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Henry IV of France was notorious for his tumultuous and politically complicated love life.

Henry IV of France's wives and mistresses played a significant role in the politics of his reign. Both Henry and his first wife Marguerite 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. In 1600, at the age of forty-six, he married his second wife, Marie de' Medici, who bore him six children, including the future Louis XIII. Henry was unfaithful to Marie from the first 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.^[1] 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 seems to have promised marriage to each of these mistresses, creating a series of political problems for himself as a result.

[edit] 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 his mother.^[2] The couple also differed over religion: Jeanne became a staunch Huguenot, whereas Antoine wavered, for political reasons, between the Roman 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 that was later sometimes applied to his son.^[2] The public squabbling between Jeanne and Antoine became scandalous during Henry's childhood, and when Henry was eight, Jeanne removed him from his father to the French court. Antoine ordered her back to her kingdom of Navarre, and she left Henry behind, rejoining the court in 1566 during the royal progress to the south.^[2] Among Henry's playmates at the French court were Henry of Anjou, the future Henry III of France, and Henry of Guise.^[3]

[edit] Marguerite of Valois

Marguerite de Valois, by François Clouet, c. 1570. Her mother, Catherine de' Medici called her "my affliction" and "this creature".^[4]

By 1570, Catherine de' Medici, the powerful mother of King Charles IX, was seeking a marriage between her youngest daughter Marguerite, also known as Margot, and Henry. Catherine, who believed in dynastic marriage as a potent political tool, aimed to unite the interests of the Valois and the Bourbons. Given the ill health of her sons, she also wished to join the two bloodlines, since Henry of Navarre stood to inherit the French throne should her sons fail to produce male heirs.^[5] The seventeen-year-old Marguerite, however, was secretly involved with Henry of Guise, the son of the late Duke of Guise. When Catherine found this out, she had Marguerite brought from her bed. Catherine and the king then beat her, ripping her nightclothes and pulling out handfuls of her hair.^[6] Henry of Guise fled the court and, threatened with death by King Charles IX, promptly announced his engagement to Catherine of Cleves. Some sources claim that he narrowly escaped being caught in Marguerite's bed, but biographer Leonie Frieda regards this as unlikely, given the risks.^[7]

By all accounts, however, Marguerite was deemed highly attractive, even sexually magnetic. In 1572, the court chronicler Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de Brantôme, after seeing her in a festival procession, described her as follows:

One had never seen anything lovelier in the world. Beside the beauty of her face and her well-turned body, she was superbly dressed and fantastically valuable jewellery adorned her attire. Her lovely face shone with faultless white skin and her hair was dressed with big white pearls, precious stones and extremely rare diamonds shaped like stars—one could say that her natural beauty and the shimmering of her jewels competed with a brilliant night sky full of stars, so to speak.^[8]

The staunchly Protestant Queen Jeanne was at first strongly opposed to the marriage on religious grounds. Catherine, however, was persistent in her calls for Jeanne to attend the French court. Writing that she wanted to see Jeanne's children, she promised not to harm them. Jeanne replied: "Pardon me if, reading that, I want to laugh, because you want to relieve me of a fear that I've never had. I've never thought that, as they say, you eat little children".^[9] When Jeanne did attend court, Catherine piled mental pressure on her. Jeanne wrote to Henry: "I am not free to talk with either the King or Madame, only the Queen Mother, who goads me [me traite á la fourche] ... You have doubtless realized that their main object, my son, is to separate you from God, and from me".^[10] Catherine played manipulatively on Jeanne's hopes for her son and finally won her agreement to the marriage 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. Huguenot writers later accused Catherine of murdering Jeanne with poisoned gloves.^[11] The wedding took place on 18 August 1572 at Notre-Dame, Paris.

A royal match between a Roman Catholic and a Huguenot was controversial and irregular. The pope refused to grant a dispensation for the marriage, and the different faiths of the bridal couple made for an unusual wedding service. For example, Henry did not attend the mass, where his place was taken by Marguerite's brother Henry, Duke of Anjou.^[12] The wedding took place in Paris on 17 August 1572. Then, 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 de' Medici and King Charles, 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, which began on the night of 23–24 August, in which thousands of Huguenots were killed in Paris and throughout France. Marguerite of Valois later described in her Memoirs the chaos and bloodshed in the Tuileries Palace, where she and her new husband were lodged. Henry himself was escorted to a room with his cousin Henry, prince of Condé, and told to choose between death and conversion to Roman Catholicism. He chose the latter. For a while, Catherine de' Medici considered having Navarre killed, but when she proposed an annulment of the Marriage to Marguerite, she replied that this was impossible because she had had sexual relations with him and was "in every sense" his wife.^[13]

