CHAPTER XII

ASSASSINATION OF HENRY THE FOURTH OF FRANCE

(May 14, 1610)

Religious wars--that is to say, civil wars for religious causes--had desolated France for half a century, and tranquillity and apparent harmony had finally been restored only by the genius of one man--Henry the Fourth. He it was who issued the Edict of Nantes, conferring equal religious and political rights upon the professors of both religions, the Protestant and the Catholic.

A short time after Martin Luther had inaugurated the great movement of religious reform in Germany, a similar movement had also been organized in France; but it was only since 1536 and through the influential and energetic agitation of John Calvin that it had assumed large dimensions and acquired a really national importance. After the disastrous battle of Pavia and after his release from Spanish captivity, King Francis the First had ordered a cruel persecution against the Protestants for political reasons, but it had utterly failed to put a stop to this movement. On the contrary, a great many noblemen had joined the new church and the originally purely religious movement had gradually assumed a pronounced political character. But this change of tendency only added fuel to the flame of intolerance and persecution. Not only were hundreds of professors of the new church most cruelly executed on the gallows or burnt alive for heresy, but among the Waldenses in Provence and in the valleys bordering on Savoy a wholesale massacre was inaugurated, which aimed at nothing less than their entire extirpation. On account of their peaceful and industrial habits, these people had for a long time enjoyed toleration in spite of their dissenting religious opinions. No less than twenty flourishing villages were destroyed and burned to the ground, and their entire population, men, women and children, were butchered in the most barbarous manner. But it seemed as if the very horror which such acts of inhumanity inspired, and the heroic constancy and bravery with which these unfortunate victims of religious fanaticism had sealed their convictions with their blood, had rather increased than diminished the ranks of the Protestants. The French translation of the Bible, which was secretly circulated throughout the kingdom, proved also a powerful means of propagandism for the principles of reform among the better educated and thinking classes.

Francis the First died in 1547 and was succeeded by his son, Henry the Second, who considered the Protestant movement merely a political question, and treated it as such. In Germany he supported the Protestant princes in their fight against Charles the Fifth, but at home, in France, he persecuted the adherents of Calvin even more persistently and cruelly than his father had done. Hundreds of excellent citizens were sent to the gallows or to the stake for heresy, and even the possession or sale of a French Bible was deemed a sufficient crime to warrant the death punishment. Henry the Second died after a reign of twelve years, in 1559, from a wound received in a tournament and inflicted accidentally by the captain of his own body-guard. His successor, Francis the Second, the husband of Mary, Queen of Scotland, was entirely under the control of his wife’s uncles, the Duke of Guise and the Cardinal of Lorraine. For the Protestants matters grew worse and worse. Francis the Second, who was merely a boy, died after a reign of less than two years, and was succeeded by his brother Charles the Ninth, of bloody St. Bartholomew Night’s memory. He was succeeded by Henry the Third, who after an inglorious reign, in which torrents of blood had flowed without quenching the fire of religious fanaticism, was assassinated in 1589 by Jacques Clément, a young Dominican monk, who had become exasperated at the concessions which the King had made to the Protestant Church. Before expiring, King Henry the Third recognized the young King of Navarre as his successor, who then ascended the throne of France under the name of Henry the Fourth.

The wars which devastated France during the preceding three reigns were waged almost without interruption; they were of a semi-religious and semi-political character. These wars must be largely ascribed to the pernicious influence of Catherine de Médicis, the wife of Henry the Second, and the mother of his three sons, Francis the Second, Charles the Ninth and Henry the Third. Her name stands in history as a synonym for an astute, unscrupulous, cruel, and intriguing ruler and politician. At the time of Henry the Third’s assassination, he was investing the city of Paris, which was in the hands of his enemies, the League, under the command of the Duke of Mayenne, who himself was aspiring to the throne. It was therefore not an easy matter for the new King to assume the reins of government, the half of his kingdom being in arms against him, and the royal army itself, in whose ranks he was fighting, being hostile to the religion he (as a Protestant) professed.

