ABSTRACT

Batholomew’s Day the Huguenot leader, Coligny, was wounded by a shot from a harquebus before being stabbed to death by a swordsman; and in December 1588 the tables were once again reversed as three leading Catholic politicians – Henri of Lorraine, the Duc de Guise and the Cardinal of Lorraine – were stabbed on the orders of Henri III, who – as we have seen – got his comeuppance the following year. Later, in 1617, Carlo Concini, a Florentine noble who had become a leading royal adviser to the Queen Mother, Marie de Medici, was stabbed to death by an assassin on the orders of Louis XIII. Alongside the practice of assassination there developed a very rich literature of controversy surrounding the politics of assassination. It played a prominent part in Jesuit political theory, ranging from Juan de Mariana’s De Rege (1599), an outspoken legitimation of assassination, to the extremely cautious endorsement of tyrannicide found in the work of his fellow Spaniard Francisco Suarez,1 while the subject also featured in imaginative literature, most notably in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Hamlet.2