At the same time that Guise was urging on the states-general in this path, he demanded to be made constable, not by the king any longer, but by the states themselves.

The kingship was thus being squeezed between the haughty supremacy of the great lords, substitutes for the feudal regimen, and the first essays of that free government which is nowadays called the parliamentary regimen.

Henry III.

determined with fear and trembling to disembarrass himself of his two rivals, of the Duke of Guise by assassination, and of the states-general by packing them off home.

He did not know how intimately the two great questions of which the sixteenth century was the great cradle, the question of religious liberty and that of political liberty, were connected one with the other, and would be prosecuted jointly or successively in the natural progress of Christian civilization, or through what trials kings and people would have to pass before succeeding in any effectual solution of them.
On the 18th of December, 1588, during an entertainment given by Catherine de' Medici on the marriage of her niece, Christine de Lorraine, with Ferdinand de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, Henry III.