FOOTNOTES:[26]I have consulted Molinier's admirable edition of theLetters(1891). The editor gives the original Latin passages from the Jesuit theologians, and it is after comparison of these with Pascal's quotations or paraphrases that I reach the conclusion given in the text. It is necessary to add that some of these doctrines were not confined to the Jesuits. The point is that the Jesuits, as a body, were characteristically lax. Probabilism, for instance (the pernicious doctrine that a man may commit an action which is probably lawful, though more probably sinful) was not invented by the Jesuits, but they made it a basic element of their casuistry. They taught that a man was free to follow one single lax theologian, if he were a "grave authority," against the adverse opinion of all the others.[27]I have in earlier chapters quoted Father Jouvency's volume of theHistoria Societatis. This volume, recalling and praising the action of the French Jesuits in the time of HenryIII.and HenryIV., was published in 1713, and gave such offence that the Parlement suppressed it.
[26]I have consulted Molinier's admirable edition of theLetters(1891). The editor gives the original Latin passages from the Jesuit theologians, and it is after comparison of these with Pascal's quotations or paraphrases that I reach the conclusion given in the text. It is necessary to add that some of these doctrines were not confined to the Jesuits. The point is that the Jesuits, as a body, were characteristically lax. Probabilism, for instance (the pernicious doctrine that a man may commit an action which is probably lawful, though more probably sinful) was not invented by the Jesuits, but they made it a basic element of their casuistry. They taught that a man was free to follow one single lax theologian, if he were a "grave authority," against the adverse opinion of all the others.
[26]I have consulted Molinier's admirable edition of theLetters(1891). The editor gives the original Latin passages from the Jesuit theologians, and it is after comparison of these with Pascal's quotations or paraphrases that I reach the conclusion given in the text. It is necessary to add that some of these doctrines were not confined to the Jesuits. The point is that the Jesuits, as a body, were characteristically lax. Probabilism, for instance (the pernicious doctrine that a man may commit an action which is probably lawful, though more probably sinful) was not invented by the Jesuits, but they made it a basic element of their casuistry. They taught that a man was free to follow one single lax theologian, if he were a "grave authority," against the adverse opinion of all the others.
[27]I have in earlier chapters quoted Father Jouvency's volume of theHistoria Societatis. This volume, recalling and praising the action of the French Jesuits in the time of HenryIII.and HenryIV., was published in 1713, and gave such offence that the Parlement suppressed it.
[27]I have in earlier chapters quoted Father Jouvency's volume of theHistoria Societatis. This volume, recalling and praising the action of the French Jesuits in the time of HenryIII.and HenryIV., was published in 1713, and gave such offence that the Parlement suppressed it.
CHAPTER X
THE EXPULSION FROM PORTUGAL AND SPAIN
Inthe Iberian Peninsula we have the same romantic story of the Jesuits being cast down from a splendid prosperity and expelled with every token of ignominy from countries in which they had almost attained a spiritual dictatorship. Here again, moreover, our chronicle will deal almost exclusively with the actions of a junta of court-Jesuits who bring the calamity upon their Society. It would not be unnatural to suspect that in this there is some partiality; that I ignore the saintly or learned or philanthropic achievements of the majority and bring into prominence only the court-intrigues and abuses of power of a few. But a glance at the works of apologetic writers will show that the candid historian has no alternative. Considering the number and resources of the Jesuits in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, their record is singularly barren of great and good deeds. A few examples of shining devotion, which we will notice as we proceed, and a few small scandals, which we will generally ignore, do little to vary the undistinguished monotony of the general life. The majority of the Portuguese and Spanish Jesuits merely continue the work of teaching, preaching, and writing works of theology, in comfortable and unascetic homes, which we have previously described. Our story, like the general history of Spain and Portugal at the time, is mainly concerned with courtiers and politicians.
We begin with Portugal, where the first destructive blow fell on the Society. A Portuguese Jesuit, Father Franco, has left us an admiring chronicle of the doings of his colleagues down to the end of the first quarter of the eighteenth century. His work (Synopsis Annalium Societatis Jesu in Lusitania, 1726) entirely confirms the feeling that the life of the vast majority of the Portuguese Jesuits is not material for history; it is little more than a record of the deaths of undistinguished (but always very saintly) Jesuits, with a few discreet references to those events at court which are of real interest. It is true that Father Franco appends a list of thousands of Jesuits who have gone to spend or lose their lives in Brazil or India, but we shall see that in the period with which we are dealing these missionary fields provided much comfort and little danger. The heroic age was over; it was the age when royal confessors enabled their brethren to sun themselves indolently in the warmth of royal favour.
