Henri IV at the battle of Arques

In August 1589 Henri of Navarre became king of France on paper and on very little else. The last Valois king, Henri III, had been stabbed by a Dominican friar, and his heir was a Protestant whom the Catholic League, the armed party of French Catholics, refused to accept. Henri fell back to Normandy, near the port of Dieppe where English help could land, and dug in around the castle of Arques. That September the League's commander, the Duke of Mayenne, attacked with a far larger army and could not break him. Two painters share this canvas. Rubens did the figures in front, which fill only about a third of it. The battle behind them is by Pieter Snayers, a battle specialist working for the court in Brussels, and the Alte Pinakothek notes that he set the fighting down as it actually happened. The king rides here as leader of the Huguenots, the French Protestants, four years before he converted to Catholicism.