HENRY III. (1379–1406), king of Castile, surnamed el Doliente (the sickly), succeeded his father John I. in 1390, when only eleven years of age. During his minority, the question of the regency not having been very clearly settled by his father, the kingdom was in a constant state of disturbance, bordering upon civil war ; unable to satisfy the rival claims of Don Fadrique, Don Alonso, and the archbishop of Toledo, Henry at last resolved, minor as he was, to take the reins of government entirely into his own hands (1393). By energetic measures he succeeded within two years in quelling the turbulence of his nobles, in establishing his own popularity with the body of the people, and thus in effecting the pacification of his kingdom. The only foreign war during this reign was that with Portugal, which terminated in the peace of 1399; a great expedition against the kingdom of Granada, for which extensive preparations had been made, and for which large grants from the cortes held in Toledo in 1406 had been obtained, was brought to an abrupt termination by the death of Henry at that city on December 25 of the same year. It was during this reign that the sovereignty of the Canary Islands was assumed by Castile ; and an interesting indication of at least a widening interest in foreign affairs was afforded by the mission of a solemn embassy to Tamerlane in 1401. Henry III. was succeeded by John II., his eldest son by Catherine of Lancaster, whom he had married in 1393. See Davila, Historic de la Vida y Hechos del Rey Don Henrique Tercero de CastiUa (1638).
HENRY IV. (1425–1475), king of Castile, surnamed el Impotente (the impotent) and sometimes el Liberal (the spendthrift), the eldest son of John II. by his first wife Maria of Aragon, was born at Valladolid on January 6, 1425. As prince of Asturias he took a prominent and generally an unfilial part in most of the disturbances of his father s reign; in 1445 a pitched battle between the king and the prince was prevented only at the last moment by the in tervention of the clergy and some of the nobles ; and peace was not finally secured until 1450 when Pope Nicholas V. issued his bull of excommunication against all those in the peninsula who, by perplexing the affairs of the sovereign, were disastrously helping the cause of the infidels. In 1440 Henry had in accordance with a treaty signed in 1436 been united to Blanche of Aragon ; but this marriage, which had not been happy and which had given cause to many scandalous reports, he dissolved in 1453 shortly before his accession to the throne on his father s death in July of that year. He began his reign with a great show of energy against the Moors ; but the boldness of his intentions con trasted strangely with the feebleness of his execution ; and the unsatisfactory character of the results attained tended greatly to bring to a head the discontent which his indolent inattention to home affairs, his reckless extravagance, and the disorders of his private life had not failed to create. In 1465 occurred at Avila the extraordinary scene, so often described, of the king s deposition in favour of his brother Alphonso ; this was followed in 1468, shortly after Alphonso s death, by the election of his sister Isabella, who, however, declined to accept the proffered crown. In the same year Henry was forced to repudiate his wife Joanna of Portugal and to disinherit her daughter Juana (la Beltraneja) whom he had unsuccessfully attempted to put forward as also his ; and thus the succession became fixed in favour of Isabella, who was married to Ferdinand of Aragon in the following year. Henry died at Madrid on December 12, 1474.
For the events of the reign of Henry IV. the contemporary authorities are Alonso de I alencia and Diego Henriijuez del Castillo, each of whom has left a Cronica del Ilcy L on Enrique Quarto; the Lest and at the same time the most accessible Tiioderu English account is to be found in Prescott s History of tit e Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, part i. , chaps, iii. and iv.
HENRY I. (c. 1210–1274), king of Navarre, surnamed le Gros, third count of Champagne, was the youngest son of Theobald I. of Navarre by Margaret of Foix, and succeeded his eldest brother Theobald II. in December 1270. His proclamation at Pamplona, however, did not occur till March of the following year, and his coronation was delayed until May 1273. After a brief reign, characterized it is said by dignity and talent, he died in July 1274, suffocated, according to the generally received accounts, with his own fat. In him the male line of the counts of Champagne, kings of Navarre, became extinct. He was succeeded by his only legitimate child Joanna, born in 1270, by whose marriage to Philip le Bel in 1284 the crown of Navarre became for a time united to that of France.
HENRY II. (1503–1555), or Henri d'Albret, titular king of Navarre, born at Sanguessa in April 1503, was the eldest son of Jean d'Albret by Catherine of Navarre ; and on the death of the latter in exile in June 1516 succeeded his parents in all their claims against Ferdinand the Catholic, assuming under the protection of Francis I. of France the title of king of Navarre. After the ineffectual conferences at Noyon (1516) and at Montpellier 1518, an active effort was made in 1521 to establish him in the de facto sovereignty ; but the French troops which, under Andre' de l'Esparre, had seized the country were ultimately expelled by the Spanish viceroy, the duke of Najera. Henry, who along with Francis was taken prisoner at the battle of Pavia (1525) but afterwards contrived to escape, married Margaret, the only sister of the latter, in 1526, and by her became the father of Jeanne d'Albret, the mother of Henry IV. of France. He died at Pan on May 25, 1555.
