Henry III.

Henry III., king of France, the third son of Henry II. and Catharine de' Medici, was born at Fontainebleau on 19th September 1551. On the death of Constable Montmorency he received the chief command of the army, and in 1569 gained two decisive victories over the Protestants at Jarnac and Moncontour. He showed his zeal for the Catholic cause by taking an active share in the massacre of St Bartholomew. In 1573 the intrigues of the queen-regent secured his election to the throne of Poland. But on receiving the tidings of the death of his brother, Charles IX., he fled by night from Cracow and came home to France to succeed Charles as king (1575). His reign was a period of almost incessant civil war between the Huguenots and the Catholics. The party of the latter, supported by the king's mother, and headed by Henry of Guise, formed the Holy League, the object of which was not merely to assert the undivided supremacy of Catholicism, but also to secure the reversion of the throne to the family of the Guises. Henry was quite unfit to cope with the crisis. He showed both fickleness and want of courage in his public conduct; and in private life his days and nights were spent in an alternation of dissolute excesses and wild outbreaks of religious fanaticism. His favourite companions were a band of young men (the 'Mignons') as vicious as himself. At length in 1588 the assassination of the Duke of Guise in the king's antechamber, and of the Duke of Lorraine in prison, fairly roused the Catholic part of the nation to the utmost pitch of exasperation. The distracted king threw himself into the arms of Henry of Navarre, and the two sovereigns marched upon Paris at the head of a Huguenot army. But on 1st August 1589 Henry of France was stabbed by a fanatical Dominican named Jacques Clément; he died on the following day, nominating Henry of Navarre as his successor. With this king the male line of the house of Valois became extinct. See M. W. Freer, Henry III., his Court and Times (3 vols. 1858).