France’s Bourbon dynasty, the direct line having died out in 1503 and the collateral Montpensier branch having become extinct in 1527, survives in the collateral line of the Vendôme, descending from Jacques de la Marche, constable of France in the mid-fourteenth century.
Antoine de Bourbon, duc de Vendôme, titular king-consort of Navarre, is himself eight generations removed from Louis IX, father of the dynasty’s founder, Robert of Clermont, grandfather of Jacques de la Marche; the junior Bourbon line of Condé descends from Antoine's brother, Louis.
Antoine de Bourbon had temporarily allied himself with the Protestants but changes sides and is mortally wounded in battle against them at Rouen.
At Antoine’s death on October 26, 1562, the Bourbon line continues in nine-year-old Henri de Navarre, or de Bourbon, the son of Antoine and Jeanne d'Albret, Queen of Navarre from 1555.
Prince Henry, who spent most of his early childhood in the Béarnaise city of Pau, had gone to live with his second cousins, the children of the king of France and Catherine de Médici, in 1561.
His mother, meanwhile, had announced her Calvinism in 1560.
