The path had not been of roses.  He had captured two hundred towns and fought in sixty battles on his way.  He himself had strewed thorns for others as well.  His wars spread suffering throughout France.  His skirmishings, petty but many, add up to an appalling total of harm.  Henry as a model of renounced ambition is a failure.  Read what his Catholic enemies in Bearn said of him, in an address and appeal to the Catholics of France; as now first translated out of its Old French, it has an oddly Jeffersonian ring: 

“Knowing long since, to our cost, the nature of the wolf who seeks to deceive and then devour you, we have deemed it duty to warn you of the character of the beast, (le naturel de la beste,) so that by our putting you on your guard he shall not have means to endamage you.  Within twenty years he has summoned a round million of foreign mercenaries to pillage and rend your kingdom.  He has sacked and demolished two thousand monasteries and twenty thousand (sic!) churches; he has wrecked no less than nine hundred hospitals; he has caused the death, by war and divers punishments, of nearly one million, six hundred thousand men.  In the face of his assurances to the nobility in 1580 and of his reiterated protestations, he has put up our very priests at auction and sold them off to the highest bidder, in order that his Huguenots might have on whom to wreak at leisure their diabolic hatred.  He thinks himself King of France; it is a malady common to the crack-brained to fancy themselves kings of the first realm they spy and to fashion them seigniories in the air.  Beware trusting your fowls to this fox!”

Evidently the Bearnais hero had made some tolerably strong enemies in pursuing his ambitions.  No less truly his ambitions had made some tolerably wide gaps in his ethics.

But the world pardons much to success.  And this man had a certain high-mindedness in him which compels admiration.  When the battle of Ivry was commencing, “he remembered,” relates Perefix, an old historian, “that the evening before the battle he had used some harsh expressions to Colonel Theodoric Schomberg, who had asked him for money, and told him in a passion that it was not acting like a man of honor to demand money when he came to take orders for fighting.  He afterward went to him, when he was ranging his troops in order, and said:  ’Colonel, we are now upon the point; perhaps I shall never go from this place; it is not just that I should deprive a brave gentleman as you are of your honor; I come therefore to declare that I know you to be an honest man and incapable of committing a base action.’  Saying this, he embraced him with great affection."[18]

[18] “The colonel,” continues Perefix, “sensibly moved with this behavior, replied with tears in his eyes:  ’Ah, Sire! in restoring to me my honor you take away my life; for after this I should be unworthy of your favor if I did not sacrifice it to-day for your service.  If I had a thousand lives I would lay them all at your feet.’  In fact he was killed upon this occasion.”