What elegant historian would neglect a striking opportunity for pointing out that his heroes did not foresee the history of the world, or even their own actions?--For example, that
Henry of Navarre, when a Protestant baby, little thought of being a Catholic monarch; or that Alfred the Great, when he measured his laborious nights with burning candles, had no idea of future gentlemen measuring their idle days with watches.
Attending to these sources, which register the shift in Huguenot writing from a "rhetoric of martyrdom" to a "rhetoric of resistance" (111), helps to explain the apparent structural inconsistency by which Marlowe's protagonist,
Henry of Navarre, moves "from a passive victim to a militant defender of the Protestant faith" (114).
I would have made mention of this, because Chereau directed one of the great films of the 1990s -- or of anytime, actually -- "Queen Margot." This was an adaptation of Alexandre Dumas' novel, based on the real lives of King
Henry of Navarre, his reluctant bride, Margot, the monstrous Catherine de Medici, and the blood-soaked persecution of the Huguenots.
But it led to her being asked to write a life of French King
Henry of Navarre, and of Catherine de Medici.
Henry of Navarre famously said, "Paris is worth a mass," as he converted to Catholicism to become King Henry IV of France.
past disorder now coalesces into a providential trajectory leading to the ascension of Elizabeth's ally, the still-Protestant
Henry of Navarre, and paralleling official Tudor history.
Under Salic Law, women were debarred from the line of succession, but the situation was not clear-cut, for the king of France had always been a Catholic and
Henry of Navarre was a Huguenot.
"Wherefore, sire, though I am aware that you have no need of my counsels," he wrote to
Henry of Navarre in 1561, "yet I do not cease to entreat and even exhort you, in the name of God, to be pleased to take courage, in order to do combat courageously and more and more overcome all the difficulties with which I know you are surrounded."
(112) Quite naturally, Montauban assisted
Henry of Navarre in his rise to power as king of France, particularly as a hub for collecting funds from the Midi in his behalf.
As Ann Ramsey remarks in her preface, it was Denis Richet and Robert Descimon who suggested she investigate the unusual number of wills drawn up in 1590 during the siege of Paris by the Protestant
Henry of Navarre in his struggle against the League to assert his claim to the crown of France.
Between 1575 and 1588 he undertook more than a dozen diplomatic missions for Henry, in which he negotiated with the crown's principal internal troublemakers,
Henry of Navarre and his Huguenot followers, Henry, duke of Guise and the Catholic Leaguers, the king's brother Francis, duke of Anjou and his Low Country allies, as well as foreign rulers like Elizabeth of England; and a host of lesser notables, both foreign and domestic.