The choice of Hercules: Henry IV as hero

Abstract

ABSTRACT In February 1610, the English chargé d'affaires reported that Henry IV of France, having decided to go to war in the Spanish Netherlands, had lately been measured for a new suit of armour, and had also displayed in his chamber a table or tableau, ‘wherein is paynted a man fleeing from Venus and the image of gaming, and following Hercules after two other images, of hope and fortune, with these verses: I go to the temple of virtue, hope and fortune precede me; farewell damned pleasure.’ This piece of visual propaganda encoded a variant of the Choice of Hercules, which appealed to the king's lifelong self-construct as heroic warrior. We trace the complex history of his heroic self-fashioning, showing how Henry IV after 1598 compensated for the absence of war through the hunt, gambling, and sexual domination. The dissonance between what Henry IV perceived himself to be and what he feared by 1610 he had become makes it easier to understand what drove him to his appointment in the rue de la Ferronerie .