the name of the Duke of Anjou was in evil odour among the electors, and the sleepless efforts of Montluc were directed to the task of whitewashing his employer from the red stain of S. Bartholomew. The long-drawn-out proceedings which delayed the Diet of election, and which gave Poland an entirely new constitution, altering the whole course of her history, also gave time for the feeling against the Valois to die down; the French agents made good use of the respite and the Anjou cause steadily gained fresh adherents, till on the eve of the election scarcely any other candidate was seriously considered. [Sidenote: 1573] Thus it came to pass that, by an irony of fate, the stormy sittings of the Diet of Warszawa, which lasted for the greater part of April and May, resulted in bestowing the Polish crown on the prince who, of all the competitors, least coveted it. And in fact the hotly-contested prize, as it came out of the long interregnum, was scarcely a brilliant possession; “it was not the heritage of the Yagellos intact that the Bishop of Valence would have to take back to the brother of Charles IX., but a crown despoiled of a part of its privileges, and, under the title of king, nothing in truth more than the life-presidency of a republic.”[168] The terms of the celebrated _Pacta conventa_, to which every succeeding king would be required to give his adhesion, were, among others, that the king should have no voice in the election of a successor; must respect the religious liberty of the Dissidents; must neither undertake a war nor impose taxes without consent of Diet; nor marry nor divorce a wife without the same sanction; and that no foreigners should hold any public office.