But Henry the Fourth was equal to the difficult task. In fact, he was one of the most remarkable men who ever sat on a European throne. His career up to that day had been extremely stormy; his escape from death and perils innumerable was wonderful and stamped him as a man of destiny. It is reported of him that when he was present one day as a very young man at a brilliant reception at the French court, where nearly all the prominent men of the French capital were assembled, he strongly impressed the foreign ambassadors with the brilliancy of his wit and the sagacity of his observations. One of them said: “In this whole assemblage of dukes, princes and great dignitaries, I see but one man fit to rule either as king or emperor,” and pointing to Henry of Navarre he continued: “It is that young man with the eye of an eagle!”

Henry the Fourth was born in 1553, the son of Antony of Bourbon. His mother was Jeanne d’Albret, only child of Henry the Second, King of Navarre, and of his wife, Queen Margaret of Navarre, who has won a lasting place in literature by her famous collection of novels, known as the “Heptameron.” Much of the genius and _esprit_ which distinguished the grandmother was inherited both by her daughter and her grandson. Jeanne d’Albret was not only an excellent woman and mother, but she was also an enthusiastic admirer and supporter of the Calvinistic doctrine, and brought up her son in that faith. On account of her religion both Philip the Second of Spain and Catherine de Médicis, Queen of France, hated her intensely, and it seems that at an early day a sort of rivalry arose between Catherine and the mother of the boy concerning his education. Catherine maintained that, inasmuch as Henry was a royal prince and might be called upon some day to ascend the throne of France, it was absolutely necessary to educate him in the Catholic faith in order to make him worthy to rule over a Catholic country and occupy a throne whose occupant had for centuries been honored with the noble title of the “eldest son of the Church.”

In this contest over the boy the mother remained victorious, and, true to her religious convictions, she surrounded him with Protestant professors. But Catherine de Médicis was not a woman to abandon a scheme which she had formed and in which politics played a large part. She therefore concocted a plan for the abduction of young Henry, which would have succeeded and would have placed him under the immediate control of Philip the Second of Spain, had it not been betrayed to Henry’s mother, the Queen of Navarre. Henry was thereupon hurried off to La Rochelle, the headquarters of the Protestant army, where he was soon placed in nominal command of all the Protestant forces, although the famous Admiral Coligny was its real leader.

We may fitly pass without comment the stormy years preceding Henry’s elevation to the throne of France. In order to reconcile the Protestant and the Catholic branches of the reigning dynasty, Catherine de Médicis was successful in her plan of a marriage between Henry of Navarre and her own daughter Marguerite, although the Pope hesitated a long time in giving his permission to this family alliance, which was in every respect a very unfortunate one. As far as Catherine de Médicis was concerned, her principal intention in planning it was the hope of continuing under Henry the Fourth’s reign (if he ever should become king) the absolute rule which she had so successfully maintained under the reign of her sons. Far from using her influence and authority to secure, if possible, the happiness of the young couple, she held out to both all possible temptations to lead them astray, and openly advanced Henry’s liaisons with other beautiful ladies of the court. It is also pretty well established by historical evidence that Catherine, in order to withdraw Henry from the beneficial influence of his mother, caused her death by poison in the very year of his marriage. At the massacre of St. Bartholomew’s night, Henry escaped death by abjuring Protestantism, King Charles the Ninth having left him the choice between going to mass and suffering death. Henry preferred the former and professed Catholicism as his religion until 1576, when he suddenly and secretly left the court, and, retracting his forced abjuration, placed himself once more at the head of the Protestant party.

