The first French king of the Bourbon dynasty, Henry of Navarre, Henry IV was a Protestant prince whose wedding became the scene of one of the most vicious massacre of French Protestant Christians, but he inaugurated the Edict of Nantes which gained toleration for them.
Henry was the son of Anthony of Bourbon and Jeanne d'Albret (a staunch Calvinist), both of whom were related to the ruling Valois family. When the French war of religion broke out in 1562, Henry became a leader of the Protestant Huguenots forces. In an attempt to find a peaceful end to the conflict, however, he entered into a marriage arrangement with Princess Margaret of Valois, sister of the reigning Charles IX. It turned out to be a disaster, when the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre four days later led to the murder of thousands of Huguenots across the country, and Henry was himself forced to convert to Catholicism and then confined as a prisoner to court. After three and a half years, however, he managed to make his escape back to his home in Navarre, renounced his conversion and took up the Huguenot cause again.
In 1589 Henry became heir-apparent to the French throne when Henry III, his cousin and last of the Valois line, died without an heir. The majority Catholic populace, however, refused to accept his ascendence to the throne because of his Calvinistic faith. As the country threatened towards collapse, Henry decided to reconvert to Catholicism to become king, and promulgated the Edict of Nantes, which inaugurated an era of toleration for the Huguenots. The edict went further than any of the previous edicts in granting the Huguenots the free exercise of their religion, civil equality and justice. Though the edict would be revoked by King Louis XIV in 1685, it set the precedence for the toleration of both Catholic and Protestant religions in his realm at a time when all other European monarchs and rulers would permit only one or the other in their realms.
Whether Henry's reconversion to Roman Catholicism was genuine, or done for reasons of personal power or national concern remains a matter of debate. Whatever it was, he seemed not to have gained the full confidence of his fellow countrymen by it, for he was assassinated by a fanatical Catholic in 1610. He was succeeded by his son,
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