her extravagant lifestyle and had no real interest in politics, beyond protecting her ability to engage in corruption. Unlike Carol, Lupescu had utterly no interest in social policy or foreign affairs and was such a self-absorbed narcissist that she was unaware of just how unpopular she was with ordinary people. Carol by contrast was interested in the affairs of the state, and though he never sought to deny his relationship with Lupescu, he was careful not to display her too much in public, as he knew that this would bring him unpopularity. Carol sought to play the National Liberals, the National Peasant Party, and the Iron Guard off against each other with the ultimate aim of making himself master of Romanian politics and disposing of all the parties in Romania. With regards to the Legion of the Archangel Michael, Carol had no intention of ever letting the Iron Guard come to power, but insofar as the Legion was a disruptive force that weakened both the National Liberals and the National Peasants, Carol welcomed the rise of the Iron Guard in the early 1930s, and he sought to use the Legion for his own ends. On 30 December 1933, the Iron Guard assassinated the National Liberal Prime Minister Ion G. Duca, which led to the first of several bans placed on the Legion. The assassination of Ion Duca, which was Romania's first political murder since 1862, shocked Carol, who saw the willingness of Codreanu to order the assassination of the Prime Minister - as a clear sign that the egomaniacal Codreanu was getting out of control, and that Codreanu would not play the role assigned by the king as a disruptive force threatening the National Liberals and National Peasant alike. In 1934, when Codreanu was brought to trial for ordering Duca's assassination, he used as his defense the argument that the entire Francophile elite was completely corrupt and not properly Romanian, and as such Duca was just another corrupt National Liberal politician who deserved to die. The jury acquitted Codreanu, an act that worried Carol as it showed that Codreanu's revolutionary message that the entire elite needed to be destroyed - was winning popular approval. In the spring of 1934, after Codreanu was acquitted, Carol together with the Bucharest police prefect Gavrilă Marinescu and Madame Lupescu, were involved in a half-hearted plot to kill Codreanu by poisoning his coffee, an effort