The young prince was, therefore, not without qualifications to ensure advancement at Court, but in the two most essential--wealth and influence--he was conspicuously lacking. The absence of the first might have mattered little had he possessed the second, but the cloud under which the Bourbons had lain for a quarter of a century showed no sign of lifting. Henri II., who had ascended the throne two years before Condé’s arrival at Court, was a well-meaning man, who sincerely desired to do his duty and promote the interests of his subjects, but he was “born to be governed, rather than to govern,”[6] and was surrounded by ambitious and greedy favourites, who thought only of exploiting him for their own selfish ends. In the early days of the new reign, the favour of the King had been divided between his mature mistress, Diane de Poitiers, Duchesse de Valentinois, and his old friend, the Connétable Anne de Montmorency, who, disgraced by François I. in 1543, had, on the death of that monarch, been recalled to Court and entrusted with the direction of affairs. Diane, however, jealous of the influence of the Constable, formed an alliance with the Guises, those able and ambitious Lorraine princes who were to play so conspicuous a part in all the troubles of the latter half of the sixteenth century; François de Lorraine, who succeeded his father as Duc de Guise in the spring of 1550, and his brother, Charles, the second Cardinal de Lorraine, became two of the King’s most trusted advisers; and they and their younger brothers were loaded with honours and benefits. Henri II.’s favourites stood like a bodyguard around the throne to prevent any one else approaching it; their greed was insatiable; “estates, dignities, bishoprics, abbeys, offices, no more escaped them than do the flies the swallow; there was not a choice morsel that was not snapped up in a moment.”[7]