And as if to leave no doubt about the sense and bearing of this legislation, it was immediately applied in the case of a Jesuit father, John Guignard, a native of Chartres; his papers were examined, and there were found in his handwriting many propositions and provocatives of sedition, such as, "That a great mistake had been made at the St.Bartholomew in not having opened the basilic vein, that is, in not having murdered Henry IV.

and the Prince of Conde, who were of the blood royal; 2.

That the crown might have been, and ought to have been, transferred to a family other than that of the Bourbons; 3.

That the Bearnese, in spite of his pretended conversion, ought to consider himself only too lucky if it were considered sufficient to shave his head and shut him up in a convent to do penance there; that if the crown could not betaken from him without war, then war must be made on him; and that if the state of things did not admit of making war on him, he ought to be got rid of at any price and in any way whatsoever." For having, not published, but thought and with his own hand written out all this, and probably taught it to his pupils, Father Guignard was obliged to retract, and was afterwards hanged in the Place de Greve on the 7th of January, 1595.
The task of honest men and of right minds is greater and more difficult in our day than it was in the sixteenth century, for we have to reconcile the laws and the requirements of moral and social order with far broader principles and sentiments, as regards right and liberty, than were those of President Augustin de Thou and the worthy functionaries of his time.
It was one of Henry IV.'s conspicuous qualities that no event, auspicious or inauspicious, affected the correctness of his judgment, and that he was just as much a stranger to illusion or intoxication in the hour of good fortune as to discouragement in the hour of ill.

He had sense enough to see, in any case, things as they really were, and to estimate at the proper value the strength they brought or the obstacles they formed to his government.