Alfonso XII of Spain

Antoine de Bourbon, Duke of Vendôme, was a French prince of the blood and the father of Henry IV, the first Bourbon king of France. Born at La Fère in Picardy in 1518, he was the senior male descendant of Robert, Count of Clermont, a younger son of Louis IX, which placed his branch of the Capetian house close to the French succession. His marriage in 1548 to Jeanne d'Albret, heiress and later queen regnant of Navarre, made him king consort of Navarre from 1555 and joined the Bourbon name to a sovereign crown. He moved between the Catholic and Protestant camps during the French Wars of Religion and served as lieutenant general of the kingdom in the year before his death in 1562.

Jeanne d'Albret was queen regnant of Navarre from 1555 until 1572 and the mother of Henry IV of France. The daughter of Henry II of Navarre and Marguerite of Angoulême, sister of Francis I of France, she inherited the small Pyrenean kingdom and ruled it in her own right. Her marriage to Antoine de Bourbon, Duke of Vendôme, brought the Bourbons a crown and produced Henry of Navarre, who would become the first Bourbon king of France. Jeanne converted to Calvinism in 1560 and became the most prominent Protestant ruler in France, establishing the reformed religion in Béarn and acting as a political leader of the Huguenot party. She died in Paris in 1572.

Henry IV was the first Bourbon king of France, reigning from 1589 to 1610, and is the figure from whom every later French and Spanish Bourbon descends. Born at Pau in 1553 to Antoine de Bourbon and Jeanne d'Albret, he became King of Navarre in 1572 and leader of the Huguenot cause in the French Wars of Religion. When the Valois line ended with Henry III in 1589 he was the senior Capetian heir, but as a Protestant he had to fight for his kingdom and finally entered Paris after converting to Catholicism in 1593. His Edict of Nantes of 1598 granted French Protestants legal toleration and ended nearly forty years of civil war. With his second wife, Marie de' Medici, he fathered Louis XIII. He died in Paris in 1610.

Louis XIII was King of France and Navarre from 1610 to 1643, the eldest son of Henry IV and Marie de' Medici. He came to the throne as a boy of eight under his mother's regency and asserted his own authority in 1617. From 1624 he governed with Cardinal Richelieu as his chief minister, a partnership that broke the political and military independence of the Huguenots at the siege of La Rochelle, curbed the power of the great nobles, and brought France into the Thirty Years' War against the Habsburgs of Spain and Austria. His marriage to Anne of Austria produced two sons after more than twenty years without an heir: the future Louis XIV and Philippe, Duke of Orléans, founder of the Orléans branch.

Henrietta Maria was Queen of England, Scotland and Ireland as the wife of Charles I, and the youngest daughter of Henry IV of France and Marie de' Medici. Born in Paris in 1609, she married Charles in 1625, and her Catholicism made her a controversial figure at the English court and a target of Parliament's suspicion in the years before the English Civil War. She raised funds and support abroad for the royalist cause and spent the years of the war and the Commonwealth in France, returning to England after the Restoration of her son Charles II in 1660. Her sons Charles II and James II both became kings of England. The American colony of Maryland was named in her honour. She died near Paris in 1669.

Louis XIV, known as the Sun King, reigned as King of France and Navarre from 1643 to 1715, a span of seventy-two years that remains the longest documented reign of any European sovereign. The son of Louis XIII and Anne of Austria, he succeeded at the age of four, took personal control of government on Mazarin's death in 1661, and ruled thereafter without a first minister. He made the court at Versailles the centre of French political and cultural life, backed the arts and the sciences through royal academies, revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, and fought a long series of wars that left France dominant but exhausted. His marriage to Maria Theresa of Spain produced the Grand Dauphin, and his grandson Philip took the Spanish throne in 1700.

Philippe I, Duke of Orléans, was the younger son of Louis XIII and Anne of Austria, the only brother of Louis XIV, and the founder of the Orléans branch of the Bourbons that eventually gave France its last king. Born in 1640, he was known at court simply as Monsieur. He was a capable soldier who commanded the French army to victory at the Battle of Cassel in 1677, after which Louis XIV gave him no further independent command. At his residences of Saint-Cloud and the Palais-Royal he was a lavish patron of art, theatre and gardens. His first wife was Henrietta of England; his second, Elizabeth Charlotte of the Palatinate, was the mother of his successor Philippe II. He died at Saint-Cloud in 1701.

Louis, known as the Grand Dauphin and addressed at court simply as Monseigneur, was the eldest son of Louis XIV and Maria Theresa of Spain and heir to the French throne for almost fifty years without ever reigning. Born at Fontainebleau in 1661, he was educated under the historian Bossuet, commanded French forces in the Rhineland campaign of 1688, and otherwise lived apart from government at his château of Meudon, where he assembled a notable art collection. His marriage to Maria Anna Victoria of Bavaria produced three sons: Louis, Duke of Burgundy, Philip, who became Philip V of Spain, and Charles, Duke of Berry. He died at Meudon in 1711, four years before his father.

Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, governed France as regent from 1715 to 1723 during the minority of Louis XV, a period known ever since as the Régence. Born at Saint-Cloud in 1674, the son of Philippe I and Elizabeth Charlotte of the Palatinate, he was a nephew of Louis XIV and distinguished himself as a commander in Italy and Spain during the War of the Spanish Succession. As regent he set aside the late king's will, restored a measure of influence to the parlement and the nobility, reversed the alliance with Spain in favour of Britain, and supported the financial experiments of the Scottish banker John Law, whose paper money scheme collapsed spectacularly in 1720. He was a cultivated patron of painting and opera and died at Versailles in 1723.

Louis, Duke of Burgundy, was the eldest son of the Grand Dauphin and the grandson of Louis XIV, and was heir to the French throne for the last year of his life. Born at Versailles in 1682, he was educated by the archbishop and writer Fénelon, who turned a hot-tempered boy into a serious and devout prince with reforming ideas about kingship and the burden of war on the French people. He commanded in Flanders during the War of the Spanish Succession and became Dauphin on his father's death in 1711. His marriage to Marie Adélaïde of Savoy produced the future Louis XV. He died at Marly in February 1712, only days after his wife, leaving his young son as heir to his great-grandfather.

Philip V was the first Bourbon king of Spain and the founder of the dynasty that reigns there today. Born at Versailles in 1683 as Philip, Duke of Anjou, he was the second son of Louis, the Grand Dauphin, and a grandson of Louis XIV. The childless Charles II of Spain named him heir, and he took the throne in 1700, triggering the War of the Spanish Succession, which ended in 1714 with his crown confirmed and his claim to France renounced. He centralised the Spanish state on the French model through the Nueva Planta decrees, rebuilt the navy and pursued Italian ambitions driven by his second wife, Elisabeth Farnese. He abdicated in January 1724 in favour of his son Louis I and resumed the throne on Louis's death that year, reigning until 1746.