Jeanne d’Albret, also known as Jeanne III, was Queen of the Kingdom of Navarre during the mid to late 1500s and the last active ruler of Navarre, which is now a province in northern Spain, close to the French border.
She was the daughter of King Henry of Navarre and Marguerite of Navarre and niece of King Francois I of France, which would have a great impact on her life, as she was raised and educated in France and became the face of the French Huguenot movement.
Jeanne was forced to marry Anne of Cleves’ brother when she was 12, as it was a match advantageous to her uncle, but only four years later was able to have her marriage annulled. And don’t go thinking that she was allowed to have it annulled because it was her wish; it was because her uncle’s alliance with England formally ended and it was no longer profitable to have her married to an English nobleman. What warms the heart a little bit about this situation is knowing that Jeanne had her mother as a fierce ally—her mother refused to let her be alone with her husband, and lobbied every day for the annulment.
She then married again, and this time supposedly for love, although her husband was a known womanizer. Her son later became the king of France and Navarre.
What interests me more than all of these facts is what Jeanne was interested in—writing. She wrote poems, memoirs (including her own), and letters, and was an activist (even though the term hardly existed back then) for radical reform in Navarre and believed in humanist thinking and individual liberty. She was also passionately dedicated to her religion, and established Navarre as a safe haven for French Protestants who fled France during the wars of religion. Her mother was a huge influence for her, as she was also literary and spoke several languages.
Jeanne converted Navarre to Calvinism and had the Bible translated to Basque. She was instrumental in the peace treaty that led to the end of the religious wars in France, and was recognized as one of the foremost leaders of her time, as well as one of the main actors of the Reformation movement in France.
Jeanne died in 1572, shortly before the massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day, which reignited the religious wars in France, undoing much of the work she had accomplished over the years.