Charlotte de Sauve, Henry's mistress during the early years of his marriage to Marguerite of Valois

Until 1576, Henry remained at court, siding with Marguerite and her brother François of Alençon against Henry III who became king in 1574. During this time, Henry of Navarre often ignored Marguerite and instead slept with his mistress, Charlotte de Sauve.^[14] It may have appeared, according to Henry's biographer David Buisseret, as if "the pleasure-loving and libidinous elements of his ancestry had finally gained the upper hand".^[15] A rivalry developed between Navarre 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 make the court attractive to noblemen and, it was rumoured, to act as informants. According to Marguerite'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".^[16] De Sauve may in this have been a tool of Henry III and Catherine in their attempts to split the two men. Henry of Navarre's good judgement was known to desert him when it came to women.^[17] He wrote to a friend:

This Court is the strangest place on earth. We are nearly always ready to cut each other's throats ... All the band you know wants my death on account of my love for Monsieur [Alençon] and they have forbidden my mistress to speak to me. They have such a hold on her that she does not dare look at me ... they say they will kill me, and I want to be one jump ahead of them.^[16]

Marguerite's behaviour was also the subject of scandal. On one occasion in 1575, Catherine de' Medici was heard yelling at her over rumours she had taken a lover.^[18] In a separate incident, the king sent a band of assassins to murder Marguerite's lover Bussy d’Amboise, a friend of Alençon's; but he managed to escape. As Leonie Frieda puts it, "he then decided to leave the Court immediately citing health reasons, which happened to be nothing less than the truth".^[19] In 1576, Henry accused Marguerite of improper relations with a lady-in-waiting.^[20] Marguerite claimed in her memoirs that if Catherine had not stopped him, he would have killed her. Despite their sexual infidelities, Marguerite remained politically loyal to her husband during the early period of their marriage and helped teach him the ways of the court.^[21] By 1575, however, the marriage was under strain: "I could not endure the pain that I felt," she recalled in her Memoirs, "and I stopped sleeping with the King my husband".^[21]

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, Marguerite found herself distrusted and imprisoned, suspected of complicity.^[22] Henry demanded that she be brought to him. In 1578, Catherine de' Medici travelled south to Nérac and duly delivered Marguerite to her husband. At first, the couple managed a show of harmony.^[23] In 1580 the religious war later called the "Lovers' War" broke out between the Huguenots and Henry III. Although inaccurate, this name for the war relates to a series of scandals at the royal court of Navarre and the notion that Henry of Navarre took up arms in response to jibes from the French court. At this point, he was conducting a passionate affair with a mistress known as "La Belle Fosseuse", while Marguerite was involved with one of Henry's commanders, the Vicomte de Turenne. Henry wrote to Marguerite apologising for the state of affairs between them. He expressed "extreme regret that instead of bringing you contentment ... I have brought the opposite".^[24]

In 1582, Marguerite returned to the French court without her husband, who was still 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.^[25] After a rumour that she had given birth to Champvallon's child, Henry III ordered her back to Navarre but then had her carriage searched and placed her in an abbey for questioning. According to her Memoirs, when Marguerite was interrogated, she screamed, "He complains of how I spend my time? Does he not remember that it was he who first put my foot in the stirrup!" ^[26]

Henry of Navarre at first refused to take Marguerite back unless Henry III made a public statement asserting her innocence of all his charges. Catherine de' Medici sent Pomponne de Bellièvre to Navarre to smooth things over and arrange Marguerite's return. She reminded her daughter by letter that her own conduct as a wife had been impeccable, despite all provocation.^[27] In other words, she spelled out to Marguerite that a royal wife must tolerate her husband's affairs without complaint. Marguerite 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, left her husband heir presumptive to the French throne. Henry was advised by his closest friend Philippe Duplessis-Mornay that it was now "time to make love to France".^[28]

Henry's mistress Diane d'Andouins, Countess of Graumont, was nicknamed "La Belle Corisande".

