In August 1589 Mendoza wrote from Paris in jubilant strains. The king (Henry III.) had been besieging the capital with 40,000 men, and it could have held out no longer. Mayenne had lost heart, the much-prayed-for Spanish troops to help them came not. Despair reigned in the League, when suddenly the last of the Valois, Henry III., in his turn, fell under the dagger of the fanatic monk Jacques Clement. “It was the hand of God,” said Mendoza, “that has done this for His greater glory, and for the advantage of His religion.” Philip, however, never loved the idea of the killing of kings, and was not so enthusiastic about this as was his ambassador. He was no hero; and if fanatics began killing anointed monarchs there was no telling where such an example would stop. The event, moreover, added much to his present perplexity. If Guise had lived, and Henry of Navarre had been amenable to reason, the realm of France might have been divided between Guise, Navarre, the Infanta, the Duke of Savoy, and Philip; but the Huguenot king had assumed the sovereignty of the whole country as soon as Henry III. fell, and had already shown that he was a soldier and diplomatist of the highest order, whom no cajolery would induce to surrender any portion of his birthright. And yet it was a matter of life and death to Philip that France should not become a heretic power, and he was obliged to tackle the monster with what strength he had left. The first impulse of the governing council of the League in Paris on the news of the death of the king was to elect Philip sovereign of France, but the idea of the Guises had always been to obtain all or part of the realm for themselves, and consequently Mayenne procured the proclamation in Paris of Henry of Navarre’s uncle, Cardinal de Bourbon, as Charles X. He was understood to be only a stop-gap, for he was old, foolish, and childless, and the problem of the fate of France was still held in suspense. But they could never even catch their king, for his nephew Henry seized him before the Leaguers could reach him, and he never let him go again. It is certain that by this time Philip had slowly made up his mind that, as he mainly would have to fight and destroy Protestantism in France, he alone should enjoy the reward. If the affair could have been settled cheaply and without fighting, the Lorraines, the Savoys, the Bourbons, and his own House might have divided the spoil; but if his arms and money had to win the reward, it must be his, and his alone. It was the most disastrous resolution he could have taken in his own interest, for it enabled Henry of Navarre to assume the position of the patriot withstanding foreign aggression; and gradually drew to him crowds of Frenchmen, who otherwise would have stood aloof. After the king’s death Henry IV. abandoned the siege of Paris and rapidly moved to Normandy, where Elizabeth’s subsidies and the aid from his own Rochelle might reach him.