French Monarch. Henri le Grand. Born at the Chateau Pau, Navarre, the son of Antoine de Bourbon and Jeanne d'Albret, Queen of Navarre. He was educated as a Protestant, and in 1561 he entered the Collège de Navarre in Paris. When his mother died in June 1572, he became King of Navarre. He married Margaret of Valois, sister of Charles IX of France the following August in an effort to bring religious peace to the kingdom. Prominant Catholics, however, plotted a massacre of Protestants gathered in Paris for the wedding. The resulting Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre on August 24 killed thousands. Henri was spared after his false abjuration of Protastantism. He was kept in confinement in Paris and, after several attempts, he escaped his imprisonment at court in early 1576 and abjured Catholicism at Tours before he rejoined the Protestant forces in the ongoing conflict. In 1577 he negotiated the treaty of Bergerac, which foreshadowed the edict of Nantes. In June 1584 the death the Duc de Anjou, brother of France's Henri III, made Henri de Navarre heir presumptive to the throne of France. The Catholic League, headed by Henri, Duc de Guise, refused to recognize him and persuaded Henri III to send an army to force his conversion. In the following War of the Three Henries, Henri de Navarre defeated Henri III at Coutras in1587, but came to the king's support after Henri III was driven from Paris by the League after his assassination of the Duc de Guise. The following assassination of Henri III in August 1589 left Henri de Navarre king of France in name, but he had to battle for years against the Catholic League and Spain before he won his kingdom. In July 1593, Henri allowed himself to be converted to Catholicism in order to secure his throne and he was crowned as Henri IV of France at Chartres in February 1594. In 1598 he established codified religious toleration through the Edict of Nantes. In 1599 the childless marriage between Henri and Margaret of Valois was annulled. In the autumn of 1600, Henri married Marie de Medici with whom he had six children; in addition to at least ten illegitimate children by several mistresses. As king, Henri attempted to reform finance, repress abuses, eliminate useless offices, develop both agriculture and industry, introduce the silk industry, and signed treaties of commerce with England, Spain, and Holland, and attempted to colonize Canada. Henri sent subsidies to the Dutch in their fight against an occupying Spain. He concluded alliances with the Protestant princes in Germany, with the Duke of Lorraine, the Swiss cantons, and with Sweden. A deranged ex-servant, François Ravaillac, interpreted Henri's decision in the Netherlands as the start of a war against the Pope. On May 14, 1610, he stabbed Henri to death on the Rue de la Ferronnerie in Paris while the king's carriage was stopped by traffic. The murderer was tortured, drawn, and quartered for his crime. Henri's eight year old son succeeded as Louis XIII.