Henry III’s thirteen years of rule had exhausted him

Evidence

The last of the Valois looked like a man secretly at grips with death. — Garrett Mattingly, The Defeat of the Spanish Armada, 84

Categorization

• XREF: Pairs with the later detail that Henry knew the monarchy could survive misfortune — a dying man gambling on institutional resilience.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Garrett Mattingly, The Defeat of the Spanish Armada, 84