Descartes: A Biography

c CUNYB/Clarke     December, :

 Descartes: A Biography

On Friday,May, King Henry IV was riding in an open car-

riage toward the royal palace in Paris (to visit his mistress, it was widely

believed) when his carriage was accidentally blocked on a narrow street,

ruedelaFerronnerie, by two parked carts. While waiting to have the street

unblocked, his assassin, Franc ̧ois Ravaillac, exploited the opportunity by

jumping into his carriage and stabbing him with a knife several times in

the chest. The king died almost immediately. Henry IV had been plan-

ning to leave Paris that day at the head of,troops to recover from

the Austrian empire a disputed piece of territory on the German border

near Cologne. This suggested initially a political motive for the regicide,

butunder questioning it emerged that Ravaillac was a disgruntled ‘good

Catholic’ who claimed that the king was too sympathetic to Calvinists, and

that he was waging war with the Pope by his opposition to the Austrian

emperor. The most likely explanation of Ravaillac’s motivation is that he

was psychologically disturbed. He had joined the Benedictine order for

a short time in his youth but had been encouraged to leave because he

was having visions. He certainly had no connection with the Jesuits, and

there was no evidence that they were in any way involved in the affair. Yet,

despite that, there was a general suspicion that the Jesuits were in some

way responsible for the king’s assassination.

The unfounded allegation against the Jesuits underlines the extent to

which they were widely perceived to be supporters of the Pope against

Gallican sympathies in the French church, or supporters of Spain in

its war with France (since Ignatius and all the early Superior Generals

of the order were Spanish). In summary, they were suspected of being

secretly allied with foreign powers, political and ecclesiastical, in a way

that compromised their allegiance to the French crown. When Henry IV

had allowed them to re-enter France and had invited them to found a

college at La Fleche, against the explicit advice of the` parlementof Paris

and the University of Paris, he had placed a senior Jesuit as a permanent

member of his household as confessor to the king. At the time of his

death, Father Pierre Coton was his confessor, a coincidence that gave rise

to the quip that ‘the king has cotton in his ears.’ Given the widespread

suspicion of the Jesuits, and the opposition of other interest groups to

their apparently privileged role, their immediate response to Henry IV’s

death was an extremely public and obsequious expression of exaggerated

grief and loyalty. This was an opportunity to implement the king’s wishes

about where his heart should be buried, and to win support with the