In 1585, Henry became engaged in a passionate love affair with a widow called Diane d'Andouins, nicknamed "La Belle Corisande". Marguerite found it impossible to tolerate this particular lover of Henry's because d'Andouins was pressing Henry to repudiate Marguerite so that she could replace her as Queen of Navarre. After attempting to poison Henry, she shot at him with a pistol but missed.^[29] To escape his revenge, she fled Navarre again, this time to her property at Agen. There she wrote to her mother begging for money. Catherine sent her enough "to put food on her table".^[29]

Marguerite attempted to reinforce the fortifications, raise troops, and ally with the Catholic League against her husband. Before long, however, she was driven out by the officials and people of Agen.^[29] Retreating to her lofty and impregnable fortress of Carlat, and refusing her mother's pleas that she move to a royal manor,^[30] she soon took a lover called d’Aubiac. Catherine now insisted that Henry III arrest "this insufferable torment" and act "before she brings shame on us again".^[31] On 13 October 1586, therefore, the king had Marguerite removed from Carlat and locked up in the Château d’Usson. D'Aubiac was executed, though not, despite Catherine’s wish,^[32] in front of Marguerite.^[33] Catherine cut Marguerite out of her will. Marguerite never saw her mother or brother again. Marguerite assumed that she was going to die and even employed a food taster at the château. In a "farewell" letter to her mother, she asked that after her execution a post-mortem be held to prove that she was not, as rumour had it, pregnant with d'Aubiac's child. However, her luck took a turn for the better when her gaoler, the Marquis de Canillac, whom she was rumoured to have seduced, switched from the royal side in the civil war to that of the Catholic League and released her in early 1587. Her freedom would have suited the League, for whom her continued existence guaranteed that Henry of Navarre would remain without an heir.^[34]

[edit] Mistresses to 1600

Gabrielle d'Estrées came closest of all Henry's mistresses to marrying him.

Henry IV was an energetic soldier and spent long periods at war. After such campaigns, he often rewarded himself with bouts of idle pleasure, hunting during the day, gambling in the evening, and womanising at night. His partner in these leisure pursuits was often the banker Sébastien Zamet, who lent him vast sums of money and made his house available to Henry for dalliances. One consequence of Henry's philandering was a proneness to venereal diseases. In October 1598, he nearly died from an infection of the bladder, and an attack of gonorrhoea a few weeks later briefly brought on a heart problem.^[35] On 6 November, he wrote to the Duke of Sully that the illness "has made me very depressed [tout chagrin], and I do everything that my doctors recommend, so keen am I to get better".^[36]

Henry's sexual appetite, said to have been insatiable,^[37] was often indiscriminate, but he always recognised a particular mistress as his first lady. One such was Gabrielle d'Estrées, whom Henry met in 1590 at Cœuvres in 1590 and made Duchess of Beaufort. The relationship was castigated by Henry's enemies in the church, particularly by the Capuchins. ^[38] On one visit to her lodgings near the Louvre, Henry was stabbed in the face by a Jesuit law student called Jean Chastel, a would-be assassin who broke one of his teeth.^[39] In 1594, she bore Henry a son, César, who was legitimised in 1596. D'Estrées had gradually risen in prominence, and she acted as Henry's hostess for diplomatic occasions, such as the surrender talks with Charles of Lorraine, Duke of Mayenne, in 1596. In October of that year, an Italian observer reported that "among the French nobility people begin to expect that the king intends to name as his successor the natural son born of Gabrielle".^[40] Henry's advisers were opposed to this plan, which would guarantee a succession war, but for a while Henry seemed determined.^[41] When the last of the Catholic League rebels, Philippe Emmanuel, Duke of Mercoeur, surrendered in 1598, Henry and Gabrielle's son, César, was promised in marriage to Mercoeur's daughter, though both were small children.^[42] The chronicler Pierre de L'Estoile records an image of D'Estrées' status at this time: "The duchess of Beaufort [was] seated in a chair, and Madame de Guise brought her the various dishes with great ceremony. Gabrielle took what she most liked with one hand, and gave her other to be kissed by the king, who was near her".^[43]

By early 1599, Henry's marriage to Marguerite of Valois looked likely to be annulled at last, and, at the age of forty-six and still without a legitimate heir, Henry felt free to propose to Gabrielle d'Estrées.^[44] On Mardi Gras, Henry placed on his mistress's finger the ring with which he had "married" France at his coronation in 1593.^[45] During Holy Week, however, Gabrielle, who was pregnant at the time, fell ill, and by Holy Saturday, to the relief of many in France, she was dead. Rumours arose that she had been poisoned, but in fact she died from an aborted pregnancy. Though Henry was grief-stricken, he quickly realised his fiancée's death had saved him from disaster: his plan to declare his two sons by d'Estrées heirs to the throne would have precipitated a major political crisis. The English agent Edmondes reported:

