Henry IV of France's wives and mistresses
Both Henry (1553–1610) and his first wife Margaret 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.
[1] The couple also differed over religion: Jeanne became a staunch Huguenot, whereas Antoine wavered, for political reasons, between the Catholicism of his birth and the faith of his wife.
[2] After the signature of the peace of Saint-Germain, Catherine de' Medici, the powerful mother of King Charles IX, was convinced by François of Montmorency to marry her daughter Margaret with Henry.
[4] Catherine, who believed in dynastic marriage as a potent political tool, aimed to unite the interests of the Valois and the Bourbons, and create harmony between Catholics and Huguenots in the reign of France.
By all accounts, Margaret of Valois was deemed highly attractive, even sexually magnetic: "The beauty of that princess is more divine than human, she is made to damn and ruin men rather than to save them", said about her Don John of Austria came to court just to see her.
[7] Although certainly after the wedding, Margaret was unfaithful to her husband, many of the extramarital adventures are the result of pamphlets that have had to politically discredit her and her family: the most famous was Le Divorce Satyrique (1607), who described her as a nymphomaniac.
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.
[15] After the massacre, the Queen-Mother proposed to her daughter that the marriage be annulled, but Margaret replied that this was impossible because she had already had sexual relations with Henry and was "in every sense" his wife.
[17] It appeared, in the words of Henry's biographer David Buisseret, as if "the pleasure-loving and libidinous elements of his ancestry had finally gained the upper hand".
According to Margaret'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".
In a separate incident, the king sent a band of assassins to murder Margaret's lover Bussy d'Amboise, a friend of Alençon's, who managed to escape.
As Catherine's biographer Leonie Frieda puts it: "he then decided to leave the Court immediately citing health reasons, which happened to be nothing less than the truth".
Despite their sexual infidelities, Margaret remained politically loyal to her husband during the early period of their marriage and helped him negotiate the complexities of the court.
At this point, he was conducting a passionate affair with a mistress known as "La Belle Fosseuse", while Margaret was involved with one of his own commanders, the Vicomte de Turenne.
After a rumour that she had borne Champvallon a child, Henry III ordered her back to Navarre and then had her carriage searched and detained her in an abbey for questioning.
[19] Margaret 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 made her husband heir presumptive to the French throne.
Retreating to her lofty and impregnable fortress of Carlat, and refusing her mother's pleas that she move to a royal manor, she there took a lover called d'Aubiac.
Her gaoler, the Marquis de Canillac, whom she was rumoured to have seduced, suddenly switched from the royal side in the civil war to that of the Catholic League and released her in early 1587.
His companion in these leisure pursuits was often the banker Sébastien Zamet, who lent him vast sums of money and made his house available to the king for dalliances.
[24] On one occasion, arriving at her apartments near the Louvre, Henry was stabbed in the face by a Jesuit would-be-assassin called Jean Chastel, who slashed his mouth and broke one of his teeth.
Henry's duchess had gradually risen in prominence, and she acted as her royal lover's hostess for diplomatic occasions, such as the surrender talks with the rebel 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".
[32] Though grief-stricken, Henry grasped that 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.
[34] At about the same time, Henry began affairs with Marie Babou de la Bourdaisière and with two wives of Paris parlement members, madames Quélin and Potier.
[k] The Medici marriage contract was signed in April 1600, pledging a huge dowry of 600,000 écus, part of which was subtracted to pay Henry's debts to Ferdinando.
He visited her afterwards in her chamber; according to Ralph Winwood, secretary to English ambassador 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 ...
She gave birth to a son, Louis, at the Palace of Fontainebleau on 27 September 1601, to the delight of Henry, who had rushed from military duties to her bedside to serve, he joked, as one of her midwives.
[42] 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".
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".