The close of the reign of JohnIV.in 1656 saw the power and wealth of the Jesuits greater than they had ever been before. We saw that at the revolution of 1640, when Portugal won its independence from Spain, the Jesuits had so nicely distributed their forces that some were sure to be on the winning side; and JohnIV.was not the man to inquire too closely into their conduct. His court soon filled with Jesuits. Father Nuñez, a man of great piety and austerity, who had an excellent moral influence on the noble dames of the court, guarded the consciences of Queen Luisa and her children. Father Fernandez, a very different type of Jesuit, was confessor to the King, and had great political influence. He was a member of the State-Council and Bishop of Japan, and he bore his dignities with a consciousness which greatly irritated the nobles.When his humbler colleague, Nuñez, died, he became confessor to the Queen also, and attained a great ascendancy over the King. When the Viceroy of India, remarking that Jesuits were forbidden to engage in commerce, took from the Jesuits in that country property worth twenty thousand crowns a year, which they had acquired by commerce, Fernandez induced the King to overrule him and order the restoration of the property. In addition, JohnIV.gave large annual sums to the foreign missions, and a comfortable sum as "viaticum" to each priest who left Portugal for the missions; and he made them presents of palaces, and showered other benefits on them.
When John died, and Luisa became Regent for her young son, the angry nobles made a vigorous effort to dislodge the Jesuits. John's elder son, who had had a Jesuit tutor, had refused to marry, and had wished to join the Society. Men recalled the earlier King Sebastian, and said that the Jesuits were attempting to seize the crown. The Jesuit-tutor was even accused of betraying the military secrets of the country; and one of his colleagues, Father Vieira, was so badly compromised by a letter of his which was intercepted that John had been compelled to make a foreign ambassador of him; another Jesuit was the diplomatic representative of Portugal at Rome. The nobles resented this situation; but Fernandez was in too strong a position, and the rule of the Jesuits continued under the Regency. Fernandez died, however, in 1660, and it is a second Jesuit of that name (as is sometimes forgotten) who took a leading part in the extraordinary events of the year 1668.
The elder prince, Theodose, had died prematurely, and Alphonso succeeded to the throne. Whether there was some incurably morbid strain in the youth, orwhether the Jesuit tuition had made him incapable of serious political life, we cannot say; but, as he grew to manhood, AlphonsoVI.entered upon ways of violence and licence which recall the youth of Nero. His court was filled with the wild companions of his orgies, and he paraded his vices on the streets and in the taverns of his capital. He exchanged his Jesuit confessor for a Benedictine monk, snatched the reins from the hands of his mother, and threatened to drag the country very speedily into the abyss which awaited it. Sober nobles and statesmen looked on with alarm, and it was inevitable that a conspiracy to dethrone him should shortly arise. But the details of the revolution, in which the Jesuits were very active, reflect little honour on its actors.
Alphonso had married Marie Isabelle de Savoie-Nemours, whose Jesuit confessor, Father de Ville, listened sympathetically to the story of the outrages she endured. Father de Ville and his colleagues were not less sympathetic when Marie Isabelle transferred her affection to the King's handsome young brother, Dom Pedro, and they entered into a plot to replace Alphonso by Pedro. The chief plotter seems to have been Father Vieira, whom the French historian regards as the glory of the Portuguese Province at that time. Vieira was not without ability, but he was a turbulent and meddlesome politician, and so eccentric in his religious ideas that he fell into the prison of the Inquisition. The Jesuits secretly engaged the nobles in a plan to dethrone and divorce Alphonso and replace him by his brother. Divorce is, of course, unknown to the Catholic Church, but it has never failed to discover a flaw in a marriage which it was expedient to undo, and, with something very like levity or cynicism, the Jesuits and the Queen determined to accuse the King of impotence and get the marriage annulled: a king who was notorious for his amours and had had a child by one of his mistresses. Pedro was then informed of the Queen's amiable disposition and the support of the nobles, and the conspiracy began.