In 1584 the death of the Duke of Anjou made Henry the legitimate heir to the crown of France, and five years later, the death of Henry the Third made him King. But only the southern provinces and the Protestants recognized him as their king. The Catholics vehemently protested against this heretical king, and refused obedience to him. The League, which kept an army of 30,000 men in the field against him, and which was supported by the King of Spain, not only refused to recognize him, but proclaimed an aged uncle of his, the Cardinal de Bourbon, King of France, and Spain adhered to this decision. The civil war between the contending factions continued with greater fury and obstinacy than ever, and it was in this campaign, in which Henry always fought against tremendous odds, that he displayed his wonderful ability and tact as a political and military leader. Finally his second conversion to Catholicism on the twenty-third of July, 1593, which was simply a political measure and not at all dictated by religious motives, decided the succession to the throne in his favor, although it took years of warfare and diplomatic negotiation to secure his recognition by Spain and the leaders of the League.

Henry the Fourth’s greatest political achievement, by which he manifested his far-seeing ability as a statesman, was the Edict of Nantes, promulgated on the thirteenth of April, 1598. It guaranteed freedom of conscience and equality before the law to Catholics and Protestants; and it was the first great manifesto of religious toleration issued by any ruler. But noble and high-minded as it was, even if inspired only by political motives, the fanatics of the Catholic Church would not forgive him. Unquestionably it was the Edict of Nantes which caused his assassination,--an act of revenge with which the Church paid back the injury it supposed it had received at his hands.

Henry, with the assistance of his great minister, the Duke of Sully, devoted the first few years, after peace had been restored, to building up the prosperity of the country, which had been distracted by war for nearly forty years. In this he admirably succeeded. With wonderful rapidity the monarchy recovered from the disasters and calamities of the religious and civil wars. Without Henry’s success, late as it came, this national improvement would have been impossible, and France would have sunk into the same condition of intellectual lethargy and material decay from which Spain has suffered for three centuries. But Henry’s ambition went much beyond the borders of his kingdom. The house of Hapsburg, a branch of which ruled Spain, appeared to him too dangerous for the security and greatness of France. He supported the German Protestant princes in their opposition to Austria, which wanted to take possession of Juliers-Cleves, two German principalities, and sent an army of ten thousand men to their assistance. Henry wanted to join personally this army on the nineteenth of May, 1610. On the thirteenth of May he published a decree appointing the Queen, Mary de Médicis, Regent of the kingdom, and her coronation was celebrated on the same day with great pomp.

On the fourteenth of May, the day after the coronation, the King was assassinated by Francis Ravaillac in the Ferronière Street at Paris, where his carriage had stopped a few minutes. It was this short delay which gave Ravaillac a chance: he climbed upon the hind-wheel of the carriage and stabbed the King twice with a long poniard, with deadly effect. It was thus that the greatest King France has produced died at the hands of a miserable fanatic, at a moment too when, according to the statement of Sully, who knew him better than any other man, he had formed a plan of establishing a great European confederation, founded on the civil equality of Catholics and Protestants and on an equilibrium of power among the great nations of Europe. Ravaillac was executed with revolting barbarity on the twenty-seventh of May, but not even the repeated application of the torture elicited the least information as to the motives or the accomplices which he may have had in his crime. Henry’s death was a cruel loss not only for France, but for the whole world.

The assassination of Henry the Fourth ended in France the era of famous political murders, which during the religious wars had taken off Coligny, Henry of Guise, and the two kings, Henry the Third and Henry the Fourth, all during one generation. But of these only the assassination of Henry the Fourth has made a lasting and profound impression on his contemporaries as well as on posterity. It has enhanced his reputation and glory by enshrining his name among the great martyrs of history. It was one of the most patriotic and high-minded thoughts of Voltaire to make Henry the Fourth the hero of his epic poem “La Henriade,” which although not ranking with the great poems of Milton, Tasso, and Virgil, in poetic merit, is still a noble hymn of liberty and a glorification of religious toleration, as well as of Henry, its representative. It is uncertain whether the profound horror which the assassination of Henry caused throughout the world, or the terrible punishment inflicted on Ravaillac, caused assassins to desist from their nefarious work, but certain it is that no new assassination of a king or any member of the royal family of France took place from the death of Henry the Fourth to the assassination of the Duc de Berry, the presumptive heir of Charles the Tenth, in 1820. Not that no attempts on the life of any or all of the French monarchs since the days of Henry the Fourth were made; but all such attempts had failed, and instead of killing the rulers, had only led to the cruel and horrible execution of the conspirators.

