Henri IV 1553 - 1610.

Henri was educated as a Calvinist mostly by his mother, Queen Jeanne d’Albret of Navarre. As a leading protestant and of the nobility, he was recognised by Admiral Coligny as the nominal head of the Huguenots.

In 1572, he married the daughter of Catherine de Medicis and sister to Charles IX, Marguerite de Valois. A few days after the wedding, he narrowly escaped being killed during the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre by professing to be a Catholic. Held as a virtual prisoner at court until 1576, he managed to escape and returned to his own territory in the south west of France. He then took up his Protestantism and played a major role in the French wars of religion. A renowned womaniser, he divorced Margueite de Valois and in 1600, married Marie de Medicis, a member of the banking family of Medicis.

He resorted to war to succeed to the throne of France and in 1593 turned Catholic again claiming, ‘Paris is worth a mass’. He is also supposed to have said ‘every house should have a chicken in a pot every Sunday’. He eventually brought peace to France in 1598, and followed with the Edict of Nantes, which established the political rights and some religious freedom for the Huguenots. With the aid of his Huguenot chief minister Maximilien de Béthune, duc de Sully, he reconstructed the war-torn country developing agriculture, industry and business. During this reconstruction he continued an anti-Habsburg foreign policy.

He was assassinated on 14 May 1610 by a Catholic fanatic called François Ravaillac, who was executed by quartering.