FRANCIS, the infamous assassin of King Henry IV. of France, was a native of Angoulême, and at the time of his execution was about one or two and thirty years of age. See France, No. 150, and note A, &c.

HENRY IV. of France. Ravilliac was the son of parents who lived upon alms. His father was that sort of inferior retainer to the law, to which the vulgar give the name of a petitfogger, and his son had been bred up in the same way. Ravilliac had set up a claim to an estate, but the cause went against him; this disappointment affected his mind deeply; he afterwards taught a school, and, as himself said, received charitable gifts, though but of a very small value, from the parents of those whom he taught; and yet his distress was so great, that he had much ado to live. When he was seized for the king's murder, he was very loosely guarded; all were permitted to speak with him who pleased; and it was thought thought very remarkable that a Jesuit should say to him, "Friend, take care, whatever you do, that you don't charge honest people." He was removed next day from the house of Espernon to the Conciergerie, the proper prison of the parliament of Paris. When he was first interrogated, he answered with great boldness, "That he had done it, and would do it if it were to do again." When he was told that the king, though dangerously wounded, was living, and might recover, he said that he had struck him home, and that he was sure he was dead. In his subsequent examinations he owned that he had long had an intention to kill the king, because he suffered two religions in his kingdom; and that he endeavoured to obtain an audience of him, that he might admonish him. He also said that he understood the king's great armament to be against the pope, and that, in his opinion, to make war against the pope, was to make war against God. We have no distinct account of the three last examinations; but he is said to have persisted in the most solemn affirmations, that he had no accomplices, and that nobody had persuaded him to the fact. He appeared surprized at nothing so much as at the universal abhorrence of the people, which, it seems, he did not expect. They were forced to guard him strictly from his fellow-prisoners, who would otherwise have murdered him. The butchers of Paris desired to have him put into their hands, affirming that they would flay him alive, and that he should still live 12 days. When he was put to the torture, he broke out into horrid execrations, and always insisted that he did the fact from his own motive, and that he could accuse nobody. On the day of his execution, after he had made the amende honourable before the church of Notre Dame, he was carried to the Grève; and, being brought upon a scaffold, was tied to a wooden engine in the shape of a St Andrew's cross. The knife with which he did the murder being fastened in his right hand, it was first burnt in a slow fire; then the fleshy parts of his body were torn with red-hot pincers, and melted lead, oil, pitch, and rosin, poured into the wounds, and through a clay funnel into his bowels by the navel. The people refused to pray for him; and when, according to the sentence pronounced upon him, he came to be dragged to pieces by four horses, one of those that were brought appearing to be too weak, one of the spectators offered his own, with which the criminal was much moved: he is said to have then made a confession, which was so written by the greffier Voisin, that not so much as one word of it could ever be read. He was very earnest for absolution, which his confessor refused, unless he would reveal his accomplices; "Give it me conditionally (said he), upon condition that I have told the truth," which they did. His body was so robust, that it resisted the force of the horses; and the executioner was at length obliged to cut him into quarters, which the people dragged through the streets. The house in which he was born was demolished, and a column of infamy erected; his father and mother were banished from Angoulême, and ordered to quit the kingdom upon pain of being hanged, if they returned, without any form of process; his brothers, sisters, uncles, and other relations, were commanded to lay aside the name of Ravillac, and to assume some other. Such was the fate of this execrable monster, who, according to his own account, suffered himself to be impelled to such a fact by the seditious sermons and books of the Jesuits, whom Henry, rather out of fear than love, had recalled and caressed, and to whom he had bequeathed his heart.

Neither the dying words of Ravillac, nor so much of his process as was published, were credited by his contemporaries. Regalt the historian says, that there were two different opinions concerning this afflication; one, that it was conducted by some grandees, who sacrificed that monarch to their old resentments; the other, that it was done by the emissaries of the Spaniards. Letters from Bruxelles, Antwerp, Mechlin, and other places, were received before the 15th of May, with a report of the king's death. Though nothing occurs in the examinations of Ravillac that were first published, in reference to his journeys to Naples and other places; yet as these are set down as certain truths by good authors, so there are probable grounds to believe that they were not fictitious. It appears from Sir Ralph Winwood's Memorials, that Ravillac had been not long before at Bruxelles. Amongst other circumstances that created a very great doubt, whether the afflatus spoke truth, were the things found in his pocket at the time he was seized; amongst which was a chaplet, the figure of a heart made in cotton, in the centre of which he said there was a bit of the true cross, but when cut there was none, which he affirmed was given him by a canon at Angoulême, a piece of paper with the arms of France painted upon it, another full of characters, and a third containing verses for the meditation of a criminal going to execution. The provost of Pluviers, or Petiviers, in Beauce, about six miles from Paris, had said openly on the day that Henry IV. was murdered, "This day the king is either slain or dangerously wounded." After the king's death was known, he was seized and sent prisoner to Paris; but, before he was examined, he was found hanged in the strings of his drawers. His body was notwithstanding, hung up by the heels on the common gibbet on the 19th of June. What increased the suspicions grounded on this man's end, was his having two sons Jesuits, and his being a dependant on the family of Monsieur d'Entragues.