The King was recalled from his licentious pleasures by an announcement that the Queen had retired to a convent and demanded the restitution of her dowry. He flew to the convent, but found his brother there with an armed force to protect the Queen, and, after a fruitless struggle, he was compelled to abdicate and to testify to the virginity of the Queen. We have the word of the English ambassador that Father de Ville and his colleagues were the chief authors of this audacious plot, or "comedy," as the Jesuit apologist calls it. The marriage was dissolved in March (1668), and it was arranged that a deputation of the Cortes should wait upon Marie Isabelle, and entreat her to marry Pedro, as Portugal was too poor to return her dowry. The marriage was celebrated a few weeks later, Alphonso was sent into a comfortable exile, and the Jesuits returned to power at the court. Sincerely as we may applaud the purification of the sordid palace and the relief of the young Queen, we must recognise that the procedure betrays a considerable lack of moral delicacy.
The gratitude of Pedro to his Jesuit confessor, Fernandez, and his colleagues could not be other than princely. He even made Fernandez a deputy of the Cortes (where he needed supporters), and we gather from the stern letter (given in Franco) in which General Oliva denounced this action to the authorities of the Portuguese Province that Fernandez was very reluctant to resign the honour. Under threat of punishment he yielded, but he maintained an absoluteauthority over King Pedro and placed his Society in a stronger position than ever. In the Jesuit documents of the time we find constant reference to "the Fathers of the Palace" and the immense benefits they procure for their colleagues. Through the King they secured a modification of the Spanish Inquisition—which had lately imprisoned one of their ablest men—and in many of the colonies they obtained a monopoly of the trade with the natives and acquired a wealth similar to that of the Spanish fathers in Paraguay. Pedro's second wife was no less generous to the Society than Luisa had been, and the ex-Queen of England, who returned to Portugal in 1693, joined in the enrichment of the Jesuits. When Pedro died in 1706, his son JohnV. continued to patronise the Society and enfeeble the kingdom. There were now more than a dozen Jesuits at the Portuguese court, and for many years it was hardly possible to approach the King without their permission.
During the long reign of the incompetent and superstitious JohnV.Portugal sank rapidly into the decline that awaited her. Not only did Jesuits undertake commerce in the colonies and absorb vast sums of money in donations and annuities, but the Church at large is calculated to have received about five hundred million francs, wrung mainly from the decaying colonies, from the priest-ridden monarch. The Jesuits are by no means wholly responsible for the scandalous expenditure and economic folly of JohnV., or for the revival of the burning of heretics and the erection of palatial monasteries. In his later years the King transferred his favour to Oratorian and Franciscan priests, and it seemed as if the long reign of the Jesuits was seriously threatened. But this appalling clerical parasitism and disregard of national economy, whichwere fast sapping the strength of Portugal, were only the culmination of the sentiments which the Jesuits had cultivated in the Portuguese court for a century.
The King died in 1750, and the Jesuits returned to power under his son Joseph. Father Moreira was the King's confessor, and Father Oliveira the tutor of his children; Father Costa was the spiritual guide of his brother Pedro, Father Campo of his uncle Antonio, and Father Aranjues of his uncle Emmanuel. The junta was completely restored, and the government was again virtually in the hands of the Jesuits. There had, however, now come into the political life of Portugal a man who was destined to shake the European power of the Jesuits and, within the short space of ten years, to drive them from the Empire in poverty and disgrace.
Sebastian Joseph de Carvalho, Count of Oeyras and Marquis of Pombal, had been a member of one of the Jesuit Congregations for laymen and had obtained office, as Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, with their cordial agreement. There is nothing either mysterious or discreditable in his hostility to the Jesuits. Even if it be true that he at times fought them with their own improper weapons, the ground of the conflict is plain. He perceived, as every non-Catholic historian perceives to-day, that their rule was as mischievous to the State as it was profitable to their own Society, and, as Foreign Minister and lay man of business, he recognised that their commercial activity in the colonies was injurious to the laity and inconsistent with their professions. To say that he was influenced by the works of the French philosophers is absurd—he had no sympathy with their ideas—nor is it less unjust to say that he wished to protestantise the Portuguese Church. It was precisely as a Catholic and a patriot that he set out to reform the swollen and degenerate Churchand invigorate the national economy. We need not imagine vices in Pombal when the defects of the Jesuits are so flagrant.
