After the death of Henri III in August 1589, Dombes and his father Montpensier transferred their loyalty to the Protestant king of Navarre who continued the royalist war on the ligue.

He succeeded in securing Honfleur for the royalist cause, however the majority of Normandie was brought into the royal fold by the buying off of its governor Admiral Villars.

His seniority in the line of succession ensured him a place on the royal council, even if Henri had a low opinion of his intelligence.

[4] Montpensier was promised the prospect of a marriage to king Henri IV's sister Catherine de Bourbon.

[9] Together they would have the following issue:[2] In 1584, Henri III's brother Alençon died, and in the absence of a son his heir became his distant Protestant cousin the king of Navarre.

[11] In the wake of the Day of the Barricades, during which the ligue seized Paris, the royal favourite the duc d'Épernon was disgraced as a concession to the Parisian ligueurs.

[15] In his capacity as governor in Auvergne, he took charge of the royalist war effort in the province against the ligue, aiming to drive them from the area.

He quickly set about a campaign of letter writing to have his governate returned to him, however Henri was uninterested in humouring these requests, focused as he was on his plans to besiege ligueur held Paris.

[19] Dombes responded with a propaganda offensive, writing to the provincial Estates of Bretagne, denouncing the 'tyranny of the Spanish'.

[1] While loyal to the royalist cause, he warned Henri that if he did not fulfil the promise he had made to convert to Catholicism, he and the other Catholic Bourbon princes would have little choice but to defect to the ligue for the 'preservation of their dynastic rights'.

Alongside the king for this momentous occasion were the various royalist princes and dukes: Conti, Piney, Retz, Ventadour and Montpensier.

[23] Of the three royal princes present, Montpensier was third in precedence behind Conti and Soissons, who were closer in the laws of primogeniture succession.

[24] Though governor of Normandie, Montpensier still lacked control of the most important city of his province, that of Rouen, which was held by the ligue.

[25] Denied the prospect of securing Rouen, Montpensier had to satisfy himself with bringing Honfleur back into the control of the crown.

One package was prepared by the king's minister Sully and proposed various quick expedients to secure a cash flow, the other was devised by Bellièvre, and was constituted of a wide scale austerity program, with large restructuring of France's finances.

[27] In the end, the notables agreed to the establishment of a new tax, known as the pancarte which appropriated 1/20th of the revenue of goods, and a year long suspension of royal wages.