This, however, was in the main a personal quarrel. Odon Pigenat, the new Provincial, and a score of other fathers were ardent Leaguers. The Jesuit house at Paris was still used for the secret meetings of the League, and the "Committee of Catholic Safety" was inspired by Pigenat. The French apologist does not question their enthusiastic share in the League's work, and no one questions that the aim of the League was to prevent the accession of the legitimate heir to the throne. Indeed, at the next dramatic turn of French affairs all this was made plain to everybody.
In 1588 Guise was invited to Paris and acclaimed there with such wild rejoicing that Henry III. fled to Blois, and shortly afterwards Guise and his cardinal-brother were invited to Blois and foully murdered there by Henry. The League now shook its banners in the breeze, and Henry was execrated from a hundred pulpits. When he went on to defy the Pope and form an alliance with Henry of Navarre, who advanced rapidly on Paris, Catholic feeling rose to a fanatical pitch, and Henry III. in turn was assassinated by the Dominican monk Jacques Clément. The Jesuits were assuredly not the only preachers to applaud this murder, but they were amongst the first to perceive, and the loudest to declare, that if a king may be dispatched by private hand for a crime, he may certainly be removed when he meditates the far graver misdeed of plunging a nation into heresy. Father Commolet, the superior of the Jesuit house at Paris and a distinguished preacher, called from his pulpit for "a second Ehud" to remove Henry of Navarre. Father Mariana, who shortly afterwards wrote his famous _De Rege_, hailed the assassin as "the eternal glory of France" and spoke of this "memorable spectacle, calculated to teach princes that godless enterprises do not go unpunished."
It has been said on behalf of the Jesuits that even their old enemy the Sorbonne joined in the general rejoicing over the assassination of Henry III., but those who make the point forget or ignore that for several years past the Jesuits had been sending pupils to the university in order gradually to permeate its faculties. It was no longer the distinct anti-Jesuit body which we have met in earlier years. Nor is there any need to discuss the abstract question whether the Jesuits taught tyrannicide. Crétineau-Joly himself quotes fourteen Jesuit theologians of the time who permitted the assassination of kings, to say nothing of more or less obscure writers, and we may be sure that the politicians of the Society were not more scrupulous than their theologians on the point. The well-known work of Mariana to which I have referred, _De Rege et Regis Institutione_ (1599), was authorised for publication by the Jesuit authorities, and it was not until the assassination of Henry IV. in 1610 that Acquaviva, anxious to save the French Jesuits from expulsion, forbade his subjects to teach the dangerous doctrine. Even then he wrote at first to the French Jesuits alone, and it was only when the cry of indignation was echoed in other countries that he made the order general. In fine, his general order was so ambiguous that even a less supple politician than a Jesuit could find his way through it. It condemned the doctrine that "any person, on any pretext whatever, may kill kings and princes"; which leaves it open to the casuist to conclude that _certain_ persons may do it for _certain_ reasons.[11]