United States or Gibraltar ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Never was king more beloved by his subjects than Henry of Navarre, who had so many of the frank and genial qualities which his nation valued. There was mourning as for a father when the fanatic, Ravaillac, struck him to the ground. It seemed strange that death should come in the same guise to the first of the Bourbon line and the last of the Valois.
Character of Madame de Maintenon. Depression of the dauphiness. Père la Chaise. The Edict of Nantes. The Catholic clergy indignant. Ravaillac. Confirmation of the Edict of Nantes. La Rochelle. Sufferings of the Huguenots. Policy of Louis. Influence of Madame de Maintenon. Religious zeal of the king. False-hearted. Persecution of the Protestants. Severe measures to force proselytism.
So is it sedition in subjects to dispute what a king may do in the height of his power. But just kings will ever be willing to declare what they will do, if they will not incur the curse of God. This year was distinguished by a memorable event, which gave great alarm and concern in England; the murder of the French monarch by the poniard of the fanatical Ravaillac.
Theirs, then, is a statesmanship which it may be well for the leading men of this land and time to be looking at and thinking of, and its representative man shall be Richelieu. Never, perhaps, did a nation plunge more suddenly from the height of prosperity into the depth of misery than did France on that fourteenth of May, 1610, when Henry IV. fell dead by the dagger of Ravaillac.
Epernon, the true murderer of Henry, trampled on courts of justice and councils of ministers, frightened the court by threatening to convert his possession of Metz into an independent sovereignty, as Balagny had formerly seized upon Cambray, smothered for ever the process of Ravaillac, caused those to be put to death or immured for life in dungeons who dared to testify to his complicity in the great crime, and strode triumphantly over friends and enemies throughout France, although so crippled by the gout that he could scarcely walk up stairs.
The deeds of people like Jacques Clement, Ravaillac, Corday, Sand, and Caserio, are all of the same kind; hardly anyone will be found to-day to maintain that Sand's action followed from the views of the Burschenschaft, or Clement's from Catholicism, even when we learn that Sand was regarded by his fellows as a saint, as was Charlotte Corday and Clement, or even when learned Jesuits like Sa, Mariana, and others, cum licentia et approbatione superiorum, in connection with Clement's outrage, discussed the question of regicide in a manner not unworthy of Netschajew or Most.
No one had seen by what hand the King had fallen; and had the regicide flung away his weapon, he might have stood unquestioned among the crowd which instantly collected upon seeing the six nobles who had accompanied the sovereign spring to the ground, with loud exclamations of dismay; but Ravaillac stood firm, with his reeking and two-edged knife still in his hand, and avowed his crime with a boldness which in a better cause would have savoured of heroism.
The assassin Ravaillac, who plunged his dagger twice into the bosom of the king, said, in his examination, "I killed the king because, in making war upon the pope, he made war upon God, since the pope is God." The Protestants were thrown into the utmost consternation by the death of Henry IV. They apprehended the immediate repeal of the edict, and a renewal of the massacre of St.
Two days after the coronation, as Henry was going to the arsenal to visit his old friend Sully, he was stabbed to the heart in his coach, in the streets of Paris, by a fanatic named Ravaillac.
However, it stands recorded, I am told, in a manuscript found in the National Library, that Ravaillac killed Henry IV because he had seduced his sister, and abandoned her when pregnant. Thus time, that affords a clue to most mysteries, has also solved this historical enigma. This statue of Henry IV was erected on the 23d of August, 1624.
Word Of The Day