Henry IV of France's wives and mistresses played a significant role in the politics of his reign. Both Henry (1553–1610) and his first wife Margaret of Valois, whom he married in 1572, were repeatedly unfaithful to each other, and the collapse of their marriage led to their estrangement and living apart. Although Henry fathered children with a series of mistresses, his lack of a legitimate heir became a cause of concern, and his marriage was not annulled until 1599. In 1600, at the age of forty-six, he married his second wife, Marie de' Medici. They had six children, including the future Louis XIII. Henry was unfaithful to his second wife as well and insisted that she raise his illegitimate children along with her own.
Henry's womanising became legendary, earning him the nickname of Le Vert Galant. His sexual appetite was said to have been insatiable, and he always kept mistresses, often several at a time, as well as engaging in random sexual encounters and visits to brothels. Even so, he tended to elevate one mistress above the others and shower her with money, honours, and promises. His two most famous mistresses of this type were Gabrielle d'Estrées, who died in 1599, and her successor, Henriette d'Entragues, who involved herself in plots against the crown. Henry promised marriage to each of them, exposing himself to a series of political problems.
Parents Born in 1553, Henry was the son of Jeanne d'Albret, who became the Queen Regnant of Navarre two years after he was born. His father, Antoine of Bourbon, was constantly unfaithful to Jeanne.Buisseret, Henry IV, King of France, p. 4. The couple also differed over religion: Jeanne became a staunch Huguenot, whereas Antoine wavered, for political reasons, between the Catholicism of his birth and the faith of his wife. His vacillating character earned him the epithet ondoyant (one whose mind changes, or undulates) from the essayist Montaigne, a description later sometimes applied to his son. The public squabbling between Jeanne and Antoine became scandalous during Henry's childhood, and in 1560, when he was seven, Jeanne took him to the French court. After Antoine ordered her back to her kingdom of Navarre in 1562, she left Henry behind, and she was reunited with him only in 1566 during the royal progress to the south. Among Henry's playmates at the French court were the future Henry III of France and Henry of Guise.Buisseret, 5.
Margaret of Valois
After the signature of the peace of Saint-Germain, Catherine de' Medici, the powerful mother of King Charles IX, was convinced by François of Montmorency to marry her daughter Margaret with Henry. The match was in fact assumed almost thirteen years earlier by the late King Henry II.Pitts, Henry IV of France, pp. 8–9. Catherine, who believed in dynastic marriage as a potent political tool, aimed to unite the interests of the Valois and the Bourbons, and create harmony between Catholics and Huguenots in the reign of France.
By all accounts, Margaret of Valois was deemed highly attractive, even sexually magnetic: "The beauty of that princess is more divine than human, she is made to damn and ruin men rather than to save them", said about her Don John of Austria came to court just to see her.Wellman, p. 278. Margaret had also an enterprising and flirtatious character. Shortly before this marriage plan with Henry of Navarre, she had been involved in a scandal: it was discovered that she encouraged the handsome Henry of Guise, who intended to marry her, entertaining a secret correspondence with him. When her family discovered it put an end to the crush between them and sent Henry of Guise away from court.
Some sources claim the duke of Guise was Margaret's first lover, but this is highly unlikely. For political reasons, the duty of a Daughter of France was to be a virgin at the wedding and for this she was very guarded. If Margaret had really compromised her reputation, Jeanne d'Albret would not accept the marriage between her son and the princess.Williams, Queen Margot, p. 39 Although certainly after the wedding, Margaret was unfaithful to her husband, many of the extramarital adventures are the result of pamphlets that have had to politically discredit her and her family: the most famous was Le Divorce Satyrique (1607), who described her as a nymphomaniac.Wellman, p. 275.
Margaret complied with her mother's desire to marry Henry, provided she was not forced to convert to Protestantism. When Jeanne arrived at the French court after receiving numerous pressures from Catherine, she was extremely impressed by Margaret: "She has frankly owned to me the favourable impression which she has formed of you. With her beauty and wit, she exercises a great influence over the Queen-Mother and the King, and Messieurs her younger brothers."Quoted by Williams, p. 60. The problems began when the Protestant Jeanne discovered that Margaret had no intention of abjuring Catholicism. Meanwhile the marriage negotiations were repeatedly impeded by the Pope and the King of Spain.
Tired of the duration of the negotiations, Charles IX decided that the wedding would be celebrated by the Cardinal of Bourbon even without papal dispensation, so Jeanne gave her consent to the wedding by promising that Henry could remain a Huguenot. When Jeanne arrived in Paris to buy clothes for the wedding, she was taken ill and died, aged forty-four; and Henry succeeded her as the King of Navarre. Henry arrived in Paris in July 1572 and saw Margaret after six years of separation (they had spent their childhood together with the French court). Despite subsequent historiographic interpretations, contemporaries do not point out any mutual dissatisfaction between future spouses.Boucher, Deux épouses et reines à la fin du XVIe siècle, pp. 21-22.
