To amuse Charles, and to avoid some of the evils which usually beset a court, the Chancellor conducted his young sovereign on a tour to the southern provinces of France. This was attended with unforeseen and evil consequences. At Bayonne Charles was met by his sister, the Queen of Spain, attended by the Duke of Alva and other Spanish noblemen. Alva acquired the confidence of Catherine, whom he persuaded that in the hands of L’Hôpital she really had no more freedom of action than under the control of the Guises; and as in her opposition to them she had been actuated by no love of toleration, she had little to unlearn under the tuition of that bigoted and able partizan of the papacy. L’Hôpital soon perceived that his power was shaken. He laboured to make up for the lost confidence of Catherine, by attaching himself more and more to Charles IX.; and for a time he succeeded in retaining influence over that prince, who, during the years 1565 and 1566, was kept in a state of vacillation between those who pleaded for peace and toleration, and those who would have exterminated Protestantism at all hazards and by all means. The religious war was renewed in 1567. Peace was concluded in 1568; but L’Hôpital was not employed to manage it. His only hold upon power was now in the reverence of the King; and this was shaken by the artful representations of Catherine. It shows, however, in a strong light, the ascendancy which L’Hôpital had acquired over Charles’s mind, that the joint influence of Catherine and the House of Guise could not induce him absolutely to dismiss his faithful minister. In 1568 he sent to request the Chancellor to give up the seals for a time, with a promise of returning them. L’Hôpital says in his Testament, that “he judged it better to yield to the necessity of the state, and to its new governors, than to contend with them.” He retired to his estate at Vignay, near Etampes, where he returned with avidity to his literary pursuits, and to the amusements and occupations of the country, to which his letters represent him as devotedly attached. The Chancellor had not amassed wealth in his various high employments; but his pensions were continued by the King; and Catherine herself did not forget his former services. Even in the dreadful massacre of St. Bartholomew’s they interfered to protect him; though his family were Protestants, and he himself, though a Catholic by profession and in observances, was so suspected by the bigot party, who did not understand how sincerity and tolerance could go together, that it passed into a sort of proverb, ‘Lord deliver us from the Chancellor’s mass.’ A troop of horse was sent from court to preserve his mansion from insult. His domestics were alarmed, and proposed to shut the gates. “No,” said the Chancellor; “but if the small gate is not enough, open the great one.” His daughter, then in Paris, was in imminent danger, and escaped only through the intervention of the Duchess of Guise.