The strong man was fortunate in having a weak, timid, and indolent monarch, and hardly less fortunate in the fact that the King had a stronger and more attractive brother on whose associates suspicion could easily be cast. It is difficult to-day to ascertain what truth there is in the charge that Dom Pedro aspired to the throne and had the secret support of the Jesuits. King Joseph was not indisposed to believe such a charge, and events soon occurred which gave it plausibility. In 1752 the Portuguese proposed to cede Sacramento to Spain in return for a part of Paraguay in which the Jesuits had seven of their profitable "reductions," and, when the troops went to enforce the change of frontiers, the pupils of the Jesuits made a sanguinary resistance. It is possible to quote letters in which the Jesuits advised submission, but asecretletter from one of the leading Spanish Jesuits to the American fathers was intercepted and was found to advise resistance. Further troops were sent, the Jesuits and their pupils were expelled, and Pombal drew up and circulated a memoir on the action of the Jesuits and the virtual slavery which they maintained in the reductions. Their monopoly of trade with the natives was abrogated, and Pombal was interested in a company which sought to secure the trade. The Jesuits fiercely attacked this change, and two members of the Society were exiled.
For a time the campaign of Pombal was then arrested by the appalling earthquake which devastated Lisbon in the year 1755. The timid and superstitious King was undecided as to the nature of the omen. At first, when it was found that Pombal's house had beenspared while seven Jesuit houses had been wrecked, he was disposed to see in the catastrophe a punishment of the sins of the Jesuits; but those artful casuists easily persuaded the country that the only new event in the life of Portugal to account for this outpour of divine wrath was the persecution of the Society, and their zeal in succouring the homeless earned for them a great deal of sympathy. The exiled Jesuits were recalled, and they seemed to recover all the ground they had lost in the preceding ten years.
With a maladroitness which we recognise so often in the annals of the Society, the Jesuits then went on to attack Pombal, and their churches rang with denunciation of the great reformer. With all his faults JosephI.had wisdom enough to choose between the Jesuits and his able minister. Pombal had effected more real reform in Portugal than Jesuit politicians had done in their two centuries of influence; he had abolishedautos da fe, curbed the power of the Inquisition, clipped the parasitic growth of monks, set bounds to the pretensions of the nobles, and made great reforms in every branch of the administration. He was a hard and ruthless man, sharing, to some extent, the Jesuit feeling that the end justified the means, but he was a sincere and enlightened patriot. He retained his influence over the King and took the next step in his campaign against the Society.
It was not until 1756 that the resistance of the natives in the Jesuit reductions was finally overcome, and the proofs (which we will see later) of secret Jesuit provocation deeply impressed the King. There was at that time on the papal throne a Pope who had repeatedly condemned the Jesuits. We shall see later that their behaviour on the Chinese and Indian missions was, in a different way, as irregular as their behaviourin South America, and BenedictXIV.severely condemned them. His chief minister, Cardinal Passionei, was also opposed to the Jesuits. King Joseph now submitted to the Vatican an account of the conduct of the Jesuits in South America and asked that they should be reformed. Meantime, in the autumn of 1757, Pombal persuaded the King that the Jesuits were fomenting disorder in Portugal itself, and an order was signed for the expulsion of all Jesuit confessors from the court. In the night of 19th-20th September the servants and soldiers entered the palace, and Fathers Moreira, Costa, and Oliviera awoke to find themselves sentenced to removal from their comfortable offices. Pombal then ordered that no Jesuit should be allowed to approach the court, sent a very forcible justification of the King's conduct to the other European courts, and pressed the demand for reform at Rome.
On 1st April 1758 the Pope signed the decree for an inquiry into the behaviour of the Jesuits, and Cardinal Saldanha was sent to South America to conduct the inquiry. The proceedings at Rome had been kept secret from the Jesuits until the decree was signed, and Pombal's agents had secured the appointment of a cardinal who was no friend of the Society. But both the Pope and the General died in the spring of that year, and, when Cardinal Saldanha justly reported that the Jesuits of South America had been wrongly engaged in commerce, the new General, Ricci, appealed to the new Pope, ClementXIII., who was known to be favourable to the Society. Clement appointed a commission of inquiry which, being composed of friends of the Society and making no investigation on the spot, declared the Jesuits innocent.
The declaration was absurd and insincere, as we shall appreciate when we come to examine the conductof the Jesuits on the missions, and Pombal saw that he must deal with the fathers in Portugal. In June (1758) the cardinal-patriarch had laid an interdict on all the Jesuits in the diocese of Lisbon, and public opinion seemed to be prepared for a drastic step. An event that occurred in the night of 3rd-4th September of that year gave Pombal his opportunity. As the King returned from the house of his mistress, the Marchioness Tavora, several shots were fired at him, and a large number of members of the Tavora family were arrested and put to the torture. One of the prisoners, the Duke d'Aveiro, said, under torture, that the Jesuits were privy to the conspiracy, and eight of the leading fathers were arrested and tortured. The duke afterwards retracted, and it must be said that, beyond this worthless declaration, there is no positive evidence to connect the Jesuits with the outrage, though they had been in close correspondence with the Tavoras. They were, however, not punished on that ground with the other prisoners. Only one of the Jesuits was executed, but for heresy, not treason; the others were kept in prison, while all the Tavoras were executed.
