CHAP. XXIX.]

HENRY ASSASSINATED BY RAVAILLAC.

89

The cares of Henry were aggravated by a presentiment of his own approaching fate. Unacquainted with fear on the battlefield, he dreaded the knife of the assassin; dark rumours of conspiracies were floating about, and he communicated to Sully his conviction that he should be murdered on the occasion of the first great public solemnity. Such an occasion was approaching. On the 20th of March, 1610, Henry had issued a decree conferring the regency on his consort, Mary de' Medici, during his absence from the kingdom, but subject to a council of fifteen persons, with whom all the effective authority would lie. As the Queen, like any other member of it, had only a single vote, Mary's self-love was sorely wounded by this step; but she used the conjuncture to persuade Henry to complete the long-deferred ceremony of her coronation, although he grudged both the expense of that pageant and the delay which it would cause in his departure.

And now everything was arranged for carrying out that grand scheme of policy which Henry had so long been meditating. The troops had begun to move; the Queen had been crowned with great pomp at St. Denis by the Cardinal de Joyeuse, May 13th; her solemn entry into Paris was fixed for the 16th; and three days afterwards the King was to set off for the army. But on the 14th, while passing in his carriage from the Rue St. Honoré into the Rue de la Ferronerie, its progress was arrested by two carts; and at this moment a man mounted on the wheel and stabbed the King with a knife between the ribs. Henry threw up his arms, exclaiming "I am wounded;" and the assassin seized the opportunity to repeat the blow more fatally, by stabbing him to the heart. He never spoke more. The murderer was seized by the King's suite, and turned out to be one François Ravaillac, who had begun a noviciate in the convent of the Feuillants at Paris, and had afterwards been a schoolmaster in his native town of Angoulême. In his examination he assigned as his motives for the deed, the King's having neglected to convert the Hugonots, and his design of making war upon the Pope; that is, in Ravaillac's notion, on God himself. In this view his crime was the result of fanaticism, inflamed by the discourses and sermons which he heard; but the Spanish Court, Mary de' Medici, and Concini, gained so much by the act, that there were not wanting some who suspected them to be privy to it; together with the Duke of Epernon, who was in the coach with Henry at the time, and to whom the town of Angoulême belonged. Nay, it is even said that Ravaillac, during the last dreadful tortures of his

90

HENRY IV.'S CHARACTER.

[CHAP. XXIX. execution, denounced their names; but the papers containing his depositions were suppressed.1 These charges, however, rest on

no certain foundation.

Thus perished Henry IV., and with him his extensive projects, at a time when his robust constitution, at the age of nearly fiftyseven, still promised many years of life. The main features of his character will have been gathered from his history, for his virtues and defects were alike without concealment. In the more private intercourse of life his tastes and habits were of the simplest kind. He preferred the bagpipe and hautboy to more refined and artificial music; he loved to mix and talk with the people in the taverns or ferry-boats whither his hunting-parties led him; and when campaigning he would sit with the soldiers and partake of their black bread. He frequented the fairs and markets, and often made purchases, but he always offered the lowest price, and it was observed to be of no advantage to deal with the King.* Some parts of his conduct it would be difficult to defend; but it may be easier to rail at his faults and weaknesses than to imitate his virtues.

See Michelet, Henri IV. et Richelieu. 2 Ranke, Französ. Gesch. B. ii. S. 100.

CHAP. XXX.] MARY DE' MEDICI SEIZES THE REGENCY. 91

N°

CHAPTER XXX.

O sooner had the murder of Henry IV. been perpetrated, than the Duke of Epernon, who had been an eye-witness of it, hastened, in his capacity of colonel-general of the French infantry, to appoint the guard at the Louvre, and to occupy with troops the principal places of the capital. The ministers of the late King, Sillery, Villeroi, and Jeannin, with whom Epernon and Guise agreed, advised Mary to seize the regency before the Princes of the blood should have time to dispute it with her; and Epernon proceeded to the convent of the Augustinians, where the Parliament had been assembled, and overawed it by his language. That body, however, was of itself sufficiently inclined to exert a privilege which did not constitutionally belong to it. Henry had been murdered at four o'clock in the afternoon; before seven, the Parliament brought to Mary de' Medici an arrêt conferring upon her the regency; to which, indeed, she had already been appointed by Henry, though for a different purpose, and with less extensive powers.

In these proceedings, Sully, the prime minister of Henry, was conspicuous by his absence. At the time of the King's murder, Sully was waiting for him at the arsenal: instead of Henry came a gentleman of his suite, bringing the knife, which still reeked with his blood. Sully's first impulse was to mount his horse and ride towards the Louvre; in the Rue St. Honoré he was met by Vitry, the captain of the guards, who, with tears in his eyes, implored him to go no further; it was rumoured, he said, that the plot had been hatched in high places, had many ramifications. Sully turned his horse's head, and shut himself up in the Bastille; whence he sent a message to his son-in-law, the Duke of Rohan, then in Champagne, to hasten to Paris with the 6,000 Swiss of whom he was colonel-general. But the Queen sent to assure Sully of her confidence; and on the following morning he appeared at the Louvre; Mary brought to him the infant Louis XIII., and while Sully embraced the heir of his late friend and master, the Queen besought him to serve the son as he had served

92

the father.