The controversial wedding took place on 18 August 1572 at Notre-Dame, Paris. After a nuptial lunch, four days of balls, masques and banquets ensued, only to be interrupted by the outbreak of violence in Paris. After the attempted assassination of the Huguenot leader Gaspard de Coligny on 22 August 1572, Catherine and Charles IX, to forestall the expected Huguenot backlash, ordered the murder of the Huguenot leaders gathered in Paris for the wedding. The result was the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, in which thousands of Huguenots were killed in Paris and throughout the reign."Saint Bartholomew's Day, Massacre of" in The New Encyclopædia Britannica (15th edition, Chicago, 1991) 10:311:3b.
Margaret later described in her Memoirs the chaos and bloodshed in the Louvre Palace, where she and her new husband were lodged. Henry found himself escorted to a room with his cousin Henry of Condé, and told to choose between death and conversion to Roman Catholicism. He chose the latter.Pitts, pp. 63-65. After the massacre, the Queen-Mother proposed to her daughter that the marriage be annulled, but Margaret replied that this was impossible because she had already had sexual relations with Henry and was "in every sense" his wife. She wrote in her Memoirs: "I suspected the design of separating me from my husband was in order to work some mischief against him."Memoirs, p. 67.
Until 1576, Henry remained at court, siding with Margaret and her brother François of Alençon against Henry III, who became king in 1574. During this time, Henry of Navarre often ignored Margaret and instead slept with his mistress, Charlotte de Sauve.Buisseret, 9. It appeared, in the words of Henry's biographer David Buisseret, as if "the pleasure-loving and libidinous elements of his ancestry had finally gained the upper hand".Buisseret, 8. A rivalry developed between him and Alençon over the beautiful de Sauve, who was one of Catherine de' Medici's so-called "flying squadron", a group of "court lovelies" whom Catherine used to lure noblemen to court and, it was rumoured, as informants. According to Margaret's Memoirs, de Sauve "treated both of them in such a way that they became extremely jealous of each other… to such a point that they forgot their ambitions, their duties and their plans and thought of nothing but chasing after this woman". De Sauve may have been acting as a tool of Henry III and Catherine in their attempts to split the two men. Henry of Navarre's good judgement was already known to desert him when it came to women. He wrote to a friend:
Margaret's behaviour was also the subject of scandal. On one occasion in 1575, Catherine de' Medici was heard yelling at her, accusing her of taking a lover. In a separate incident, the king sent a band of assassins to murder Margaret's lover Bussy d'Amboise, a friend of Alençon's, who managed to escape. As Catherine's biographer Leonie Frieda puts it: "he then decided to leave the Court immediately citing health reasons, which happened to be nothing less than the truth". In 1576, Henry III accused Marguerite of improper relations with a lady-in-waiting. Margaret claimed in her Memoirs that he would have killed her if Catherine had not stopped him. Despite their sexual infidelities, Margaret remained politically loyal to her husband during the early period of their marriage and helped him negotiate the complexities of the court. By 1575, however, their relations were no longer physical: "I could not endure the pain that I felt", she recalled in her Memoirs, "and I stopped sleeping with the King my husband".
In 1576, Henry managed to slip away while hunting and made for his kingdom, where he abjured the Catholic religion on 13 June. For a time, the abandoned Margaret found herself imprisoned, suspected of complicity, and was afterwards distrusted by her own family. Henry eventually demanded that she be brought to him. In 1578, therefore, Catherine de' Medici travelled south to Nérac and duly delivered Margaret to her husband. At first, in this new phase in their marriage, the couple managed a show of harmony, but strains were apparent. In 1580 a religious war, later called the "Lovers' War", broke out between the Huguenots and King Henry III. Although inaccurate, this name for the war relates to a series of scandals at the Navarre court and to the notion that Henry of Navarre took up arms in response to jibes about his love life from the French court. At this point, he was conducting a passionate affair with a mistress known as "La Belle Fosseuse", while Margaret was involved with one of his own commanders, the Vicomte de Turenne. Henry wrote to Margaret apologising for the state of affairs between them. He expressed "extreme regret that instead of bringing you contentment… I have brought the opposite".
In 1582, Margaret returned to the French court without her husband, who was still openly besotted with La Fosseuse. Before long, she began taking lovers again, such as Harlay de Champvallon, one of her brother François's retinue, and acting more scandalously than ever. After a rumour that she had borne Champvallon a child, Henry III ordered her back to Navarre and then had her carriage searched and detained her in an abbey for questioning.
Henry of Navarre at first refused to take Margaret back unless Henry III made a public statement asserting her innocence of all the charges against her. Catherine de' Medici sent Pomponne de Bellièvre south to smooth things over and arrange Margaret's return. In a letter, she spelled out to Margaret that a royal wife must bear her husband's affairs without complaint, recalling proudly that her own conduct as a wife had been impeccable, despite all provocation.Knecht, Catherine de' Medici, 215–16. Margaret was reunited with Henry on 13 April 1584, but she failed to heed her mother's words, even though the death of her brother François in June 1584 made her husband heir presumptive to the French throne. Henry himself was under increased pressure to produce an heir. He was advised by his closest friend Philippe Duplessis-Mornay that it was now "time to make love to France".