The main issues of France, religious toleration and political reform, were now more obscured than ever by the rivalry of the factions around the throne. The queen mother bore the Guises greater hatred than before because of their new ascendency and had little less spleen toward the Montmorencys, but carefully dissimulated and sought on one pretext and another to remove them from around her son. For this purpose Bellegarde, who was an old attaché of the house of Montmorency and owed his popularity with the King to a handsome face and a well-turned leg, was made a special ambassador to Poland in order to get him out of the way. His comrade on the mission was Elbœuf—an ill-matched pair indeed. Their business was to carry 200,000 crowns of the Paris bourgeois to Poland to bribe the Polish diet not to elect a successor to the absent Henry. If the Poles were obdurate, Elbœuf was to advocate the election of the duke of Ferrara, who had Guisard blood in his veins. At the same time Biron and Matignon were made marshals to counterpoise the influence of De Retz who forthwith resigned his office and vowed he would “meddle no more.” There were heart-burnings, also, over the bestowal of the government of Normandy, vacated by the death of the duke of Bouillon. The duke of Nevers claimed that it had been promised him while in Poland; the duchess of Nemours demanded the post for the duke and declared that Nevers was “a foreigner.” Henry III finally sought to compromise by giving the office to his insignificant father-in-law, whereupon the duke of Nevers quit the court in a rage. Squabbles of precedence, too, vexed the King’s mind. Montpensier challenged the claims of the Guises to court precedence before the Parlement, and Madame de Nemours therefore quarreled with her daughter. “They were all bent to preparations of war,” quaintly wrote Dale to Walsingham, “but these domestic discords do tame them. It is a very hell among them, not one content or in quiet with another, nor mother with son, nor brother with brother, nor mother with daughter.”[1690]