It has been said on behalf of the Jesuits that even their old enemy the Sorbonne joined in the general rejoicing over the assassination of Henry III., but those who make the point forget or ignore that for several years past the Jesuits had been sending pupils to the university in order gradually to permeate its faculties. It was no longer the distinct anti-Jesuit body which we have met in earlier years. Nor is there any need to discuss the abstract question whether the Jesuits taught tyrannicide. Crétineau-Joly himself quotes fourteen Jesuit theologians of the time who permitted the assassination of kings, to say nothing of more or less obscure writers, and we may be sure that the politicians of the Society were not more scrupulous than their theologians on the point. The well-known work of Mariana to which I have referred, _De Rege et Regis Institutione_ (1599), was authorised for publication by the Jesuit authorities, and it was not until the assassination of Henry IV. in 1610 that Acquaviva, anxious to save the French Jesuits from expulsion, forbade his subjects to teach the dangerous doctrine. Even then he wrote at first to the French Jesuits alone, and it was only when the cry of indignation was echoed in other countries that he made the order general. In fine, his general order was so ambiguous that even a less supple politician than a Jesuit could find his way through it. It condemned the doctrine that "any person, on any pretext whatever, may kill kings and princes"; which leaves it open to the casuist to conclude that _certain_ persons may do it for _certain_ reasons.[11]