When Philippe-le-Bel came to the throne of France it was his wife Jeanne who, by common consent, administered the affairs of Navarre. She chased the Aragonians and Castilians from her fair province, and put her people into a state of security hitherto unknown. "She held," said Mézeray the historian, "every one enchanted by her eyes, her ears, and her heart, and she was equally eloquent, generous and liberal." A veritable paragon of a woman evidently. Henri II, son of Catherine and Jean d'Albret II, succeeded to the throne of French Navarre at the age of thirteen. He followed the French king, François, to Italy, and was made prisoner at the unfortunate battle of Pavia, finally escaping through a ruse. François Premier, king of France, and Henri d'Albret, king of Navarre, each nourished an equal aversion for the king of Spain, the prime cause of that fateful day at Pavia. The first hated the Spanish monarch as a rival; the second as the usurper of his lands. They united arms, but the battle of Pavia, when "all was lost save honour," gave matters such a setback that naught but time could overcome them. It was Henri II's marriage with Marguerite of Valois, the Duchesse d'Alençon, in 1526, by which he acquired the Armagnac succession as a gift from his brother-in-law, François Premier, that brought to Navarre's crown nearly all of Guyenne. In 1555 the young king died at Pau, leaving a daughter, Jeanne d'Albret, who with her second husband, Antoine de Bourbon, Duc de Vendome, succeeded to the throne. The new rulers did not attempt or accomplish much, save to embrace Calvinism with zeal. Suffice to recall the well-known facts that Antoine died in 1562 from a wound received in the siege of Rouen, and that Jeanne herself died from the poison of the wicked Catherine de Medici's gloves at Paris. Their son, Henri III of Navarre, was the Henri IV of France. Born at Pau in 1553, he was first only the Comte de Viane. When he came to Paris he would not have allied his Pyrenean possessions with those of France but for the pressure brought to bear upon him. He declared that his ancestral lands should remain entirely separate, but the procureur general, La Guesle, forced his hand, and it was thus that the Royaume de France became augmented by Basse-Navarre, the Comtés d'Armagnac, Foix, d'Albret and Bigorre, the Duché de Vendome, the Comté de Périgord and the Vicomté de Limoges.