The approach of the Duke of Parma with a Spanish army obliged Henry to raise the siege of Paris. It was not the policy of the Spanish court to render the Leaguers independent of its assistance, and the duke, satisfied with having relieved the metropolis, avoided an engagement, and returned to his government in the Low Countries, followed by Henry as far as the frontiers of Picardy. In 1591 Henry received succors from England and Germany, and laid siege to Rouen; but his prey was again snatched from him by the Duke of Parma. Again battle was offered and declined; and the retiring army passed the Seine in the night on a bridge of boats; a retreat the more glorious, as Henry believed it to be impossible. The duke once said of his adversary, that other generals made war like lions or wild boars; but that Henry hovered over it like an eagle.
During the siege of Paris, some conferences had been held between the chiefs of the two parties, which ended in a kind of accommodation. The Catholics of the king's party began to complain of his perseverance in Calvinism; and some influential men who were of the latter persuasion, especially his confidential friend and minister Rosny, represented to him the necessity of a change. Even some of the reformed ministers softened the difficulty, by acknowledging salvation to be possible in the Roman Church. In 1593 the ceremony of abjuration was performed at St. Denis, in presence of a multitude of the Parisians. If, as we cannot but suppose, the monarch's conversion was owing to political motives, the apostacy must be answered for at a higher than any human tribunal; politically viewed, it was perhaps one of the most beneficial steps ever taken toward the pacification and renewal of prosperity of a great kingdom. In the same year he was crowned at Chartres, and in 1594 Paris opened her gates to him. He had just been received into the capital, where he was conspicuously manifesting his beneficence and zeal for the public good, when he was wounded in the throat by John Châtel, a young fanatic. When the assassin was questioned, he avowed the doctrine of tyrannicide, and quoted the sermons of the Jesuits in his justification. That society therefore was banished by the Parliament.
