This cruel execution, which the necessity of it alone could excuse, had nearly proved fatal to the author, and seemed at first to plunge him into greater dangers than those which he sought to avoid by taking vengeance on his enemy. The partisans of the league were inflamed with the utmost rage against him: the populace every where, particularly at Paris, renounced allegiance to him: the ecclesiastics and the preachers filled all places with execrations against his name: and the most powerful cities and most opulent provinces appeared to combine in a resolution, either of renouncing monarchy, or of changing their monarch. Henry, finding slender resource among his Catholic subjects, was constrained to enter into a confederacy with the Hugonots and the king of Navarre: he enlisted large bodies of Swiss infantry and German cavalry: and being still supported by his chief nobility, he assembled, by all these means, an army of near forty thousand men, and advanced to the gates of Paris, ready to crush the league, and subdue all his enemies. The desperate resolution of one man diverted the course of these great events. Jaques Clement, a Dominican friar, inflamed by that bloody spirit of bigotry which distinguishes this century and a great part of the following beyond all ages of the world, embraced the resolution of sacrificing his own life, in order to save the church from the persecutions of an heretical tyrant; and being admitted, under some pretext, to the king’s presence, he gave that prince a mortal wound, and was immediately put to death by the courtiers, who hastily revenged the murder of their sovereign. This memorable incident happened on the first of August, 1589.