Succession of Henry IV of France

Kingdom of Navarre

Though most of the old Kingdom of Navarre was incorporated into Spain, the claim to the remaining part was retained by Queen Catherine (daughter of Magdalene of France), who married John, Count of Périgord, brother-in-law of Cesare Borgia and lord of vast lands in the southwest of France. John was chased out of Spanish Navarre by Ferdinand II of Aragon in 1512 and retreated to Navarre north of the Pyrenees, and the Navarrese Cortes (parliament) accepted annexation to Castile. The part that survived as an independent kingdom north of the Pyrenees, Lower Navarre, was united with the Viscountcy of Béarn in an independent kingdom. It was given a representative assembly by Catherine and John's son, Henry II of Navarre. By the time of Henry III of Navarre (the future Henry IV of France), the monarch of Navarre could call to arms 300 gentlemen and 6,000 footsoldiers from the kingdom.

Rival claimants

The Catholic League's candidate for the crown of France in 1589 was Charles, Cardinal de Bourbon. The brother of Antoine of Bourbon (and Henry of Navarre's uncle), he was the last surviving Catholic prince of the blood. However, two factors made him an unconvincing choice: he was 66 years old, and he was firmly in the custody of first Henry III and then Henry IV. The cardinal found himself imprisoned in 1588, when Henry III ordered the murder of Henry, Duke of Guise, at the Château of Blois and rounded up those he regarded as a threat to his crown, including the Cardinal of Bourbon. On Henry III's death, Henry IV assumed responsibility for his captive rival. The League proved unable to free the cardinal, and when he died on 9 May 1590, they were left without a plausible successor as claimant to the throne. That proved fatal to their opposition to Henry's rule.

During the period between the succession of Henry IV and the death of the Cardinal of Bourbon, the city of Paris had achieved a degree of independence. While acknowledging the Catholic League and accepting a Spanish garrison, the authorities there had championed their liberties against those of the crown so much that some citizens openly opposed the institution of monarchy altogether. In October 1589, a Parisian lawyer complained publicly, "Our civil disorder and factions have opened the door to a crowd of corrupt little men who, with effrontery, have attacked authority with such licence and audacity that those who have not seen it would not believe it. In so doing, they have wanted to jump from a monarchy to a democracy".

The death of the Cardinal of Bourbon prompted measures to elect a new anti-king. Although the French monarchy was hereditary, the League's lawyers searched the early history of France for precedents to legitimise the election of a king. The Protestant scholar and ideologue François Hotman had argued in his Francogallia that France was once a free country, whose liberties had been eroded over time, including the right to elect kings. Hotman had asserted the right of the Estates-General to perform this function. Though Hotman was a Protestant, his argument also influenced Catholic jurists searching for a means to replace the Cardinal of Bourbon at the beginning of the 1590s and the decision to summon the Estates-General to elect a new "king".

The meeting of the Estates General that opened on 26 January 1593 proved far from representative. Many royalist delegates refused to attend, and other delegates were blocked by royalist troops from reaching Paris. By then, deep divisions in the League had become apparent. The League's leader, Charles of Lorraine, Duke of Mayenne, had repeatedly disputed the strategy of the Duke of Parma, the Governor of the Spanish Netherlands, whom Philip II sent into northern France to reinforce the League. Mayenne had also quarrelled with his nephew, Charles, Duke of Guise, whom some wanted to elect king. Finally, Mayenne was at odds with many Parisian leaders, particularly with the Sixteen, a group of city representatives who pursued their own libertarian agenda and often worked with the Spanish behind Mayenne's back.

In November 1591, when the Sixteen executed a group of moderates from the Paris parlement, Mayenne hanged or imprisoned the ringleaders. Mayenne, who nursed ambitions to be king himself, saw his grand alliance of Catholic nobles, French towns and Spain crumbling from a growing disunity of purpose and the absence of an obvious claimant to the throne.

