The King of Navarre was now thirty-one years old; for the three Henrys were nearly of the same age.  The first indications of his existence had been recognized amid the cannon and trumpets of a camp in Picardy, and his mother had sung a gay Bearnese song as he was coming into the world at Pau.  Thus, said his grandfather, Henry of Navarre, thou shalt not bear to us a morose and sulky child.  The good king, without a kingdom, taking the child, as soon as born, in the lappel of his dressing-gown, had brushed his infant lips with a clove of garlic, and moistened them with a drop of generous Gascon wine.  Thus, said the grandfather again, shall the boy be both merry and bold.  There was something mythologically prophetic in the incidents of his birth.

The best part of Navarre had been long since appropriated by Ferdinand of Aragon.  In France there reigned a young and warlike sovereign with four healthy boys.  But the new-born infant had inherited the lilies of France from St. Louis, and a later ancestor had added to the escutcheon the motto “Espoir.”  His grandfather believed that the boy was born to revenge upon Spain the wrongs of the House of Albret, and Henry’s nature seemed ever pervaded with Robert of Clermont’s device.

The same sensible grandfather, having different views on the subject of education from those manifested by Catherine de Medici towards her children, had the boy taught to run about bare-headed and bare-footed, like a peasant, among the mountains and rocks of Bearn, till he became as rugged as a young bear, and as nimble as a kid.  Black bread, and beef, and garlic, were his simple fare; and he was taught by his mother and his grandfather to hate lies and liars, and to read the Bible.

When he was fifteen, the third religious war broke out.  Both his father and grandfather were dead.  His mother, who had openly professed the reformed faith, since the death of her husband, who hated it, brought her boy to the camp at Rochelle, where he was received as the chief of the Huguenots.  His culture was not extensive.  He had learned to speak the truth, to ride, to shoot, to do with little sleep and less food.  He could also construe a little Latin, and had read a few military treatises; but the mighty hours of an eventful life were now to take him by the hand, and to teach him much good and much evil, as they bore him onward.  He now saw military treatises expounded practically by professors, like his uncle Condo, and Admiral Coligny, and Lewis Nassau, in such lecture-rooms as Laudun, and Jarnac, and Montcontour, and never was apter scholar.

The peace of Arnay-le-Duc succeeded, and then the fatal Bartholomew marriage with the Messalina of Valois.  The faith taught in the mountains of Bearn was no buckler against the demand of “the mass or death,” thundered at his breast by the lunatic Charles, as he pointed to thousands of massacred Huguenots.  Henry yielded to such conclusive arguments, and became a Catholic.  Four years of court imprisonment succeeded, and the young King of Navarre, though proof to the artifices of his gossip Guise, was not adamant to the temptations spread for him by Catherine de’ Medici.  In the harem entertained for him in the Louvre many pitfalls entrapped him; and he became a stock-performer in the state comedies and tragedies of that plotting age.