Henry III

Henry III, also called Henry of Valois, or (until 1574) duc d’Anjou, (born Sept. 19, 1551, Fontainebleau, France—died Aug. 2, 1589, Saint-Cloud), king of France from 1574, under whose reign the prolonged crisis of the Wars of Religion was made worse by dynastic rivalries arising because the male line of the Valois dynasty was going to die out with him.

The third son of Henry II and Catherine de Médicis, Henry was at first entitled duc d’Anjou. Given command of the royal army against the Huguenots during the reign of his brother, Charles IX, he defeated two Huguenot leaders, the prince de Condé (Louis I de Bourbon) at Jarnac in March 1569 and Gaspard de Coligny at Moncontour in October of that year. Henry was Catherine’s favourite son, much to Charles’s chagrin, and she used her influence to advance his fortunes. In 1572 she presented him as a candidate for the vacant throne of Poland, to which he was finally elected in May 1573. In May 1574, however, Charles died, and Henry abandoned Poland and was crowned at Reims on Feb. 13, 1575. He was married two days later to Louise de Vaudémont, a princess of the house of Lorraine. The marriage proved childless.

The French Wars of Religion (1562–98) continued during Henry III’s reign. In May 1576 he agreed to the Peace of Monsieur, named after the style of his brother François, duc d’Alençon, but his concession to the Huguenots in the Edict of Beaulieu angered the Roman Catholics, who formed the Holy League to protect their own interests. Henry resumed the war against the Huguenots, but the Estates-General, meeting at Blois in 1576, was weary of Henry’s extravagance and refused to grant him the necessary subsidies. The Peace of Bergerac (1577) ended the hostilities temporarily; the Huguenots lost some of their liberties by the Edict of Poitiers, and the Holy League was dissolved. In 1584, however, the Roman Catholics were alarmed when the Huguenot leader, Henry of Navarre (the future Henry IV), became heir to the throne on the death of Henry III’s brother François, and the League was revived under the leadership of Henri, 3e duc de Guise.

Henry III, acting on his mother’s advice, tried to placate the Holy League by revoking past edicts that had granted toleration to the Huguenots, but its members regarded him as a lukewarm defender of the faith and tried to depose him. A rising of the people of Paris, a League stronghold, on May 12, 1588 (the Estates-Day of the Barricades), caused the king to flee to Chartres. In December 1588 he took advantage of a meeting of the Estates-General at Blois to have the duc de Guise and his brother Louis, the cardinal of Lorraine, assassinated. This, of course, exacerbated the League’s hostility, and Henry III was compelled to ally himself with Henry of Navarre. Together they laid siege to Paris, but on Aug. 1, 1589, Jacques Clément, a fanatical Jacobin friar, gained admission to the king’s presence and stabbed him. Before he died, Henry, who left no issue, acknowledged Henry of Navarre as his heir.

Henry III had a good intellect, an ingratiating manner, cultivated tastes, and a gift for oratory but could not save France from civil war. He issued ordinances designed to correct many of the financial and judicial problems of the country, but he refused to exert the effort needed to enforce them. He was more attentive to the trappings of power than to its substance; and he lost the sympathy of powerful elements by his aloofness at court and by the favours he conferred upon his mignons, a small group of handsome young men with whom he indulged in questionable excesses. Above all, he was so extravagant as virtually to bankrupt his kingdom.