‘Vive Henri Quatre
Vive ce roi vaillant
Ce diable-à-quatre
Qui eut le triple talent
De boire et de battre
Et d’être vert galant.’
song of the French Royalists1
Each nation has a hero king from whose legend a good deal can be learnt about his fellow countrymen. Spaniards admire Philip II, and the Germans Frederick Barbarossa, while England’s favourite sovereign is undoubtedly Elizabeth I, with her insular blend of courage and compromise, grandeur and double dealing. Most foreigners regard Louis XIV as France’s archetypal monarch but the French themselves prefer Henri IV; Louis epitomizes France, Henri Frenchmen. For no ruler in history can rival his achievement in embodying his people’s virtues and vices in the way they themselves wish to see them. The Bourbons are frequently credited with bigotry, arrogance and lack of imagination, yet the first King produced by their branch of the Capetian house had none of these failings. He was nevertheless a hero to his own dynasty and until the final decline of French royalism remained its ideal of the perfect ruler. It is only justice that a family whose name has been made synonymous with obscurantism should be given credit for a founder remarkable above all else for humanity.
The two great hero myths of modern French history are those of Henri de Bourbon and Napoleon Bonaparte. In England the latter’s cult is considerable, but that of Henri IV is little appreciated, though acquaintance with him and his legend is no less vital for an understanding of modern France: during an election address in 1969 President Pompidou named Henri IV as his favourite monarch and many Frenchmen would agree with him. The King and the Emperor were both soldiers, even if most of Henri’s battles were fought at home in civil wars, while Napoleon’s victories were won abroad. Each saved and rebuilt a ruined country torn to pieces by rival ideologies, leaving a reconstruction which long outlived them, Henri’s by a hundred and eighty years and Napoleon’s until the present day. Finally, each was a superb leader in both peace and war, idolized by the French people as well as by their troops. However, this book is not a comparison of two great men or of two great legends. Its purpose is first to show that the old France which was destroyed in 1789, and yet which remains a part of the national heritage, had a hero no less inspiring than the one who built the new France after the Revolution, and to give some account of the reality behind the legend.
Henri IV was not only the grandfather of Louis XIV, creator of the splendours of Versailles but also of one of history’s greatest ironies, of a King who was in spirit a typical Frenchman with typically French vices and virtues but who sat on the English throne and encouraged his subjects to emerge from a particularly sanctimonious phase. Charles II cannot be understood without some knowledge of this grandfather whom he so much resembled. As young men both faced the gloomiest adversity. Prisoners of a hostile court, Henri at the Louvre, Charles at Holyrood, each dissembled with sublime hypocrisy while as youthful leaders of broken, hunted oppositions they endured crushing reverses with unshakeable optimism. They shared the same insatiable appetite for women and the same charm of manner. It is curious that so few historians have commented on the striking affinities between the English wit and the French hero.
In France biographies and romances of Henri IV proliferate but there are few English studies. Yet almost every year a new life of Louis XIV is published in London and meets an avid reception; his far more attractive grandfather, a King who over the centuries has won the admiration of such demanding critics as Montaigne, Voltaire and Mme de Stael, is only known from passing references in general histories. Luckily Henri lived in an articulate age which left an abundance of memoirs of campaign and court life, by Brantôme, d’Aubigné, L’Estoile, Sully, Bassompierre and many others including Henri’s mother and his wife. Most valuable of all, a great mass of his correspondence survives. There are also several contemporary or near contemporary histories, like the biography by Bishop Péréfixe. So it is possible to see Henri through the eyes of his own world.
In addition there are English contemporary sources which have not received sufficient attention. French biographers of Henri IV turn to Italy or Spain when consulting foreign authorities while almost all the modern English studies have been based on secondary material. As this book is intended for English or American readers I have employed English primary sources as much as possible because they possess the very real merit of seeing Henri and his kingdom as Anglo-Saxons of the time saw them. For similar reasons I have also made use of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English translations of primary French works, such as Montaigne, Péréfixe and Sully, after checking them against the original French text.
Lastly, the ecumenical climate of recent years has now made it possible even for Catholics to understand something of the attraction of French Calvinism in the sixteenth century. Writing as a Catholic brought up in England and therefore to admire the diehard Papists of the Elizabethan era, one feels a natural sympathy with the Huguenots who so strongly resembled them in stubborn loyalty to an outlawed creed. Further, this new spirit makes it easier to realize that ‘Politiques’ were not necessarily cynical opportunists ready to betray their co-religionists.
All modern historians of Henri IV try to disentangle the man from his legend. He was named ‘Henri le Grand’ even in his own lifetime, a soubriquet which persisted into the eighteenth century when his cult achieved epic status with Voltaire’s Henriade. In so far as the Ancien Régime had an anthem to drown the Marseillaise it was the old song of Vive Henri Quatre, popular among French monarchists until the 1914 War. But the legend did not stem merely from the Bourbons’ need of a dynastic beau ideal. During his campaigns soldiers had come to give this laughing, swaggering leader in tattered clothes who joked with them and who shared their hardships, the same doglike devotion which the Grande Armée gave Napoleon. And there were other roots far deeper; in the eighteenth century it was noted that Henri IV was the one King whose memory was kept green by the common people of France, that they believed he had genuinely cared for them, telling tales of how he had wished for each peasant to have ‘une poule au pot tous les dimanches’. In consequence ‘le bon roi Henri’ became a folk hero; this King was a rough mountaineer who chewed cloves of garlic like fruit so that his breath felled an ox at twenty paces, who killed bears with a knife, who ate and drank enough for ten, who fought like a lion and whose virility was, of course, superhuman. Even now it is le Vert Galant’s countless love affairs which ensure the cult’s survival in a modern industrial France. Obviously no human being could have been quite like this and Henri was certainly neither so great, nor so paternal, nor so charming. Yet one must beware of being over sceptical, of demolishing truth as well as fiction. Properly used, his legend can be of vital assistance in understanding Henri for it reflects his personality to a remarkable extent besides preserving much of the impression which he left on his contemporaries.
It may be thought that certain chapters in this book consider too fully the almost perennial Wars of Religion, the ever shifting power groupings and the incessant intrigues which filled the first half of his life. But a knowledge of these, even during the early years when he was too young to take part, is indispensable for an understanding of his motives and his methods, and for a just assessment of his development as a statesman. However, as a seventeenth-century biographer admitted: ‘It would be a Task mighty painful and without end, to him who aims to express everything that’s Brave in the Life of Henry the Great.’2
Finally, it would be pleasant to think that acquaintance with Henri’s character might increase English understanding of the French. Charles II, that supremely Gallic figure, now rivals Queen Elizabeth in popular affection and if the English can like him they can like his grandfather, whom Mme de Stael once called ‘the most French of French Kings’. After the débâcle of the Second World War Marshal Pétain’s aide and lifelong friend who had been with him since Verdun told the tragic old man why he had betrayed France and himself— ‘mon maréchal, vous avez trop aimé les français, pas assez la France.’ Other French rulers, Kings and Presidents, have gone to the opposite extreme, loving France as a glorious abstraction yet ignoring her people. Henri IV was the only one who really loved both and herein lies his importance—he was France and he was all Frenchmen too.