And the King himselfe doth freelie confesse it, that albeit her death is a great grief unto him, in regard that he did so dearlie love her, and intending as he acknowledgeth to have married her, but that God having directlie manifested that he would not suffer him to fall into the danger of so great an error and inconvenience to himselfe and to his state, that he will not fail to make a lesson thereof.^[46]

Henry provided Gabrielle d'Estrées with a grand funeral and then launched himself into a sustained spree of womanising. Sir Henry Neville, the English ambassador, reported that Henry was spending time "in secret manner at Zamet's house", where "la belle garce Claude" was known to entertain, and that he was avidly courting Henriette d'Entragues. Royal accounts record that Henry was soon making large payments to "Mademoiselle d'Entragues", as well as to "Mademoiselle des Fossez". D'Entragues quickly replaced D’Estrées as Henry's principal mistress. She also extracted from him, in Neville's words, "100,000 crowns in ready money and an yearly pension" as proof of his commitment.^[47] At about the same time, Henry began affairs with Marie Babou de la Bourdaisire, and with two wives of Paris parlement members, madames Quélin and Potier.^[37]

[edit] Marie de' Medici

In October 1599, the parlement of Paris officially petitioned that Henry marry a worthy princess. Henry took note, and he began considering candidates from several foreign states. According to Sully, however, he ruled out a German wife, saying it would feel like going to bed with a wine-barrel.^[37] Henry was keenest on Maria de' Medici, niece of Ferdinando I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and daughter of the previous duke, Francesco I de' Medici. What attracted him to Maria in particular was her enormous wealth.^[37]

Henry's second wife, Marie de' Medici. Ralph Winwood, described her as "of a comely stature", whose beauty was without artifice.^[48]

On 17 December 1599, the Archbishop of Arles pronounced the annulment of Henry's marriage to Marguerite of Valois.^[49] The marriage contract was signed in April 1600, with Henry pledged a huge dowry of 600,000 écus, part of which was subtracted to pay his debts to Ferdinando.^[37] Henry played his part by sending a series of letters to Maria proclaiming his undying devotion, though he was also sending love letters to Henriette d'Entragues saying, for example, that he wanted to kiss her a million times.^[50] A proxy marriage took place in Florence in October 1600, and Maria—known in France as Marie—sailed in great pomp for Marseille, where she disembarked on 3 November.^[50] Henry, who had been on campaign in Savoy, rode to meet her at Lyon. He found her at supper and afterwards visited her in her chamber. According to Ralph Winwood, secretary to Sir Henry Neville:

She met him at the door, and offered to kneel down, but he took her in his arms, where he held her embraced a long time ... He doth profess to the World the great Contentment he finds in her, how that for her Beauty, her sweet and pleasing carrriage, her gracious behaviour, she doth surpass the relation which hath been made of her, and the Expectation which he thereby conceived.^[51]

The couple underwent a second marriage ceremony in Lyon; and Marie finally reached Paris on 7 February, by which time she was pregnant.^[52] She found her new home, the Louvre so shabby that at first she thought Henry was playing a joke on her. She gave birth to a son, Louis, at the Palace of Fontainebleau on 7 September 1601, to the delight of Henry, who had rushed from military duties to her bedside to be, as he put it, one of her midwives.^[53] As soon as Henry was told that the child was a boy, he allowed two hundred courtiers to enter the chamber to share the excitement. The baby was fed a spoonful of wine and handed over to the care of a governess, Baroness Monglat, and to the physician Jean Héroard, author of a book on the bone structure of horses.^[54]According to Winwood, the baby was a "strong and a goodly prince, and doth promise long life".^[55] The birth of a dauphin, as an heir to the French throne was know, was celebrated throughout France with bonfires and rejoicing.^[56]

Marie believed that having borne a son, she "would begin to be a queen". However, a few weeks later, Henrietta D'Entragues also gave birth to a son,^[57] and Henry not only made as much fuss over this baby but remarked that he was better-looking, not dark and fat like Louis and the Medici.^[55] In the words of biographer David Buisseret, "the royal couple was well embarked upon nine years of mutual recrimination and misunderstandings, in which the fault plainly lay with the king".^[55]

Henry had made Marie's position clear to her from the first. When she pressed him to accept the decrees of the Council of Trent, he told her to look after herself and keep out of state business.^[58] Shortly after Marie's arrival in Paris, Henry had introduced Henriette d'Entragues to her, reportedly pushing Henriette further towards the gound when her curtsey was not low enough. Henry housed this mistress close to the Louvre and was seen dining with wife and d'Entragues together. Marie also soon had to cope with a second public mistress of Henry's, La Boidissière, whom he began courting during the first summer of the marriage, as well as with his continued visits to Zamet's house for services provided by "la belle garce Claude". In the next nine years, Marie bore Henry six children; but he also sired five more children by d'Entragues, Jacqueline du Beuil, and Charlotte des Essarts.^[59] Nonetheless, Henry often wrote affectionate letters to Marie and treated her in other ways with respect.^[53]

Henriette d'Entragues believed that Henry had legally promised to marry her and that his children by the queen were therefore bastards.

