tenets for his instructors; and having discovered that a plot was brooding to remove him to Spain by force, to train him in the Catholic faith, she conducted him, in 1569, to La Rochelle, and presented him to the assembled Huguenot army, with whom he participated in the battle of Jarnac. Henry was now chosen chief of the Protestant party, although. on account of his youth, the principal command was vested in Coligny (q.v.). Notwith standing the defeats which the Huguenots had experienced in this campaign, the peace of St. Germain which followed was apparently most advantageous to their cause, and was speedily followed by a contract of marriage between Henry and Margaret of Valois, the sister of Charles I. After much opposition on the part of both Catholics and Protestants, the marriage was celebrated with great pomp in 1572, two months after the sudden death of the queen Jeanne, which was probably due to poison. and within less than a week of the massacre of St. Bartholomew. It had been originally intended that Henry was to share the fate of his friends and co-religionists; but his life was spared on onndition of his professing himself a Catholic. Three years he remained at the French court, virtually a prisoner.; but ,at length, id 1576, Henry contrived to elude the vigi lance of the queen-mother, and escaped to the camp of the Hucuenots in Meucci'', where, having revoked his compulsory conversion, he resumed the command of the army, and by his address gained several signal advantages, which constrained the king to consent to a peace highly favorable to the cause of the reformers. The death of the duke of Anjou (late Alencon) gave Henry the rank as first prince of the blood-royal, of presumptive heir to the crown, while the murder of Henry III., in 1559, made him, in right of the Salic law, and as the nearest lineal male descendant of the royal house of France, rightful king of France. As a Protestant, lying under the ban of papal excom , mnication, he was obnoxious to the greater part of the nation; and finding that the dukes of Lorraine and Savoy, and Philip 11. of Spain, were prepared, each on his own account, to dispute his claims, he retired to the south until he could collect more troops and obtain reinforcements from England and Germany. His nearly hopeless cause, however, gradually gained strength through 'the weaknesi and internal dissensions of the Liguists, who, in their anxiety to circumvent the ambitious designs which Philip II. cherished in favor of his daughter (niece of Henry III.), notwithstanding her exclu sion by the Salic law, proclaimed the aged cardinal Bourbon king, with the duke of Mayenne lieutenant-general of the 'kingdom, and thus still further complicated the inte rests of their party. In 1590 Henry won a splendid victory over Mayenne at Ivry. In 1593 the assembly of the states-general, by rejecting the pretensions of Philip II., and insisting on the integrity of the Salic law, smoothed Henry's way to the succession, although it is probable that he would never have been generally acknowledged had he not, by the advice of his friend and minister, De Rosny, afterwards duke de Sully (q.v.),
formally professed himself a member of the church of Rome. The ceremony. of his recantation of Protestantism, which was celebrated with great pomp at St. Denis in July, 1593, filled the Catholics with joy, and was followed by the speedy surrender of the most important cities of the kingdom, including even Paris, which opened its gates to him in 1594. The civil war was not, however, wholly put down till four years later. In the same year, 1598, peace was concluded between Spain and France by the treaty of Vervins, which restored to the latter many important places in Picardy, and was otherwise favorable to the French king; but important as was this event, it was pre ceded by a still more memorable dct, for on April 15, Henry had signed an edict at Nantes, by which he secured to Protestants perfect liberty of conscience, and the admin istration of impartial justice. Henry was now left at liberty to direct his attention to the internal improvements of the kingdom, which had been thoroughly disorganized through the long continuance of civil war. The narrow-minded policy that had been followed preceding reigns had left the provinces remote from the capital very much at the mercy of the civic governors and large landed proprietors, who, in the absence of a general administrative vigilance, arrogated almost sovereign power to themselves, raising taxes, and exacting compulsory services. These abuses Henry com pletely stopped, and by making canals and roads, and thus opening all parts of his king &in' to traffic and commerce, he established new sources of wealth and prosperity for all classes of his subjects. The mainspring of these improvements was, however, the reorganization of the finances under Sully, who, in the course of ten years, reduced the national debt from 330 millions to 50 millions of livres, although arrears of taxes to the amount of 20 millions were remitted by the king during that period. On Nay 14, the day after the coronation of his second wife, Mary de' Medici, and when about to set out to commence war in Germany, Henry was assassinated by a fanatic named Ravaillac. Nineteen times before attempts had been made on his life, most of which had been traced to the agency of the papal and imperial courts, and hence the people, in their grief and consternation, laid Ravaillac'a crime to the charge of the same influences. The grief of the Parisians was well-nigh delirious, and in their fury they wreaked the most horrible vengeance on the murderer, who, however, had been a mere tool in the hands of the Jesuits, Henry's implacable foes. notwithstanding the many concessions which he made to their order.
Time has strengthened the high estimate which the lower classes had formed of their favorite king, for although his faults were numerous, they were eclipsed by his great qualities. Inordinate love of women was his worst fault, and the cause of much evil in his own and succerling reigns, for his prodigality and weak indulgence to his favorite mistresses, Gabrielle d'Estr6es and Henrietta d'Entragues, and his affection for the nat ural children which they bore him, were a scandal to the nation, and a source of impov erishing embarrassment to the government. As authorities in regard to Henry 11..111.. and IV., in addition to the general histories of France, the following works may be con sulted: Anquetil, Esprit de la Ligue; Petitot's Collection of Nemoires; De la 8aussaye. Ifistoire de Blois; Documents de l' Hist. de F•iTitee Matthieu, Hist. de Henri Memoirs and letters of De Thou, D'Aubigne, Pasquier, Duplessis-Mornay; Capefigue, Bid. de la Beforme et de la Ligue; Werefixe, Mist. de Henri IV.