Assassination of Henry IV of France (1610) by Ravaillac

The assassination of Henry IV of France took place on 14 May 1610, when François Ravaillac, a Catholic zealot from Angoulême, stabbed the king as his carriage was held up in a narrow Paris street. Henry, the first Bourbon king, had ended decades of religious civil war, and his death came just as he was preparing a major campaign against the Habsburgs. The murder left an eight-year-old boy on the throne and opened a turbulent regency under Marie de’ Medici.

Background: a king with many enemies

Henry of Navarre was born at Pau in 1553 and raised a Protestant. He survived the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre of 1572, became heir to the French throne in 1584 and king in 1589, but Catholic Paris refused to accept a heretic. Only after he converted to Catholicism in 1593 and entered the capital in 1594 did most of the kingdom submit.

His Edict of Nantes of 1598 granted French Protestants, the Huguenots, freedom of conscience, limited rights of worship and fortified towns. To many Catholics this was a betrayal, and to radical preachers Henry remained a false convert. Plots against his life were frequent. In December 1594 a young man named Jean Châtel struck at him with a knife and cut his lip, an attack that led the Parlement of Paris to expel the Jesuits, who were readmitted in 1603.

By the spring of 1610 Henry was also preparing for war. A dispute over the succession to the duchies of Jülich and Cleves in the Rhineland threatened to bring Habsburg power to France’s borders. Henry assembled a large army and allied with German Protestant princes, which made the coming campaign look to some Catholics like a war against the Catholic cause and even against the Pope.

The killer: François Ravaillac

Ravaillac was born around 1578 in Angoulême. He had worked as a clerk and teacher, had spent a short time as a lay brother with the Feuillant order before being dismissed, and claimed to have had religious visions. He was poor, intensely devout and convinced that the king must be made to fight heresy.

In the months before the murder he travelled to Paris several times and tried to speak to Henry in person to warn him of his duty. Turned away, he became persuaded that killing the king was justified. He later told his judges that he had heard Henry intended to make war on the Pope, which he regarded as making war on God.

The assassination

On 13 May 1610 Marie de’ Medici was crowned queen at the basilica of Saint-Denis, a ceremony meant to strengthen her authority while the king was away on campaign. The next afternoon Henry left the Louvre by carriage to visit his chief minister, the Duke of Sully, who was ill at the Arsenal. Several nobles rode with him, including the Duke of Épernon.

In the rue de la Ferronnerie, a narrow street near the Cemetery of the Innocents, the carriage was forced to stop by carts blocking the way. Ravaillac, who had followed it, climbed onto a wheel and struck the king with a knife. According to the standard accounts, he delivered two or three blows, one of which pierced a major blood vessel near the heart.

Henry died within minutes, probably before the carriage got back to the Louvre. Ravaillac made no attempt to flee and was seized on the spot; nobles prevented the crowd from killing him so that he could be questioned. A marker in the street today recalls the site of the murder.

Trial and execution

The Parlement of Paris tried Ravaillac swiftly. He was questioned repeatedly, including under torture, about accomplices. He consistently maintained that he had acted alone and had told no one of his plan, though he expressed regret on learning that the people of Paris mourned the king.

He was executed on 27 May 1610 on the Place de Grève, after further torture, by being pulled apart by horses, the traditional penalty for regicide in France. His parents were banished from the kingdom, his relatives were ordered to take another name, and the house where he was born was ordered to be demolished.

Conspiracy theories

Because Henry had so many enemies, rumours of a wider plot spread at once. Suspicion fell on the Duke of Épernon, who was in the carriage, on the king’s former mistress Henriette d’Entragues, on Spain and on the Jesuits. A woman named Jacqueline d’Escoman claimed to have known of a plot involving Épernon and others, but her accusations were not upheld and she was imprisoned.

Some writers have even suggested that the queen herself benefited from the murder. The historian Roland Mousnier, whose study remains the standard work, concluded that Ravaillac was a lone fanatic shaped by the violent religious climate of the time. No firm evidence of a conspiracy has been found.

The regency of Marie de’ Medici

On the evening of 14 May the Parlement of Paris declared Marie de’ Medici regent, and the next day the young Louis XIII confirmed this at a formal session of the court. The rapid move prevented a power vacuum, but the regency soon changed course.

The planned war was scaled back, and France moved towards friendship with Spain, sealed by a double marriage in 1615 between Louis XIII and Anne of Austria and between Louis’s sister Elisabeth and the future Philip IV. Sully left office in 1611. Great nobles, led by the Prince of Condé, rebelled for money and influence, and the Estates General of 1614 achieved little.

Marie relied increasingly on the Italian favourite Concino Concini. In April 1617 Louis XIII, now in his teens, had Concini killed and sent his mother away from court. Among those who rose in her service and later became the king’s chief minister was Cardinal Richelieu.

Legacy

Henry’s murder turned him into one of France’s most loved monarchs. Later generations remembered him as “Good King Henry”, the ruler who ended the religious wars and cared for ordinary people; the saying that he wanted every peasant to have a chicken in the pot on Sundays is attributed to him in later sources. His equestrian statue on the Pont Neuf, destroyed during the Revolution, was rebuilt in 1818.

The killing also hardened suspicion of the Jesuits and fed debate about whether subjects could ever lawfully kill a king. In 1615 the Third Estate pressed for a declaration that no power on earth could depose a French king, a sign of how strongly the murder had marked public opinion.

Timeline

• 1553, 13 December: Henry of Navarre is born at Pau.
• 1589, August: Henry becomes king of France as Henry IV.
• 1594, December: Jean Châtel wounds the king in an attempt on his life.
• 1598, April: Henry issues the Edict of Nantes.
• 1610, 13 May: Marie de’ Medici is crowned queen at Saint-Denis.
• 1610, 14 May: Ravaillac stabs Henry IV in the rue de la Ferronnerie; Marie is declared regent.
• 1610, 27 May: Ravaillac is executed on the Place de Grève.
• 1617, April: Louis XIII has Concini killed and removes his mother from power.

Why it matters

The assassination of Henry IV cut short the reign of the king who had ended France’s wars of religion and changed the direction of French foreign policy at a critical moment. It produced a weak regency, revived aristocratic unrest and set the stage for the rise of Richelieu and the strong monarchy of the seventeenth century.