Henry II of France

King of France (r. 1547-1559)

• Born: March 31, 1519
• Birthplace: Saint-Germain-en-Laye, near Paris, France
• Died: July 10, 1559
• Place of death: Paris, France

As king of France, Henry continued the patronage of Renaissance learning and culture begun by Francis I. He also continued the wars against the Habsburgs, resulting in the recovery of Calais from England and the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559. His hostility to the Reformation led to unsuccessful attempts to repress Protestantism in France, and his death while jousting brought chaos to France and led to the French Wars of Religion.

Early Life

The fourth child and second son of Francis I and Claude of France, Henry was not expected to gain the throne. At age seven, he and his older brother, Francis, were sent to Spain as hostages for their father, who had been captured at the Battle of Pavia near Milan in February, 1525. Henry felt that the Spanish mistreated him and his brother during the four years they spent there, and he bore a permanent grudge against both his father and Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor. After a ransom of 2 million gold crowns had been handed over, the two princes were returned to France in July, 1530.

Among those who welcomed them back to France was Diane de Poitiers . Henry was deeply smitten by her, and several years later, she became his mistress; he loved her until his death, although she was twenty years older than he. In 1534, he married Catherine de Médicis as part of Francis I’s attempt to build an alliance with the Médicis pope Clement VII (Giulio de’ Médici). The pope soon died, ending the marriage’s political value, which also came under strain because of a lack of children during its first ten years. Henry and Catherine, however, eventually had seven offspring who survived to adulthood. Henry’s love for Diane further strained the marriage.

Life’s Work

When his older brother died in 1536, Henry became dauphin (the French heir to the throne). As such Henry received nominal command of royal armies and was involved in several campaigns, but with limited success. He ascended the throne at the death of his father on March 31, 1547, his twenty-eighth birthday. He had already formed a cadre of close advisers Constable Montmorency, the duke of Guise (his younger brother Francis), the cardinal of Lorraine, and Marshal Saint-André who now dominated the royal council. Diane also wielded broad influence over her royal lover.

In France’s government, Henry largely carried on trends begun under his father; his major innovation was creating the offices of the four secretaries of state, each having responsibility for a different area of administration. The selling of royal offices had already become an important source of revenue for the monarchy, and Henry significantly increased the number of venal offices. His major effort in that respect was creating a semester system in the Parlement of Paris, the highest law court, by doubling the number of offices in it and selling them. The Parlement’s judges were to serve for six months and then be off for six. The new system soon created problems, however, causing many cases to drag on for years, and bitter complaints from the judges led the king to cancel the semester system, although he did not reduce the number of offices.

The war against Charles V continued during Henry’s reign, and he allied with the German Lutherans and the Ottoman Turks against him. With the approval of the Lutheran princes, Henry occupied the three bishoprics of Lorraine Metz, Toul, and Verdun in April, 1552, and made his famous promenade to the Rhine that same year. Late in 1552, Charles V brought eighty thousand men against Metz to recover it, but the city, well defended by the duke of Guise, withstood the siege, and the three bishoprics remained permanently in French hands. In cooperation with the Ottoman fleet, Henry seized Corsica from Charles V’s ally Genoa in 1553, but it remained in French control for only six years.

A devout Catholic, Henry lived at the height of the Protestant Reformation and was aggressively anti-Protestant. His alliance with the German Lutherans prevented him from being excessively severe with the French Protestants, but he took seriously the clause in his coronation oath to protect the Catholic Church. Shortly after becoming king, he created a new chamber in the Parlement of Paris to deal with heresy. Called the chambre ardente for its zealous pursuit of Protestants, it condemned thirty-seven persons to death in three years. The Catholic hierarchy’s objections to the loss of jurisdiction over heresy persuaded him to close it down in 1550. The rivalry between the Parlement and the Church over heresy prosecution rendered ineffective such harsh edicts against heresy as the Edict of Châteaubriand in 1551. This problem, along with Henry’s perception that heresy was lower-class sedition, led him to overlook Protestantism among the French elite and allowed it to flourish despite his pledge to rid his realm of the Protestants. By 1550, Calvinists, directed from the French-speaking Swiss city of Geneva, constituted the overwhelming majority of French Protestants, also known as Huguenots.

