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Historical person
1553–1610
Henry IV was born Henry of Bourbon, king of Navarre, and became the leading Protestant prince during the later French Wars of Religion. His 1572 marriage to Margaret of Valois was intended to ease confessional conflict, but the celebrations in Paris immediately preceded the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. Henry survived, spent years navigating captivity, conversion and renewed Protestant leadership, and became heir presumptive to the French crown as the Valois dynasty approached extinction.
Henry became king of France in 1589 but had to defeat Catholic League resistance before securing the kingdom. His conversion to Catholicism in 1593 helped make reconciliation possible, while the Edict of Nantes in 1598 granted Huguenots a limited framework of worship and political security. With ministers including the Duke of Sully, Henry restored royal finances and authority after decades of civil war. His plans for further European intervention ended when the Catholic zealot François Ravaillac assassinated him in Paris on 14 May 1610.
In Jean Plaidy’s Myself, My Enemy, the daughter of Henry IV of France, Princess Henrietta Maria, becomes a pawn in a political strategy to stabilize relations between two countries when her father marries her to Charles I of England. In G. A. Henty’s Saint Bartholomew's Eve, Historical figures including Catherine de' Medici, Charles IX of France, Gaspard II de Coligny, and Henry IV of France connect the fictional action directly to the documented events. Further fictional perspectives on Henry IV of France can be found in G. P. R. James’ Henry of Guise; or, the States of Blois, Kate Mosse’s The City of Tears, John Pilkington’s A Reluctant Traitor, and G. P. R. James’ One in a Thousand; or, the Days of Henri Quatre. For broader historical treatment of Henry IV of France, see David Hackett Fischer’s Champlain’s Dream.
Series
The Joubert Family Chronicles follows generations of a Huguenot family from the French Wars of Religion into the maritime and colonial worlds of the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. The Burning Chambers begins in Carcassonne in 1562; The City of Tears carries the family into the St Bartholomew’s Day…
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The Will Revill thrillers follow a former artillery captain drawn into covert service for the Crown between 1589 and 1591. Revill has seen enough organised violence to distrust easy appeals to duty, yet his military skills and vulnerable family connections allow powerful councillors to keep forcing him back…
All books in this series
The Medici Trilogy centres on Catherine de’ Medici and the Valois monarchy during the French Wars of Religion. From her arrival as an Italian bride to her struggle to preserve the crown for her sons, the sequence explores court faction, dynastic marriage and the violence dividing Catholic and…
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The Queens of England novels dramatise the lives of royal women from Eleanor of Aquitaine to Queen Victoria. Each volume concentrates on a queen, consort or claimant whose marriages, loyalties and private ambitions were inseparable from dynastic politics, religious conflict and the exercise of monarchy.
All books in this series
Standalone books
Non Fiction
Biographies, histories and other non-fiction are listed separately from the historical novels above.