EXECUTION OF RAVAILLAC.

[CHAP. XXX.

Deceitful words! Concini was already director of Mary and the State. On the same morning, the regency of the Queen was solemnly confirmed in a Lit de Justice, at which the youthful King presided, and in infantine tones appointed his mother to be his tutor. Not many weeks after we find him imploring the guardian he had himself appointed not to apply the horsewhip too severely; for personal chastisement was among the means of his education.

1

The Regency of Mary de' Medici was not unpopular. She was now in the meridian of womanly beauty; a well-developed person and a majestic air procured for her the admiration of the Parisians, and in her progresses through the capital she was received with the acclamations of the people. But they also lamented the loss of Henry, whose merits were not appreciated till he was dead. It was difficult to save Ravaillac, when proceeding to execution, from the fury of the populace; his remains, instead of being burnt pursuant to his sentence, were seized by the crowd and torn to pieces; even the peasants of the neighbourhood carried off portions of them to burn in their villages. The Sorbonne, at the instance of the Parliament of Paris, issued a decree condemning the principles from which the assassination had proceeded, and the Parliament itself ordered the book of Mariana, in which that Jesuit sanctions regicide, to be burnt. Yet Henry had courted that Society, apparently to propitiate their power of doing him mischief. To gratify his confessor, Père Cotton, he had appointed by his will that his heart should be entombed in their church at La Flèche, and one morning early, before Paris was awake, several of the fraternity carried it off secretly in a coach, escorted by many of the nobility on horseback. It was a prize, as L'Estoile maliciously observes, for which they had long been waiting.2

Mary de' Medici had stolen a march upon the Princes of the blood, whose characters did not render them very formidable. Condé, as we have seen, was absent in Italy; of his two uncles, one, the Prince of Conti, was almost imbecile, the other, the Count of Soissons, who had absented himself from Court, was entirely venal. He arrived in Paris on the 17th of May, but abandoned all his pretensions for a sum of 200,000 crowns and an annual pension of 50,000. Henry of Condé, first Prince of the blood, was, as already related, in a state of rebellion against

Michelet, Henri IV. p. 203.

2 Journal de Louis XIII. t. v. p. 8 (Petitot). Cf. Michelet, Henri IV. p. 206.

CHAP. XXX.]

RETIREMENT OF SULLY.

93

Henry IV.; but he protested his devotion to the young King, and finding that he should be well received, returned to Paris in the middle of July, when most of the nobility, who were disgusted with the conduct of Concini, and other rapacious favourites by whom the Queen was surrounded, went out to meet and welcome him; and he entered the capital at the head of 1,500 gentlemen.1 But Condé was as meanly venal as his uncle. At his first interview with the Queen, Mary was all grace, the Prince all submission. The treasure amassed by Henry IV. in the Bastille for his projected war supplied Mary with unlimited means of seduction, and the County of Clermont, a pension of 200,000 livres, the Hotel Gondi, with 30,000 crowns to furnish it, together with a seat in the Council, converted Condé from a rival into a subject. The Queen also gained the leading nobles by giving them pensions and governments; the people by remitting several unpopular ordinances and taxes; the Hugonots by confirming the Edict of Nantes. Her new situation seemed to have roused a fresh spirit in her. She was up at sunrise to receive her privy council; she devoted the whole morning to business; after dinner she admitted to an audience all who demanded it; and in the evening she discussed her affairs with confidential friends.

But there was one man who was not to be gained. Sully viewed with aversion both the domestic and foreign policy of Mary, so contrary to all his former projects. He resolved to retire, and in October, during the sacre of Louis XIII. at Rheims, he obtained leave to visit his estates, and set off with a determination never to return. His administrative talents were soon missed; nothing went right in his absence; and, at the pressing solicitation of Mary and her ministers, he again returned to the helm. He was now about fifty years of age, in the full maturity of his powers, and ambitious to employ his talents in those schemes for the benefit of France which had so long engrossed his attention; but he met with a furious opposition from the rapacious courtiers and nobles; his life was even threatened, and in January, 1611, he found himself compelled finally to relinquish office. From this time till his death in 1641, at the age of eighty-one, his life was passed in retirement on his estates of

1 Mém. d'Estrées (in Petitot, 2de sér. t. xvi. p. 189). If the Queen had not persuaded some gentlemen to remain with the King, says Pontchartrain (Mém. t. i. p. 418), not one would have stayed in Paris.

* Jeannin admitted to the States-Gene

ral in 1614 that pensions, which under Henry IV. had been less than two millions per annum, then figured for a sum of 5,650,000 livres! Relation des EtatsGén. in the Arch. Curieuses, 2de sér. t. i.; Fontenai-Mareuil, t. i. p. 134.