Marie de' Medici (, ; 26 April 1575 – 3 July 1642) was Queen of France and Navarre as the second wife of King Henry IV. Marie served as regent of France between 1610 and 1617 during the minority of her son Louis XIII. Her mandate as regent legally expired in 1614, when her son reached the age of majority, but she refused to resign and continued as regent until she was removed by a coup in 1617. A member of the powerful House of Medici in the branch of the Grand Dukes of Tuscany, the wealth of her family caused Marie to be chosen by Henry IV to become his second wife after his divorce from his previous wife, Margaret of Valois. The assassination of her husband in 1610, which occurred the day after her coronation, caused her to act as regent for her son, Louis XIII, until 1614, when he officially attained his legal majority, but as the head of the Conseil du Roi, she retained the power. Noted for her ceaseless political intrigues at the French court, her extensive artistic patronage and her favorites (the most famous are Concino Concini and his wife, Leonora Dori Galigaï), she ended up being banished from the country by her son and dying in the city of Cologne, in the Holy Roman Empire. Life Early years Born at the Palazzo Pitti of Florence, Italy on 26 April 1575, Maria was the sixth daughter of Francesco I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and Archduchess Joanna of Austria. She was a descendant of Lorenzo the Elder –a branch of the Medici family sometimes referred to as the 'cadet' branch– through his daughter Lucrezia de' Medici, and was also a Habsburg through her mother, who was a direct descendant of Joanna of Castile and Philip I of Castile. Of her five elder sisters, only the eldest, Eleonora (born 28 February 1567) and the third, Anna (born 31 December 1569) survived infancy. Their only brother Philip de' Medici, was born on 20 May 1577. One year later (10 April 1578) Grand Duchess Joanna –heavily pregnant with her eighth child– fell from the stairs in the Grand Ducal Palace in Florence, dying the next day after giving birth to a premature stillborn son. A few months later, Grand Duke Francesco I married his longtime mistress Bianca Cappello; the marriage was officially revealed one year later,