Most remarkable among these was the assault of Damiens on King Louis the Fifteenth, one of the most dissolute and worthless monarchs,--one who in the gratification of his lusts was utterly oblivious of common decency and shame. Louis the Fifteenth came nearer reviving the atrocious immorality of Claudius, Caligula, Caracalla, Heliogabalus in the palace of the Cæsars of ancient Rome, than any other modern monarch had done. It was the age of Madame de Pompadour and the monstrosities of the “deer park.” The French nation blushed at the excesses of the court, which paved the way for the great Revolution, already dimly foreseen by some ingenious observers, as one of the necessities of the future. It was at this time, when public indignation, not to say public disgust, had reached its culminating point, that an attempt on the life of the King was made.

It was on the fifth of January, 1757, at six o’clock in the evening, on a cold and dark day, that he stepped out of the doorway of the palace of Versailles and went up to a carriage waiting for him to take him to Trianon. All at once he felt that somebody had run against him, and at the same time that he was bleeding from a wound in the side. He uttered a cry of pain and alarm, and when the torch-bearers drew near and surrounded him, the King noticed a man who alone among all those present had kept his hat on. “This man has assaulted and wounded me!” exclaimed the King, pointing to the man whose head remained covered. “Arrest him, but do not harm him!” It makes almost a painful impression to find that an embodiment of vice and debauchery like Louis the Fifteenth should at such a moment have been inspired with feelings of mercy toward his assassin, and should have used almost the identical words which fell from the lips of the pure and high-minded President McKinley after Czolgosz had fatally wounded him! But history records them, and we must give even the devil his due.

The attempt on the King’s life caused a tremendous sensation in Paris, where immediately the most exaggerated reports concerning the fatal wounding of the King and the discovery of a widespread conspiracy to assassinate him were circulated. Damiens was treated with the greatest severity. As though the crime which he had tried to commit had been really committed, and as though the stab he had given to the King had had fatal effect, the criminal was treated as a regicide, and the terrible machinery of the law provided for in such cases, and in France not employed since the trial of Ravaillac, was put in operation. Even during his transportation from Versailles to Paris measures of precaution were used, as if a state prisoner of the most dangerous character and of the greatest importance were to be guarded. Regiments of soldiers surrounded his carriage, and six sergeants with drawn swords marched on each side. Strict orders had been issued to the citizens of Paris not to go out on the streets or appear at the front windows of their houses. Everything had been done to create the impression of a conspiracy against the government which counted many influential men among its members and of which the assassin was merely the tool, while those who were directing him and using his arm against the King, had to be sought in the highest classes of the aristocracy, and especially among the enemies of Madame de Pompadour. Great efforts were made to get a full confession from Damiens. Who was he? How had he formed the plan to assassinate the King? Who had instigated him to commit the act? Who were his accomplices? These were the questions to be solved by the French police authorities, and for whose solution they did not hesitate to apply the most cruel measures known to them. But the result of their painstaking investigation was far from realizing their expectations. It was found that Damiens belonged to the lower classes of the people. He had learned the trade of a locksmith, but had preferred to enter the service of rich lords and ladies as a domestic. Being of a very restless and quarrelsome disposition, he had changed his positions as often as Gil Blas had changed his masters. He had been in the houses of parliamentarians, clergymen, noblemen, orthodox Catholics, Jansenists, Molinists, Protestants, free thinkers. Often he had served at the table of the great lords and ladies of the kingdom and had listened to the conversation of the guests; and invariably the subject of the conversation had turned on the disgraceful conduct of the King, on his excesses, on the shameful orgies of the court, on the mysteries of the “deer park,” where not only the virtue of young girls of the people was ruthlessly sacrificed, but also the money extorted from the sweat of the people criminally squandered. Wherever he had gone he had heard the same story, and it had made a deep impression upon him. Damiens had always been of an eccentric turn of mind; he had even had spells of religious exaltation, and for three years he had seriously meditated on the possibility of rescuing the King from his sinful excesses and debauches.

