Imagine a twelve-year-old girl led weeping to the altar, forced into marriage for reasons of state she barely understood. That is how the public life of Jeanne d’Albret began, long before she became queen and a symbol of Protestant resistance in sixteenth-century France.
Born in 1528 in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, she was the daughter of Henry II of Navarre and Marguerite de Navarre, a learned writer who protected persecuted reformers. She grew up in an environment open to the religious ideas then sweeping across Europe.
In 1541 she was forced to marry William of Cleves, a union annulled years later. In 1548 she married Antoine de Bourbon; they had five children, of whom only two survived to adulthood: Henry, who would later become king of France, and Catherine.
When her father died in 1555, she took the throne of Navarre. She governed alone most of the time, since her husband stayed caught up in the intrigues of the French court and was frequently absent from the kingdom.
At Christmas in 1560 she publicly declared her adherence to Calvinism, becoming the most powerful Protestant woman in Europe. Three years later, Pope Pius IV threatened to excommunicate her and considered handing her kingdom over to whoever conquered it, but he backed down in the face of the reaction from Catherine de’ Medici and King Philip II of Spain, and the threat never materialized.
Jeanne established Calvinism as the official religion of her domains, closing Catholic religious orders and reorganizing worship according to the Geneva model. This included expelling priests and nuns who refused to convert and closing Catholic churches: she protected the Reformed faithful, but it cost her Catholic subjects their religious freedom.
She financed Huguenot armies, took refuge in La Rochelle during the Third War of Religion, and commissioned the first translation of the New Testament into Basque. She personally negotiated peace agreements between Catholics and Protestants.
She died in Paris in 1572, months before the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre. Her story is a reminder that faith and political power, when joined together, can protect the persecuted, but can also become an instrument of coercion against those who think differently.