It was widely believed among Catholics that the pope's blessing was essential to the legitimacy of a king of France because of the Protestant faith of Henry. At the time of his succession, Henry IV was under a papal excommunication, which had been imposed by Pope Sixtus V on 21 September 1585, and so the papacy considered it legitimate for Henry's subjects to oppose his rule, both as King of Navarre and, after 1589, as King of France. The persistence of rebellion and civil war in the early years of Henry's reign owed much to the papacy's refusal to accept anyone but a Catholic on the French throne.

Mayenne was opposed to the idea of summoning the Estates-General to elect a king, but in 1592, he finally caved in to Spanish pressure to do so. Mayenne opened the assembly with a symbolically empty chair beside him. The influence of Spain on the assembly soon proved problematic. Spain sought the election of the Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia of Spain, the daughter of Philip II of Spain and Henry III's niece and would-be-heiress under male-preference primogeniture. The Spanish urged the Estates-General to repeal the Salic law, which prevented the rule of a queen regnant, but in so doing, they failed to grasp a fundamental principle of the French royal succession.

The Spanish ambassador in Paris had instructions to "insinuate cleverly" the rights of the Infanta to the French throne. His brief also stated that the Salic Law "was a pure invention [...] as the most learned and discerning of their lawyers recognise". The Estates-General of the Catholic League insisted that if Clara Isabella Eugenia were to be chosen, she should marry a French prince. Philip II, however, wanted her to marry Archduke Ernest of Austria. The Estates replied that "our laws and customs prevent us from calling forward as king any prince not of our nation". On 28 June 1593, the Paris parlement followed up by resolving "to preserve the realm which depends on God alone and recognizes no other ruler of its temporal affairs, no matter what his status, and to prevent it from being overrun by foreigners in the fair name of religion".

While the delegates of the Estates-General dithered in Paris, Henry IV dealt a well-timed blow to their deliberations by announcing his wish to be converted from Protestantism to Catholicism, a move that effectively cut the ground from under the Catholic League's feet. The Estates-General sent delegates to treat with Henry's representatives, and on 8 August, most of the members of the assembly returned home.

Legitimisation

Henry's abjuration of the Protestant faith on 25 July 1593 at the Abbey of Saint-Denis proved decisive in winning over many of his opponents. His legitimisation proceeded in stages. The archbishop of Bourges raised his excommunication, though without papal authority, during the abjuration ceremony. The following year, Henry had himself anointed and crowned at Chartres Cathedral. After the ceremony, he demonstrated his sacred powers by touching people for scrofula, the king's evil. Finally, on 12 July 1595, Pope Clement VIII agreed to lift Henry's excommunication, and he pronounced the absolution on 17 September. For the first time, he gave Henry the title of "most Christian King of France and Navarre".

When Clement absolved Henry, he, like Henry, was motivated by political pragmatism. The papacy lived in fear of further national churches breaking away from Rome, to be governed instead by princes. The Gallican church had already shown independent tendencies, and some of Henry's advisers advocated for him to declare himself the spiritual head of the French church. Also, Clement feared that, in the words of the historian J. H. Elliott, "a Spanish victory in France could mean the end of papal independence". Clement's grant of absolution, therefore, contains an element of damage limitation. For two years, Henry had been recognised by many in the French church, and French theologians at the Sorbonne had confirmed the Archbishop of Bourges's lifting of Henry's excommunication. To reassert papal jurisdiction, Clement made a point of declaring the absolution granted at Saint-Denis in 1593 to be void, but in substituting his own absolution, he ruled all Henry's acts since that date as legitimate in retrospect. Thus, the pope papered over the technical anomaly of the archbishop's abrogation of papal powers. Clement's absolution was contingent on a set of demanding conditions. Among other promises, Henry swore to establish a single religion in France, to recompense all Catholic clergy who had lost land or property to the Huguenots and to apply the decrees of the Council of Trent in France.