He finally had come to the conclusion that the only possibility of turning the King’s mind away from his vicious habits and arousing his soul to sentiments of honor and duty might come through fear, by placing him in the immediate presence of death. This thought preyed so incessantly and so strongly on his mind that he resolved to become the instrument of the King’s redemption, by attacking and wounding, but not killing him. The attempt on the King’s life was therefore the result of a psychological process which was, perhaps, based on wrong and extravagant premises, but which, if all the circumstances are taken into consideration, was rather meritorious than criminal in its aim. The assassin had acted strictly in accord with his preconceived theory. He had in his possession a knife with two blades, one of which was very long, sharp and pointed like a dagger, while the other was quite short and sharp. It seemed to be impossible to inflict a mortal wound with the short blade, and Damiens had used it in wounding the King. He had no accomplices. At first, very likely to mitigate his punishment, he had hinted at the existence of a widespread conspiracy, contemplating the assassination of the King, the Dauphin, and others, but he soon retracted these statements, and even the most severe application of the torture could not elicit from him any other declaration than this: that he had no accomplices, that nobody, not even his wife and his young daughter, had known anything of his intention; that he did not intend to kill the King, though he could easily have done so; that he had only intended to wound him for the purpose of frightening and warning him; that his act had been inspired by the wish of saving France and the dynasty.

But all these statements, which could not be controverted by conflicting evidence, made no impression upon judges who had fully made up their minds beforehand, and who looked upon the man that wanted to touch even the King’s finger with the same horror as upon a regicide who might have stabbed him through the heart and killed him. The sentence passed upon Damiens was therefore in conformity with their preconceived opinion, and cruel in the extreme. It was based upon the sentence carried out against Ravaillac for having killed the greatest of kings and one of the benefactors of mankind. Though Damiens was an eccentric ponderer, a foolish dreamer, who had but slightly wounded a heartless voluptuary that had deserved death a hundred times, his sentence was terrible beyond description, and was actually carried out in the presence of an immense multitude. At first his right hand, in which was placed the knife with which he had struck the King, was burned to the bone. Thereupon his arms, his legs, his breast, his back and his feet were lacerated with burning tongs; molten lead, boiling oil, burning sulphur, rosin, and wax were poured into the open wounds; and finally, while he was still suffering unimaginable pain, four strong horses, hitched to his arms and legs, tried for half an hour with all their might to tear out his limbs. After that time only one arm remained in the body, and it took another five minutes’ work to pull it out of its socket. The body of the unfortunate man had been pulled to almost double its length and width, and its power of resistance amazed all the spectators. When at last the cruel execution was over, the bleeding trunk and the arms and legs were thrown upon a pile of wood near the scaffold and destroyed by fire. The spectacle had struck terror into the hearts of the beholders.

But even with this terrible act of revenge the criminal justice of France was not satisfied; it reached out for the innocent family of the criminal. His father, his wife, and his daughter were banished from France for life, not to return there on penalty of death, while his brothers, sisters, and other relatives had to change their names. The house in which he was born was burned to the ground, and any other trace which he might have left was carefully obliterated. The crime of Damiens was not one of the famous assassinations in history, but it caused such a sensation in Europe, and it was punished so cruelly, that we thought his attempt on the life of Louis the Fifteenth might very properly be recorded in this book.