erfect crop they were, in which kings were conspirators or were
conspired against, killed or were killed, according to the supposed
requirements of state policy or the necessities of high-placed
individuals. At earlier dates assassination was far from being unknown
in France; and some remarkable cases occurred there in those awful times
when the Burgundian and Armagnac parties existed. The Duke of Orleans
was assassinated, and, later, the Duke of Burgundy. Louis XI., who had
rebelled against his father, is believed to have murdered his brother,
and also to have sought the death of Charles of Burgundy. But it was in
the sixteenth century that French assassinations were of the most
striking order. The marriage of Catharine de' Medici with that French
prince who became Henry II. is supposed to have been attended with the
effect of debauching French morals, as the Italians had a prodigiously
bad reputation as assassins, and particularly as poisoners. Catharine
was totally unscrupulous, having about as much of moral sense as goes to
the making of a tigress; but it needed not that she should marry into
the House of Valois to render assassination a Gallic crime. It would
have existed in France all the same, had she never been born. It was a
moral plague that ran over Europe, as the Black Death made the same tour
a couple of hundred years earlier. Poltrot killed Francis, Duke of
Guise, the greatest man of a great race. Henry, Duke of Guise, Francis's
son, was concerned in a plot to murder the Admiral Coligny, shortly
before the St. Bartholomew, and was one of the Admiral's murderers in
the Massacre. Henry of Guise was assassinated by Henry III., last of the
Valois kings of France, who took upon himself to act in accordance with
the principles laid down by Diego de Chaves, which James II. had acted
on in the case of the Black Douglas, and on which Ferdinand II., Emperor
of Germany, afterward acted toward Wallenstein, who was basely murdered.
Henry III. was soon made to follow his victim, being assassinated by
Jacques Clement, a Jacobin monk and a Leaguer. Henry IV. was killed by
Francois Ravaillac, a Romish fanatic, who was in bad odor with all
respectable Catholics who knew him. Richelieu lived in a condition not
unlike that which Cromwell knew, being often conspired against. Louis
XV. was attacked by Damiens, who was put to death by cruel tortures. In
the Revolution there were several assassins, the most noted of whom was
Charlo