Marguerite de Navarre (French: Marguerite d'Angoulême, Marguerite d'Alençon; 11 April 1492 – 21 December 1549), also known as Marguerite of Angoulême and Margaret of Navarre, was a princess of France, Duchess of Alençon and Berry, and Queen of Navarre by her second marriage to King 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".
Marguerite was born in Angoulême on 11 April 1492, the eldest child of Louise of Savoy and Charles, Count of Angoulême. Her father was a descendant of Charles V, and would thus have been on the line of succession to the French crown by masculine primogeniture, if both Charles VIII and the presumptive heir, Louis, Duke of Orléans, had died without producing male offspring.
Two years after Marguerite's birth, the family moved from Angoulême to Cognac, "where the Italian influence reigned supreme, and where Boccaccio was looked upon as a little less than a god".
She had several half-siblings from illegitimate relationships of her father, who were raised alongside Marguerite and her brother Francis. Two girls, Jeanne of Angoulême and Madeleine, were born of her father's long relationship with his châtelaine, Antoinette de Polignac, Dame de Combronde, who later became Louise's lady-in-waiting and confidante. Another half-sister, Souveraine, was born to Jeanne le Conte, also one of her father's mistresses.
Thanks to her mother, who was only nineteen when widowed, Marguerite was carefully tutored from her earliest childhood and given a classical education that included Latin. The young princess was to be called "Maecenas to the learned ones of her brother's kingdom". When Marguerite was ten, Louise tried to marry her to the Prince of Wales, who would later become Henry VIII of England, but the alliance was courteously rebuffed. Perhaps the one real love in her life was Gaston de Foix, Duc de Nemours, nephew of King Louis XII. Gaston went to Italy, however, and died a hero at Ravenna, when the French defeated Spanish and Papal forces.
At the age of seventeen Marguerite was married to Charles IV of Alençon, aged twenty, by the decree of King Louis XII (who also arranged the marriage of his ten-year-old daughter, Claude, to Francis). With this decree, Marguerite was forced to marry a generally kind but practically illiterate man for political expediency—"the radiant young princess of the violet-blue eyes... had become the bride of a laggard and a dolt". She had been bartered to save the royal pride of Louis, by keeping the County of Armagnac in the family. There were no offspring from this marriage.
Following the example set by her mother, Marguerite became the most influential woman in France during her lifetime when her brother acceded to the crown as Francis I in 1515. Her salon, known as the "New Parnassus", became famous internationally.
After the death of Queen Claude, she took in her two nieces Madeleine and Marguerite, for whom she would continue to care during her second marriage.
Marguerite was married twice, first to Charles IV of Alençon, but this marriage was childless.
Her next marriage was to Henry II of Navarre. The children of Marguerite and Henry were:
Jeanne III of Navarre (16 November 1528 – 9 June 1572), the mother of the future Henry IV of France, also known as Henry III of Navarre. She became Queen regnant of Navarre from 1555 to 1572. She was the wife of Antoine de Bourbon, Duke of Vendôme, and mother of Henry of Bourbon, who became King of Navarre and also of France as the first Bourbon king. She was the acknowledged spiritual and political leader of the French Huguenot movement.
Jean (7 July 1530 – 25 December 1530), who died as an infant
After the death of her first husband in 1525, Marguerite married Henry II of Navarre in January 1527 at St. Germain-en-Laye. 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. 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 (The Mirror of the Sinful Soul), 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.
Marguerite wrote many poems and plays. Her most notable works are a classic collection of short stories, the Heptaméron, and a remarkably intense religious poem, Miroir de l'âme pécheresse (The Mirror of the Sinful Soul). This poem is a first-person, mystical narrative of the soul as a yearning woman calling out to Christ as her father-brother-lover. Her work was passed to the royal court of England, suggesting that Marguerite had influence on the Protestant Reformation in England.
Following the expulsion of John Calvin and William Farel from Geneva in 1538, Marguerite de Navarre wrote to Marie Dentière, a notable Walloon Protestant reformer in Geneva. The two women appear to have personal history outside of their written correspondence: Marguerite was godmother to the daughter of Marie Dentière and Dentière's daughter composed a French guide to the Hebrew language to send to Marguerite's daughter. In her letter, Marguerite inquired what was the cause for Calvin and Farel's expulsion. Dentière responded in 1539 with the Epistre tres utile, commonly known today as the Epistle to Marguerite de Navarre. This epistle criticized the Protestant clergy who had expelled Calvin and Farel, asked for Marguerite's support and aid in increasing scriptural literacy and access among women, and advised her to act in expelling Catholic clergy from France.