Jacques Clement

Jacques Clement was the Dominican friar who assassinated Henry III of France in 1589, ending the Valois dynasty and putting a Protestant on the throne. France was in the eighth of its wars of religion, and Henry had made his position impossible: he had ordered the murder of the Duke of Guise and his brother the cardinal at Blois the previous December, which turned the Catholic League and much of Paris against him, and he had then allied with the Protestant Henry of Navarre and was besieging his own capital. The Sorbonne had declared subjects released from their allegiance and the pope had excommunicated him. Clement was twenty-two, from a village in Burgundy, and had been encouraged in Paris by League preachers who told him that killing a tyrant was meritorious. He obtained letters for the king, was admitted on 1 August at Saint-Cloud on the pretext of delivering them, and stabbed him in the abdomen with a concealed knife while the king was on his close stool. He was killed on the spot by the guards, which removed any chance of learning who had prompted him. Henry lingered a day, long enough to recognise Navarre as his heir. Navarre became Henry IV, took four years to convert to Catholicism and nine to enter Paris, and was himself assassinated by another Catholic in 1610. Clement was celebrated in League Paris as a martyr and his mother was granted a pension by the Duchess of Montpensier. The Parlement had his body quartered and burned.

• Lived: 1567 CE – 1589 CE
• Nationality: French
• Roles: other