Instead of attempting to proceed against the Jesuits on such discreditable evidence Pombal took the more effective ground that their moral principles, especially in regard to assassination, were the ultimate source of such outrages, and a very fierce controversy ensued. It seemed to become gradually plain to all that the long conflict of the Jesuits and their opponents was about to enter on its last stage. There were bishops who supported Pombal, and bishops who appealed to the Pope to check his progress. What Pombal mostly feared was the stirring of the ignorant and superstitious masses, and he proceeded with great caution. Before his project was realised in Portugal, the Jesuits of thecolonies were on their way, under guard, to the mother-country, and, when they arrived, the Jesuit houses were surrounded by soldiers, the more active fathers were transferred to prison, and the rest were prevented from communicating with the laity. By the month of April 1759 about 1500 Jesuits were in jail or under guard. The King then informed the Pope that he was about to expel the fathers from his dominions. When Clement protested, stronger evidence of their intrigues was produced, and it is the general feeling of impartial contemporaries (like the English historian Coxe) and later authorities that some of these documents were forged. Clement still refused to sanction the expulsion, and a ruthless and indefensible step was taken by Pombal. On the feast of St. Ignatius (31st July) six Jesuits were condemned to be broken on the wheel, as if some value were now attributed to the evidence of a tortured witness.
This unjust sentence was not carried out, probably from a fear that the Pope would seriously question the jurisdiction of the civic authorities, but the plight of the Jesuits was lamentable. It was in Portugal that they had first attained power and wealth, and they had enjoyed an almost uninterrupted dominion for two centuries; now they lay on straw in the common jails, or tremblingly discussed the dark future in their overcrowded residences. On the first day of September the sentence of expulsion was enforced. The younger Jesuits were offered a dispensation from their vows by Cardinal Saldanha, but few accepted it, and the majority of them were put on ship and conveyed to the Pope's dominions. Pombal was cruel and unjust to the end in the realisation of his design; it is possible that he feared their later activity on foreign soil. There may be some exaggeration in the stories of their hardships, and indeedsuch a sentence could not be carried out without hardship, but one cannot defend his action in keeping 221 of the Jesuits in the jails of Portugal. One of them, Father Malagrida, an old man of seventy-two, seems to have been a little deranged by his imprisonment, and certain works which he wrote in prison were submitted to the Inquisition. He was condemned to be burned alive by the very tribunal which the Jesuits had been instrumental in establishing in Portugal. Of the 200 Jesuits, 88 died in jail, and the rest lingered in their humiliating captivity until the death of Joseph I. and dismissal of Pombal in 1777. By that time their Society had ceased to exist.
Such was the tragic issue of Jesuit history in the land which they had been accustomed to regard as the safest and most generous country in which they had taken root. However severely we may censure the detailed procedure of the Marquis de Pombal, his action was in substance just and patriotic. Portugal, which, in the sixteenth century, had promised to become one of the greatest powers in the world, had sunk to a humiliating depth, and its decay had proceeded apace with the power of political Jesuits. They were incapable of a patriotic conception of the task of governing, and they took advantage of and encouraged the economic folly of living on overburdened colonies. If they were unwilling to discharge the proper duties of priests and refrain from intrigue for political power, they must depart.
We have already seen how this bold stroke echoed in France and encouraged the enemies of the Society. We must now turn to Spain and see how "the most Catholic majesties" of that country came to follow the terrible example of Pombal. The general outline of the story is somewhat similar to that of the story of Portugal. A series of weak and incompetent rulersoccupy the throne; they are dominated (generally) by a group of court-Jesuits, who teach them that the main duty of a king is to be chaste, zealous for the faith, and generous to the Church; the broad empire of Spain is repeatedly shorn, as its increasing weakness is exposed; and at length a strong man realises the evil of Jesuit domination and induces the King to send the fathers back to the Pope's dominions from which they came. In one respect the story is even more unpleasant than that which we have just concluded. Chaste as the Spanish monarchs generally are in this period, they are so weak and purblind that the court is filled with the most sordid intrigues for power, and the Jesuits are deeply involved in these intrigues.
