page_title: Marguerite de Navarre
section_title: Second marriage and recognition
hierarchical_section_title: Marguerite de Navarre / Second marriage and recognition
caption_attribution_description: Léonard Limosin: Henri d'Albret (1503–1555), King of Navarre (mid-16th century), Metropolitain Museum of Art
context_page_description: Marguerite de Navarre, also known as Marguerite of Angoulême and Margaret of Navarre, was the princess of France, Queen of Navarre, and Duchess of Alençon and Berry. She was married to Henry II of Navarre. Her brother became King of France, as Francis I, and the two siblings were responsible for the celebrated intellectual and cultural court and salons of their day in France.
  Marguerite is the ancestress of the Bourbon kings of France, being the mother of Jeanne d'Albret, whose son, Henry of Navarre, succeeded as Henry IV of France, the first Bourbon king.
  As an author and a patron of humanists and reformers, she was an outstanding figure of the French Renaissance. Samuel Putnam called her "The First Modern Woman".
context_section_description: After the death of her first husband in 1525, Marguerite married Henry II of Navarre. Ferdinand II of Aragon had invaded the Kingdom of Navarre in 1512, and Henry ruled only Lower Navarre, the independent principality of Béarn, and several dependencies in Gascony. Approximately a year after the lead image (in the information box) that was painted by Jean Clouet, on 16 November 1528, Marguerite gave birth to a daughter by Henry, the future Jeanne III of Navarre, who became the mother of the future Henry IV of France.
  A Venetian ambassador of that time praised Marguerite as knowing all the secrets of diplomatic art, hence to be treated with deference and circumspection. Marguerite's most remarkable adventure involved freeing her brother, King Francis I, who had been held prisoner in Spain by Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor after being captured in the Battle of Pavia, Italy, 1525. During a critical period of the negotiations, Queen Marguerite rode horseback through wintry woods, twelve hours a day for many days, to meet a safe-conduct deadline, while writing her diplomatic letters at night.
  Her only son, Jean, was born in Blois on 7 July 1530, when Marguerite was thirty-eight, an age considered old by sixteenth century standards. The child died on Christmas Day the same year. Scholars believe that her grief motivated Marguerite to write her most controversial work, Miroir de l'âme pécheresse, in 1531.
  Sorbonne theologians condemned the work as heresy. A monk said Marguerite should be sewn into a sack and thrown into the Seine. Students at the Collège de Navarre satirized her in a play as "a Fury from Hell". Her brother forced the charges to be dropped, however, and obtained an apology from the Sorbonne.
caption: Henri d'Albret King of Navarre
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