Under the Salic law, the head of the House of Bourbon, as the senior representative of the senior-surviving branch of the Capetian dynasty (first prince of the blood), became King of France as Henry IV.

[2] Bourbon monarchs then united to France the part of the Kingdom of Navarre north of the Pyrenees, which Henry's father had acquired by marriage in 1555, ruling both until the 1792 overthrow of the monarchy during the French Revolution.

All legitimate, living members of the House of Bourbon, including its cadet branches, are direct agnatic descendants of Henry IV through his son Louis XIII of France.

That same year Catherine de' Medici, mother of King Charles IX of France, arranged for the marriage of her daughter, Margaret of Valois, to Henry, ostensibly to advance peace between Catholics and Huguenots.

Extended civil war erupted again in 1584, when François, Duke of Anjou, younger brother of King Henry III of France, died, leaving Navarre next in line for the throne.

Henry won a crucial victory at Ivry on 14 March 1590 and, following the death of the Cardinal the same year, the forces of the League lacked an obvious Catholic candidate for the throne and divided into various factions.

Henry's marriage to Margaret, which had produced no heir, was annulled in 1599 and he married Marie de' Medici, niece of the grand duke of Tuscany.

To deal with the financial troubles of France, Louis summoned the Estates General in 1614; this would be the last time that body met until the eve of the French Revolution.

In 1617, Louis conspired with Charles d'Albert, duc de Luynes to dispense with her influence, having her favorite Concino Concini assassinated on 26 April of that year.

After some years of weak government by Louis's favorites, the King made Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal Richelieu, a former protégé of his mother, the chief minister of France in 1624.

He established the role of intendants, non-noble men whose arbitrary powers of administration were granted (and revocable) by the monarch, superseding many of the traditional duties and privileges of the noble governors.

Their lacking a national bank led to them taking short-term loans, and ordering financial agents to make payments in advance or in excess of tax revenues collected.

In that year the Treaty of the Pyrenees was signed signifying a major shift in power, France had replaced Spain as the dominant state in Europe.

Louis XIV began to persecute Protestants, undoing the religious tolerance established by his grandfather Henry IV, culminating in his revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685.

[2] This Régence was seen as a period of greater individual expression, manifested in secular, artistic, literary and colonial activity, in contrast to the austere latter years of Louis XIV's reign.

Bourbon's motive appears to have been a desire to produce an heir as soon as possible so as to reduce the chances of a succession dispute between Philip V and the Duke of Orléans in the event of the sickly king's death.

Next came the War of the Austrian Succession in 1740 in which France supported King Frederick II of Prussia against Maria Theresa, Archduchess of Austria and Queen of Hungary.

Shortly after Fleury's death in 1745 Louis was influenced by his mistress the Marquise de Pompadour to reverse the policy of France in 1756 by creating an alliance with Austria against Prussia in the Seven Years' War.

Louis granted a constitution on 14 June 1814 to appease the liberals, but the ultra-royalist party, led by his brother, Charles, continued to influence his reign.

A temporary Third Republic was established, while monarchists waited for the comte de Chambord to die and for the succession to pass to Prince Philippe, Count of Paris, who was willing to accept the tricolour.

However, King Charles II of Spain, dying without issue, willed the throne to his grand-nephew the Duke of Anjou, who was the younger grandson of his eldest sister Marie-Thérèse, who had married Louis XIV.

In the Treaty of The Hague, signed on 17 February 1720, Philip renounced his conquests of Sardinia and Sicily, but he assured the ascension of his eldest son by Elisabeth to the Duchy of Parma upon the reigning duke's death.

When the War of the Polish Succession began in 1733, Philip and Elisabeth saw another opportunity to advance the claims of their sons and recover at least part of the former possessions of the Spanish crown on the Italian peninsula.

At the conclusion of peace on 13 November 1738, control of Parma and Piacenza was ceded to Austria, which had occupied the duchies but was now forced to recognise Charles as king of Naples and Sicily.

Charles revived the Family Compact with France on 15 August 1761 and joined in the Seven Years' War against Britain in 1762; the reformist policies he had espoused in Naples were pursued with similar energy in Spain, where he completely overhauled the cumbersome bureaucracy of the state.

As a French ally, he opposed Britain during the American Revolution in June 1779, supplying large quantities of weapons and munitions to the rebels and keeping one third of all the British forces in the Americas occupied defending Florida and what is now Alabama, which were ultimately recaptured by Spain.

Despite his many marriages he did not have a son, so in 1833 he was influenced by his wife to abolish the Salic Law so that their daughter, Isabella, could become queen depriving his brother, Don Carlos, of the throne.

Don Carlos found his greatest support in Catalonia and the Basque country because the constitution centralized the provinces thus denying them the autonomy they sought.

Although it is not as powerful as it once was and no longer reigns in its native country of France, the House of Bourbon is by no means extinct and has survived to the present-day world, predominantly composed of republics.

The daughters of Gaston, Duke of Orléans, were the first members of the House of Bourbon since the accession of Henry IV to take their surname from the appanage of their father (d'Orléans).