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CHAPTER TWO

THE HOUSE OF ALBRET

a. , 10 January 1494

On Friday, 10 January 1494, in the high-perched city of Pamplona in , a great coronation procession made its stately progress through the city's old centre of La Navarreria.1 The narrow streets, thronged with the people of the quarter, were lined with bright ban• ners and strewn with laurels, from the gates of the royal palace to the open portals of the cathedral.2 As the sounds of a sung antiphon swelled from within, Jean d'Albret, viscount of Tartas, and his wife, Catherine of , queen of Navarre, made their solemn entry, mov• ing slowly down the cathedral's nave toward the canopied altar, where the bishop of Pamplona and the cathedral canons stood in a waiting cluster around the two vacant gold and scarlet thrones. To either side were ranked the peers, lords, and officers of the realm of Navarre, whose people pressed in to form the narrow aisle through which the royal pair advanced. Seated before the altar, Jean and then Catherine were anointed with the holy oil by the bishop, spoke their oaths, and were crowned. After mass in the rite, and having received communion, the and queen of Navarre, preceded by the unsheathed sword of the monarchy, returned in state to the palace.3 Thus an Albret, one of that essentially rural family of Aqui-

1 The 'two bourgs' of the medieval Pamplona were the bourg of Pam• plona itself, and the palace and central city of La Navarreria within the town. (Guil- lelmus Anelier de , Histoire de la Guerre de Navarre, ed. Francisque-Michel, p.348fn, and p.675.) On the royal palace of La Navarreria, see Juan José Martinena, 'Pamplona,' in Luis Javier Fortun, ed., Sedes Reales de Navarra, Pamplona, Gobierno de Navarra, 1991, p.62. On the cathedral of Santa Maria of Pamplona, see Juan José Martinena, 'Pamplona,' in Fortun, ed., Sedes Reales de Navarra, pp.69-77. 2 AD PA, MS E.546, Coronation of Jean d'Albret and Catherine of Foix, 10 Janu• ary 1494. In Navarre at that time, the year-end was the Nativity. 3 While historical aspects of this coronation are to be found in Cadier, Etats de Beam, pp.203-4, my narrative description of its ceremony is imaginary. I have, how• ever, made use of ceremonial elements outlined in Janos M. Bak, ed., Coronations: Medieval and Early Modern Monarchic Ritual, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1990, principally in: Jacques Le GofT, 'A Coronation Program for the Age of Saint 44 CHAPTER TWO

tanian feudal lords, was made a king. As well, his successors were to be sovereigns of what would be the only part of to remain outside the French king's administration and justice.4 The crown of Navarre was, of course, Catherine's, not the Albrets', to bestow.5 For the Albrets, it was soon to become almost nothing, and yet remain practically everything. Jeanne III of Navarre's accession in 1555, and public conversion to Protestantism in 1560, were still far in the future, but, as Dartigue has said,6 in order to understand how and why she became Protestant, and how and why the leaders and people of Beam and Navarre followed her in that perilous conversion, it is necessary to examine the origins and evolution of the Albrets, and the origins and evolution of Beam and Navarre. This chapter undertakes those crucial explanations.

b. The rue and use of the House ofAlbret

In the land of Guyenne, the Albrets had been a power to reckon with since medieval times, and their power had increased during the long

Louis: The Ordo of 1250 [BNF, lat 1246],' pp.46-71, and Richard C. McCoy, "The Wonderfull Spectacle": The Civic Progress of Elizabeth I and the Troublesome Coronation,' pp. 217-27. I have also made use of Richard A.Jackson's Vive le Roi!: A History of the French Coronation from Charles V to Charles X, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1984, Chapter 2, 'The Coronation of Louis XIII [1610],' pp. 15-23, and Chapter 3, 'The Order of the Medieval Ceremony,' pp. 15-40. The portion of the ordo concerning the coronation of a queen at the same time as her hus• band is considered by Jackson on pp.30-31. 4 Herbert H. Rowen has noted that in France after 1523, there remained outside royal administration and justice 'only the Foix and Albret counties in the southwest, bound in since 1484 to the tiny independent and the independent viscounty of Beam.' (The King's State: Propnetary Dynasticism in , New Brunswick (NJ), Rutgers University Press, 1980, p.28.) The resul• tant binding of the counties of Foix (including Bigorre, Beam, and Marsan) and Albret is illustrated by the map 'Les domaines de la maison de Bourbon-Navarre (1515-1589), Pierre Tucoo-Chala, Cathenne de Bourbon: Une calviniste exemplaire, Biarritz, Atlantica, 1997, p.5, reproduced herein (see Illustrations). 5 Catherine (Catalina) was crowned sovereign queen of Navarre in March 1483. Her to Jean d'Albret took place on 14 June 1484, when Jean was still a child; hence the coronation did not take place until 1494. (Cadier, Etats de Beam, vol.2, pp.182, 186.) 6 'En bref, il est impossible de comprendre la politique religieuse de Jeanne d'Al• bret et la manière dont elle a établi la Réforme, si l'on ignore les problèmes qui avaient surgi sous le règne précédent et les transformations qui c'étaient amorcées en même temps.' Dartigue-Peyrou, Vicomte de Béarn, p.6.