Under Henry, the French monarchy continued to be a major patron of Renaissance culture, although he preferred to patronize French talent rather than, as his father had done, Italian talent. He completed several projects begun by Francis I, including the château of Fontainebleau and the reconstruction of the Louvre in Paris, while putting his own stamp on them. Henry assigned the architectPierre Lescot and the sculptor Jean Goujon to the Louvre, and its Cour Carrée (the central courtyard) is probably the best example of their work. The major building project during Henry’s reign was the château of Anet, done for Diane de Poitiers by the royal architect Philibert Delorme. François Clouet painted the best-known portrait of Henry.

In literature, Henry’s reign saw something of a reaction against the Humanist emphasis on using classical Latin versus a greater effort to use French. The great literary theoretician Joachim du Bellay argued for using French in La Défense et illustration de la langue française(1549; The Defence and Illustration of the French Language , 1939). He was a member of La Pléiade, a group of poets who wrote in French and received patronage from the French court as royal poets. The most famous among them was Pierre de Ronsard . Étienne Jodelle’s Cléopâtre captive, the first French tragedy, was performed for Henry in 1552.

The end of Henry’s reign was shadowed by economic problems, a huge royal debt, an upsurge in religious dissent, and more intense war with the Habsburgs. The severe downturn in climate that would mark the next one hundred years first appeared in 1556, when there was a major crop failure. Inflation caused by the huge influx of American bullion through Spain began to have a negative impact on the finances of most of the French people and the royal budget. Burdened by the huge expenses of the court and war, Henry was forced to resort to heavy borrowing. In 1555, Henry devised a system of amortizing his loans, at 16 percent annually, which is regarded as the first such system to appear in Europe. By the end of his reign, the royal debt amounted to about two and a half times the annual royal revenues.

At the urging of the bitterly anti-Spanish Pope Paul IV , Henry sent an army to Italy to reclaim Naples and Milan, which the pope promised to give to two of the king’s younger sons. Philip II, Charles V’s successor as king of Spain, responded by invading northern France and defeating Montmorency at Saint-Quentin in 1557, taking the constable captive. Philip failed to push his forces on to Paris, and Henry used the army he had assembled for defending the city to take Calais from the English in January, 1558 since England was allied with Spain in the war. With the fortunes of war balanced, both rulers agreed to the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559. The treaty recognized Philip’s sovereignty over Naples and Milan, while leaving Calais and the bishoprics of Lorraine in French hands. It also arranged for a marriage between Philip II and Henry II’s eldest daughter, Elisabeth.

Henry, jousting in a tournament in Paris celebrating the peace and the marriage, was mortally wounded when his opponent’s shattered lance struck him in the face. He left his fifteen-year-old son, Francis II, a realm beset with problems, the most serious being the religious divisions.

Significance

Although Henry II was a competent administrator, he was neither the astute politician nor the personally popular king that his father had been. Although he supported the Renaissance arts, he did not champion them as his father had. Where his father had been somewhat tolerant of the Protestant Reformation, Henry II was passionately hostile toward Protestants. This passion would lead to the bloody Wars of Religion. Henry left his son a state deeply divided in religious beliefs and deeply in debt. However, in his children with the powerful Catherine de Médicis, he gave France three future kings (Francis II, Charles IX, and Henry III) and strong allies with the marriages of three daughters (Elisabeth to Phillip II, Marguerite to Henry of Navarre, and Claude to Charles III the Great).

Bibliography

Baumgartner, Frederic J. Henry II, King of France, 1547-1559. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1988. A thorough biography of the king. Includes bibliography and index.

Bonner, Elizabeth. “The Recovery of St. Andrew’s Castle in 1547: French Naval Policy and Diplomacy in the British Isles.” English Historical Review 111 (1996): 578-598. A broad study of France’s relationship with Scotland and the Stuart Dynasty.

Frieda, Leonie. Catherine de Medici. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003. A major study of Henry II’s wife that includes significant sections on the king. Includes illustrations, bibliographical references, and an index.

Knecht, R. J. French Renaissance Monarchy: Francis I and Henry II. New York: Longman, 1996. Provides a good overview of Henry’s reign.