Henry's devotion to Henriette d'Entragues was tested during the revolt of Marshal Biron in 1602, in which her half-brother, Charles, Count of Auvergne, was involved and she was compromised. Though Biron was executed, Henry released Auverne to please Henriette. She herself was at the heart of a Spanish-backed plot of 1604 to set up her son by the king as heir to the throne.^[60] Her father, the sieur d'Entragues, was involved in this plot, along with, again, as her half-brother. Henriette d'Entragues was sentenced to confinement in a convent, but Henry was moved to spare her even that, and he allowed her to retire to her estate at Verneuil.^[61]

Henriette d'Entragues never reconciled herself to Henry's marriage, and she drove Marie to tears by calling her his "fat banker", claiming her own children were his legitimate heirs, and branding the dauphin a bastard.^[62] She may have continued to plot against the king despite his clemency over the 1604 plot. According to a government report of 1616, a former companion of d'Entragues, Mlle d'Escoman, had claimed in 1611 that d'Entragues had met Ravaillac, Henry's assassin of 1610; however, this evidence is compromised by the fact that Mlle d'Escoman was in prison on another charge at the time she made this accusation.^[63]

The dauphin, Louis, turned out to be a difficult and temperamental child, and for this some historians have blamed his parents and the circumstances of his upbringing.^[64] He was raised just outside Paris at the château of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, not only with Marie's other children by Henry but, as Henry insisted, with several children by Henry's mistresses.^[65] Henry always seemed to get his mistresses pregnant at the same time as Marie. Just as Marie was in constant competition with henry's mistresses, so her children were forced to compete with his mistresses' children for his affection.^[66] the fact Henry's three children by Gabrielle d'Estrées were older than the heir to the throne caused particular problems. César and Alexandre were later to rebel against Louis when he was king.

Louis's stubbornness has been noted as a characteristic of his father, but he may have inherited his temper tantrums from his mother, who often gave Henry tongue-lashings. Although Marie has been accused of lacking affection for her children, a study of her letters reveals otherwise, though Marie was more of a disciplinarian than Henry with the children. She wrote to the dauphin's governess, for example, asking her to avoid whippings when the weather was hot and to beat Louis only "with such caution that the anger he might feel would not cause any illness".^[67] On another occasion, however, she reprimanded her middle daughter, Chrétienne, for being ill, blaming her for not taking the advice of her doctors.^[68] Marie also took on the role of educating the children in practical matters, such as etiquette.^[69] After Henry's assassination in 1610, she became regent of France and retained influence over Louis XIII until he finally rejected her in 1617.

Henry's last passion had been for Charlotte of Montmorency, the fifteen-year-old wife of Henry, Prince of Condé, First Prince of the Blood. The king had arranged her marriage to Condé for his own convenience, so that he could make love to her himself. To escape from this predicament, the couple fled to Brussels. The king was enraged and threatened to march into Flanders with an army unless the Habsburg governors returned Condé and his wife at once. At the time, Henry was also threatening war with the Habsburgs over the succession to Jülich-Cleves-Berg, so historians are unsure how vital Charlotte's return was in itself as a reason for war. Condé continued to provoke Henry from Flanders: when asked to drink to the queen of France, he replied that it seemed there was more than one queen of France, maybe as many as four or five.^[70]

[edit] Children

[edit] Legitimate children

On 18 August 1572 he married Marguerite de Valois, annulled in 1599, with no children. He subsequently married Marie de' Medici on December 17, 1600. There were six children from this marriage:

[edit] Illegitimate children

By Gabrielle d'Estrée:

By Catherine Henriette de Balzac d'Entragues, Marquise de Verneuil:

By Jacqueline de Bueil, Countess de Moret (1580-1651):

By Charlotte des Essarts, Countess de Romorantin:

