The Princes of Condé enjoyed considerable influence in France. "The Great Condé", Louis II de Bourbon (1621–1686), led the parliamentary opposition against Mazarin’s party at the beginning of the reign of →Louis XIV, and ultimately had to accept the growing power of the crown. In the 1670s he applied for →Poland’s crown (and failed); he did not organise a →Huguenot rebellion at the same time. His ancestor, Henri I de Bourbon (1552-1588) was a Huguenot general – yet a century earlier. The details are carefully balanced to fit and not to fit and to thus turn the novel into the roman à clef in which →James Scott, 1st Duke of Monmouth, can become the historoical person to be identified.