654 HENRY IV. OF FRANCE 



HENRY OF HUNTINGDON 



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 Ivrv. In 1593 

 the assembly or the States-general, by rejecting the 

 pretensions of Philip II., and insisting on the in- 

 tegrity 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 

 Rosiiy, afterwards Due de Sully (q.v. ), formally 

 professed himself a inember of the Church of Rome. 

 The ceremony of his recantation of Protestantism, 

 which was celebrated witli 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 other- 

 wise favourable to the French king ; but, import- 

 ant 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 disorgan- 

 ised 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 pro- 

 prietors, who, in the absence of a general adminis- 

 trative vigilance, arrogated almost sovereign power 

 to themselves, raising taxes and exacting com- 

 pulsory 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 corona- 

 tion 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 Ravail- 

 lac. 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 Ravaillac'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 licentious- 

 ness 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'Estrees 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 maybe consulted: Anquetil, Esprit de la Ligue; 

 Petitot's Collection of Memoires ; De la Saussaye, Histoire 

 de Blois ; Documents de I' Hist, de France; Matthieu, 

 Hist, de Henri IV. ; Memoirs and Letters of Sully, De- 

 Thou, D'Aubigne, Pasq\iier, Duplessis-Mornay ; Cape- 

 figue, Hist, de la Rvjorme et de la Ligue ; Perefixe, Hist, 

 de Henri IV. ; M. W. Freer, History of the Reign of Henry 

 IV. (6 vols. 1860-63); H. de la Ferriere's Henri IV. 

 (1890); Bingham's Marriages of the Bourbons (1889); 

 and monographs by *. F. Willert ( 1893 ) and E. T. Blair 

 (Phila. 1894). 



Henry V. OF FRANCE. See CHAMBORD. 



Henry, surnamed THE NAVIGATOR (Dom 

 Henrique el Navegador), a famous Portuguese 

 prince, the fourth son of Joao I., king of Portugal, 

 was born at Oporto in 1394, and first distinguished 

 himself at the conquest of Ceuta in 1415. After 

 the death of his father he took up his residence at 

 the town of Sagres, in Algarve, near Cape St Vin- 

 cent ; and while prosecuting the war against the 

 Moors of Africa, his sailors reached parts of the 

 ocean heretofore unvisited and unknown. The 

 grand ambition of Henry was the discovery of un- 

 known regions of the world. At Sagres he erected 

 an observatory, to which he attached a school for 

 the instruction of youthful scions of the nobility in 

 the sciences necessary to navigation. Subsequently 

 he despatched some of his pupils on voyages of dis- 

 covery, which resulted at last in the discovery of 

 the Madeira Islands in 1418. Henry's thoughts 

 were now directed towards the auriferous coasts of 

 Guinea, of which he had heard from the Moors ; 

 and in 1433 one of his mariners sailed round Cape 

 Nun, until then regarded as the farthest point of 

 the earth, and took possession of the coasts as far 

 south as Cape Bojador. Next year Henry sent out 

 a larger ship, which reached a point 120 miles 

 beyond Cape Bojador ; and at last, in 1440, Cape 

 Blanco was reached. Up to this period the prince 

 had borne all the expense of these voyages himself ; 

 henceforth, self-supporting societies were formed 

 under his patronage and guidance, and what had 

 formerly been the affair of a single individual now 

 became the passion of a whole nation. But Henry 

 did not slack personally in his efforts. In 1446 his 

 captain, Nuno Tristam, doubled Cape Verd in 

 Senegambia, and in 1448 Gonzalez Vallo discovered 

 three of the Azores. Henry died in 1460. A great 

 national celebration of his memory took place in 

 Portugal in 1894. Henry's mother was the English 

 Philippa, daughter of John of Gaunt. 



See works by Wappaus (Gott. 1842) and De Veer 

 ( Konigsb. 1864 ) ; the Life and the Discoveries of Henry, 

 both by Major (1868 and 1877); and a short work by 

 Raymond Beazley ( 1895 ). 



Henry of Huntingdon, English chronicler, 

 was brought up in the household of the Bishop of 

 Lincoln, and about 1120 became Archdeacon of 

 Huntingdon. His chef d'ceuvre is the Historic^ 



