Henry IV., king of France and Navarre, surnamed 'the Great,' and 'the Good,' was born at Pau, 13th Dec. 1553. He was the third son of Antoine de Bourbon and Jeanne d'Albret, daughter and heiress of Henry, king of Navarre and Bearn. His 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 Bearnais mountaineers. His mother, who was a zealous Calvinist, was careful to select learned men holding her own tenets for his instructors; and having discovered that a plot was on foot 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, at whose head he fought at 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.)—and the third of the Huguenot wars began. Notwithstanding the defeats which the Huguenots had experienced in the next campaign, the peace of St Germain which concluded it 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 IX. 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 condition of his professing himself a Catholic. Three years he remained at the French court, virtually a prisoner; but at length, in 1576, he contrived to elude the vigilance of the queen-mother, and escaped to the camp of the Huguenots in Alençon. There, 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 favourable to the cause of the Reformers.
The death of the Duke of Anjou (late Alençon) gave Henry the rank, as first prince of the blood- royal, of presumptive heir to the crown; while the murder of Henry III. in 1589 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 excommunication, he was obnoxious to the greater part of the nation; and finding that the Dukes of Lorraine and Savoy, and Philip II. 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 weakness and internal dissensions of the Leaguers, who, in their anxiety to circumvent the ambitious designs which Philip II. cherished in favour of his daughter (niece of Henry III.), notwithstanding her exclusion 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 interests 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 Duc 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 favourable to the French king; but, important as was this event, it was preceded by a still more memorable act, for on the 15th April Henry had signed an edict at Nantes by which he secured to Protestants perfect liberty of conscience and the administration of impartial justice.
Henry was now left at liberty to direct his attention to the internal improvements of the kingdom, which had been thoroughly disorganised through the long continuance of civil war. The narrow-minded policy that had been followed during the 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 completely stopped, and by making canals and roads, and thus opening all parts of his kingdom 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 reorganisation 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 14th May 1610, 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 Ravailac. 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 Ravailac's 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.
According to Henri Martin, Henry 'remains the greatest, but above all the most essentially French of all the kings of France.' His unbridled licentiousness was his worst fault, and the cause of much evil in his own and succeeding reigns; for his prodigality and weak indulgence to his favourite mistresses, Gabrielle d'Estrées and Henrietta d'Entragues, and his affection for the natural children which they bore him were a scandal to the nation, and a source of impoverishing embarrassment to the government.
As authorities in regard to Henry II., III., and IV., in addition to the general histories of France, the following works may be consulted: Anquetil, Esprit de la Ligue; Petitot's Collection of Mémoires; De la Saussaye, Histoire de Blois; Documents de l'Hist. de France; Matthieu, Hist. de Henri IV.; Mémoires and Letters of Sully, De Thou, D'Aubigné, Pasquier, Duplessis-Mornay; Capefigue, Hist. de la Réforme et de la Ligue; Péréfixe, Hist. de Henri IV.; M. W. Freer, History of the Reign of Henry IV. (6 vols. 1860-63); H. de la Ferrière's Henri IV. (1890); Bingham's Marriages of the Bourbons (1889); and monographs by P. F. Willert (1893) and E. T. Blair (Phila. 1894).