Authorities differ, and so it is with the Basque game of laz Marellas, and the royal arms of the Navarres. Labastide says the game came down from the time when the Basques of to-day were originally Phœnicians. If this be so, the royal arms were but a copy of something that had gone before. Certainly they form as curious and enigmatic an armorial device as is found in heraldry.
The Royaume de Navarre has so completely disappeared and been so absorbed by France that it takes a considerable knowledge of geography and history to be able to place it precisely upon the map of modern Europe, hidden away as it was in what are now the two arrondissements of Bayonne and Saint-Palais.
They were a noble race, the men of Béarn and Navarre, the Basques especially, and the questionable traits of the cagots and gypsies have left but little impress on the masses.
Henri IV, faithful in his sentiment for his first subjects, would have shown them his predilection by allowing them to remain an independent monarchy. He would not that the kingdom of his mother be mingled with that of France, but intriguing counsel prevailed and the alliance was made, though Navarre escaped conquest and was still ruled by the sceptre of its legitimate sovereign.
How near France came to being ruled by Navarre instead of Navarre by France is recalled by the following bit of recorded history. When Philippe V (le Long) came to the throne of France (1316) his right was contested by many princes. Among others the crown was claimed by Jeanne de Navarre, but an assembly of bishops, seigneurs and bourgeois of Paris declared for the Salic law—which proscribed the right to rule the French to one of the female sex, and this against feudal rights as they were known and protected in the satellite kingdoms surrounding the royal domain. It was agreed later (by Philippe-le-Long) that if the widow of Louis X should have another female child, the rights appertaining to Navarre should belong to her and her stepsister Jeanne, making it an independent monarchy again.
When Philippe-le-Bel came to the throne of France it was his wife Jeanne who, by common consent, administered the affairs of Navarre. She chased the Aragonians and Castilians from her fair province, and put her people into a state of security hitherto unknown. “She held,” said Mézeray the historian, “every one enchanted by her eyes, her ears, and her heart, and she was equally eloquent, generous and liberal.” A veritable paragon of a woman evidently.
Henri II, son of Catherine and Jean d’Albret II, succeeded to the throne of French Navarre at the age of thirteen. He followed the French king, François, to Italy, and was made prisoner at the unfortunate battle of Pavia, finally escaping through a ruse.
François Premier, king of France, and Henri d’Albret, king of Navarre, each nourished an equal aversion for the king of Spain, the prime cause of that fateful day at Pavia. The first hated the Spanish monarch as a rival; the second as the usurper of his lands. They united arms, but the battle of Pavia, when “all was lost save honour,” gave matters such a setback that naught but time could overcome them.
It was Henri II’s marriage with Marguerite of Valois, the Duchesse d’Alençon, in 1526, by which he acquired the Armagnac succession as a gift from his brother-in-law, François Premier, that brought to Navarre’s crown nearly all of Guyenne. In 1555 the young king died at Pau, leaving a daughter, Jeanne d’Albret, who with her second husband, Antoine de Bourbon, Duc de Vendome, succeeded to the throne.
The new rulers did not attempt or accomplish much, save to embrace Calvinism with zeal. Suffice to recall the well-known facts that Antoine died in 1562 from a wound received in the siege of Rouen, and that Jeanne herself died from the poison of the wicked Catherine de Medici’s gloves at Paris.