[edit] Notes

1. ^ Literally "the green gallant", but untranslatable, the nickname refers to Henry's "playboy" reputation.
2. ^ ^{a b c} Buisseret, 4.
3. ^ Buisseret, 5.
4. ^ Knecht, Catherine de' Medici, 254–55.
5. ^ Frieda, 256.
6. ^ Frieda, 257; Knecht, Catherine de' Medici, 135.
7. ^ Frieda, 256–57.
8. ^ Quoted in Frieda, 280.
9. ^ Bryson, 282.
10. ^ Quoted by Knecht, Catherine de' Medici, 148–49.
11. ^ Knecht, Catherine de' Medici, 151. An autopsy revealed tuberculosis and an abscess.
12. ^ Knecht, Catherine de' Medici, 153.
13. ^ Frieda, 380.
14. ^ Buisseret, 9.
15. ^ Buisseret, 8.
16. ^ ^{a b} Quoted in Frieda, 379.
17. ^ Frieda, 379.
18. ^ Frieda, 378.
19. ^ Frieda, 378–379.
20. ^ Frieda, 384.
21. ^ ^{a b} Frieda, 380.
22. ^ Frieda, 384–85.
23. ^ Frieda, 392–93.
24. ^ Frieda, 398.
25. ^ Frieda, 403.
26. ^ Frieda, 404.
27. ^ Knecht, Catherine de' Medici, 215–16.
28. ^ Frieda, 410.
29. ^ ^{a b c} Frieda, 415.
30. ^ She wrote to Catherine that she was not prepared to fall back "into the hands of those that wished to take my life, my goods and my honour". Frieda, 416.
31. ^ Frieda, 416.
32. ^ Henry III wrote to his secretary Villeroy: "The Queen my mother wishes me to hang Obyac [sic] in the presence of this miserable creature [Margot] in the courtyard of the Château d'Usson". Frieda, 416.
33. ^ Frieda, 41; Knecht, Catherine de' Medici, 254–55.
34. ^ Frieda, 417.
35. ^ Buisseret, 76.
36. ^ Quoted in Buisseret, 76.
37. ^ ^{a b c d e} Buisseret, 79.
38. ^ Mousnier, 225.
39. ^ Mousnier, 218.
40. ^ Buisseret, 64.
41. ^ In March 1597, the Cardinal of Florence reported that "nobody dares to speak to him about it". Buisseret, 64.
42. ^ As an English report of the negotiations put it, "Many a good Frenchman laughed, to see a couple of puppies, that knew not the difference between a contract and a botterfly, should be putt together with such an assembly [sic]". Buisseret, 69.
43. ^ Quoted in Buisseret, 75.
44. ^ Buisseret, 77. By 1593, when Henry first proposed an annulment of his marriage, he had not seen Queen Marguerite for eleven years. Although Marguerite was agreeable, the annulment was not granted until six years later.
45. ^ Buisseret, 77.
46. ^ Quoted in Buisseret, 78.
47. ^ Buisseret, 78–79.
48. ^ Buisseret, 86–87.
49. ^ Buisseret, 79. The grounds were closeness of kin; that Marguerite's father, Henry II, had been Henry's godfather; and that Catherine de' Medici had forced Marguerite into the marriage against her will.
50. ^ ^{a b} Buisseret, 86.
51. ^ Quoted in Buisseret, 87.
52. ^ Buisseret, 87.
53. ^ ^{a b} Buisseret, 108–9.
54. ^ Moote, 19–20.
55. ^ ^{a b c} Buisseret, 109.
56. ^ Moote, 20.
57. ^ Gaston Henri, Duc de Verneuil
58. ^ Buisseret, 108. Among other losses to the Gallican Church, this would have meant Henry giving up the right to appoint his own bishops.
59. ^ Mousnier, 186.
60. ^ Mousnier, 126. Henriette d'Entragues possessed a letter from Henry promising to marry her if she bore him a son; and this document was used by her and her ambitious family to challenge his marriage to Marie. They hoped to convince the pope to annul the marriage, rendering Prince Louis illegitimate.
61. ^ Buisseret, 125–26. He also released Henriette's father and merely imprisoned her half-brother, though both had been sentenced to death for lèse-majesté.
62. ^ Moote, 29.
63. ^ "It is hard to know how much of her story to believe." Mousnier, 47–48.
64. ^ Moote, 21.
65. ^ Moote, 22.
66. ^ Moote, 28.
67. ^ Moote, 27.
68. ^ Moote, 27–28.
69. ^ Moote, 26–27.
70. ^ Buisseret, 173–74.
71. ^ Moote, 190–91.

[edit] Bibliography

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