Navarre had been compelled to attend Mass in public and to ask absolution from the Archbishop of Bourges, who received him into the fold of the Catholic, Apostolic and Roman Church before the coronation. He was now the "most Christian King," welcomed with blaze of bonfires and the blare of trumpets. He was crowned at Chartres because the Catholic League held Rheims, and he entered Paris by the Porte Neuve, through which Henry III had fled from the Guises some six years previously. The Spaniards had to withdraw from his capital, being told that their services would be required no longer.
Henry IV waged successful wars against Spain and the Catholic League, gradually recovering the whole of his dominions by his energy and courage. He settled the status of the Protestants on a satisfactory basis by the Edict of Nantes, which was signed in April 1598, to consolidate the privileges which had been previously granted to the Calvinists. Full civil rights and full civil protection were granted to all Protestants, and the King assigned a sum of money for the use of Protestant schools and colleges.
Henry introduced the silk industry into France, and his famous minister, Sully, did much to improve the condition of French agriculture. By 1598 order had been restored in the kingdom, but industry and commerce had been crippled by nearly forty years of civil war. When France's first Bourbon King, Henry IV, was assassinated in April 1610, he had only begun the great work of social and economical reform which proved his genuine sense of public duty.
Chapter X
Under the Red Robe
Never was king more beloved by his subjects than Henry of Navarre, who had so many of the frank and genial qualities which his nation valued. There was mourning as for a father when the fanatic, Ravaillac, struck him to the ground. It seemed strange that death should come in the same guise to the first of the Bourbon line and the last of the Valois.
Henry had studied the welfare of the peasantry and the middle class, striving to crush the power of the nobles whose hands were perpetually raised one against the other. Therefore he intrusted affairs of State to men of inferior rank, and determined that he would form in France a nobility of the robe that should equal the old nobility of the sword. The paulette gave to all those who held the higher judicial functions of the State the right to transmit their offices by will to their descendants, or even to sell them as so much hereditary property.
In foreign affairs Henry had attempted to check the ambitious schemes of the Spanish Hapsburg line and to restore the ancient prestige of France in Europe, but he had to leave his country in a critical stage and hope that a man would be found to carry on his great work. Cardinal Richelieu was to have the supreme honour of fulfilling Henry IV's designs, with the energy of a nature that had otherwise very little in common with that of the first King of the Bourbons.