After 1594, Henry's recognition doomed further armed opposition to his rule within France. One by one, the leaders of the Catholic League made peace with him. Mayenne surrendered in 1596 after the Peace of Follembray, and in 1598, the surrender of the last League commander, Philippe Emmanuel, Duke of Mercœur, who had hoped to restore Brittany to independence under his own rule, was followed by the Edict of Nantes the same year. Even so, many of Henry's Catholic subjects were sceptical about his recantation. It was argued that until Henry fulfilled the daunting terms of his absolution, his conversion could not be considered sincere. Those who continued to believe that Henry was a heretic regarded him as a tyrant who had usurped the throne of France under false pretenses. One of the reasons that François Ravaillac gave for assassinating Henry IV in 1610 was the king's "refusal to exercise his power to compel the so-called reformed Church Calvinist Protestants to the apostolic Catholic and Roman Church".

Assassination

Henry IV's assassination in 1610 was the last of a series of attempts on his life throughout his reign. The constant threat of assassination was related to questions of his legitimacy as King of France. Even after his abjuration of the Protestant faith in 1593, doubts remained about the sincerity of Henry's conversion. In particular were those who believed that in failing to fulfill the terms of his absolution, he remained technically excommunicated and therefore a legitimate target of assassination. As a Catholic king, Henry should have, it was argued, closed Huguenot churches and banned Protestant worship, but he instead made concessions to his former co-religionists in the Edict of Nantes and tolerated the existence of what was seen as a "state within a state", with whole towns and regions of France in which the Huguenots' right to worship, bear arms and govern their own affairs being protected by Henry.

According to his murderer, François Ravaillac, Henry "made no attempt to convert these Protestants and was said to be on the point of waging war against the Pope so as to transfer the Holy See to Paris". Ravaillac stated that "he had felt obliged to take this step because, from rumours he had heard, he felt the King had seemed reluctant to punish the Huguenots for trying to murder all the Catholics last Christmas Day. Some Catholics still languished in the Paris gaols while their persecutors went scot free".

Henry continued to promote Huguenots to office in France and to form alliances with Protestant princes abroad. In his home territory of Béarn, he did nothing to re-establish free Catholic worship, as the pope had demanded. It seemed clear to Henry's Catholic opponents that he had recanted his Protestantism merely for political reasons to secure the French throne. Rebels and would-be assassins felt justified by what they saw as Henry's manifest failure to comply with the terms of his absolution. In their view, Henry remained a heretic and thus a usurper on the throne of France.

Genealogy

On the death of King Henry III of France, who had no son, the crown passed to Henry IV, in the application of Salic law, because Henry was the descendant of the eldest surviving male line of the Capetian dynasty.

House of Bourbon

Henry IV's descent in the male line from Louis IX of France.

• Henry IV was the 9th cousin of King Henry II, and the 9th cousin once removed of kings Francis II, Charles IX, and Henry III. He was the son of:
• Antoine of Navarre (1518–1562), 8th cousin of kings Charles VIII and Francis I, who was the son of:
• Charles IV, Duke of Bourbon (1489–1537), 7th cousin of kings Louis XI and Louis XII, who was the son of:
• François de Bourbon-Vendôme (1470–1495), 6th cousin of King Charles VII, who was the son of:
• Jean de Bourbon-Vendôme (1428–1477), 5th cousin of King Charles VI, who was the son of:
• Louis de Bourbon-Vendôme (1376–1446), 4th cousin of King Charles V, who was the son of:
• Jean de Bourbon-La Marche (1344–1393), 3rd cousin of kings John I Posthumous and John II, who was the son of:
• Jacques de Bourbon-La Marche (1315–1362), 2nd cousin of kings Louis X, Philip V, Charles IV, and Philip VI, who was the son of:
• Louis I, Duke of Bourbon (1279–1342), 1st cousin of King Philip IV, who was the son of:
• Robert, Count of Clermont (1256–1317), brother of King Philip III and son of:
• King Louis IX (Saint Louis) (1214/1215 - 1270)

Simplified Bourbon family tree

From Louis IX to Charles X

Descent from Henry IV

see also:Family tree of Spanish monarchs

Ancestors