HENRY IV. OF FRANCE 173 The approach of the Duke of Parma with a Spanish army obliged Henry to raise the siege of Paris. ' It was not the policy of the Spanish court to render the Leaguers independent of its assistance, and the duke, satisfied with having relieved the metropolis, avoided an engagement, and returned to his government in the Low Countries, followed by Henry as far as the frontiers of Picardy. In 1591 Henry received succors from England and Germany, and laid siege to Rouen ; but his prey was again snatched from him by the Duke of Parma. Again battle was offered and declined ; and the retiring army passed the Seine in the night on a bridge of boats ; a retreat the more glorious, as Henry believed it to be impossi- ble. The duke once said of his adversary, that other generals made war like lions or wild boars ; but that Henry hovered over it like an eagle. During the siege of Paris, some conferences had been held between the chiefs of the two parties, which ended in a kind of accommodation. The Catholics of the king's party began to complain of his perseverance in Calvinism ; and some influential men who were of the latter persuasion, especially his confidential friend and minister Rosny, represented to him the necessity of a change. Even some of the reformed ministers softened the difficulty, by acknowledging salvation to be possible in the Roman Church. In 1593 the ceremony of abjuration was per- formed at St. Denis, in presence of a multitude of the Parisians. If, as we can- not but suppose, the monarch's conversion was owing to political motives, the apostacy must be answered for at a higher than any human tribunal ; politically viewed, it was perhaps one of the most beneficial steps ever taken toward the pacification and renewal of prosperity of a great kingdom. In the same year he was crowned at Chartres, and in 1594 Paris opened her gates to him. He had just been received into the capital, where he was conspicuously manifesting his beneficence and zeal for the public good, when he was wounded in the throat by John Chatel, a young fanatic. When the assassin was questioned, he avowed the doctrine of tyrannicide, and quoted the sermons of the Jesuits in his justification. That society therefore was banished by the Parliament. For two years after his ostensible conversion, the king was obliged daily to perform the most humiliating ceremonies, by way of penance ; and it was not till 1594 that he was absolved by Clement VIII. The Leaguers then had no further pretext for rebellion, and the League necessarily was dissolved. Its chiefs ex- acted high terms for their submission ; but the civil wars had so exhausted the kingdom, that tranquillity could not be too dearly purchased ; and Henry was faithful to all his promises, even after his authority was so firmly established, that he might have broken his word with safety to all but his own conscience and honor. Although the obligations which he had to discharge were most burden- some, he found means to relieve his people, and make his kingdom prosper. The Duke de Mayenne, in Burgundy, and the Duke de Mercoeur in Brittany, were the last to protract an unavailing resistance ; but the former was reduced in 1596, and the latter in 1598, and thenceforth France enjoyed almost uninterrupted peace till Henry's death. But the Protestants gave him almost as much uneasi- ness as the Catholic Leaguers. He had granted liberty of conscience to the for-