We left the Society in Spain enjoying a splendid prosperity in the early years of the reign of PhilipIV.Readers of Major Hume's brilliantCourt of PhilipIV.(1907) will not need to be reminded that this was "the gayest and wickedest court since the days of Heliogabalus," and that Madrid was in a repellent condition of vice and decadence. The King's confessor was not a Jesuit, but a worthless Dominican, and there were spirited struggles between the rival orders. However, the Jesuits still guided the consciences of most of the nobles and wealthy people, and were generously patronised by the King. They prospered richly in the decaying kingdom, were indifferent to the periodical national disasters, and claim only that they produced such brilliant casuists as Escobar. At the end of this long and dreary reign the chronicle of the Society becomes more interesting.
An infant of four years, CharlesII., inherited the throne, and this gave the Jesuits an opportunity under the Regency of Maria Anna, daughter of FerdinandIII.Queen Anna had brought with her from her Germanhome a very learned Jesuit, Father Nidhard, who was her confessor. It was quite natural that this father should attain predominant power at the death of the King, and we may regard it as a piece of particularly frivolous Castilian gossip that the sixty-year-old priest had a more tender relation to the Queen than that of political adviser. We may further grant that Nidhard's power was used unselfishly, and he was true to the ascetic ideal of his Society. But he was flagrantly false to other and more important rules of the Society in occupying the position he did, and he added a heavy contribution to the accumulating hatred of the Society. He was not only royal confessor, but a Councillor of State—in fact, the first minister—and Grand Inquisitor. He had pleaded his rule when the Queen pressed these dignities on him. She obtained a "dispensation" from the Pope, and Nidhard then posed as a Jesuit Ximenes and ruled Spain. The papal document gives him no moral justification. Had he and his superiors willed, he could at once have been transferred to Germany. They acquiesced in his political position on account of the power it gave them.
The Spanish nobles chafed under the rule of a priest and a woman and were irritated to see the decay of the nation continue. In 1668 they lost much of the Low Countries in the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, and the independence of Portugal was recognised. Don Juan, a natural son of the late King, seized the opportunity and attacked the Jesuits. They appointed the prince governor of the Low Countries, and he refused to go. They forbade him to approach the capital, and he boldly advanced to Madrid and demanded the dismissal of Nidhard. The troops and people supported him, and, shedding bitter tears, the Queen was obliged to "permit Nidhard to retire from office." The crowdthreatened to end his career at once, but he escaped to Rome, where he became Spanish ambassador, and afterwards Cardinal and Archbishop of Edessa. He had greatly strengthened the hostility to the Jesuits in Spain.
The long and disastrous reign of Philip was followed by the long and disastrous reign of his weak-minded son, and Spain decayed with frightful rapidity. Piety flourished—on one occasion fifty heretics were put to death for the entertainment of the young Queen—and the misshapen King set an admirable example of chastity. Few were sensible of the greater obligation of arresting the decay of the land, and the Jesuits were content to float on the sluggish stream. It is probable that their wealth reached its highest point during the reign of CharlesII.—"one of the most disastrous reigns on record," a distinguished historian calls it. But there would be little interest in chronicling the princely gifts and legacies they received and the handsome houses they erected. Charles died of old age in his fortieth year (1700), and was persuaded to leave the throne to the Duke of Anjou and thus ensure the protection of LouisXIV.for the unfortunate country. From this point the story of the Spanish Jesuits assumes a livelier complexion.
PhilipV., a youth of seventeen, was entrusted by LouisXIV.to the care of the French Jesuit Daubenton. Father Letellier was at that time the spiritual guide of the grand monarch, and he had recommended his friend and colleague Daubenton for the important post of ruling the Spanish King's conscience. Daubenton was a stout little man who concealed an immense aptitude and eagerness for intrigue under an air of severe detachment from worldly affairs. On the other hand, a brilliant Frenchwoman, the Princess Orsini, was sent tosustain the interests of France in the Queen's circle, and she succeeded in obtaining so strong an influence that we find her at times writing, without much exaggeration, of "my administration." She wascamerara mayorto the young Maria Luisa—a mere girl—and her great power drew on her the hatred of the Spaniards and of some of the French. By the year 1703 the court was seething with intrigue. The memoirs of the Duke de Saint Simon, the work of the contemporary English historian Coxe, and the letters which passed between the Spanish and French courts indicate that Daubenton was the most active and insidious agent in the cabal against the Princess Orsini. A very sordid intrigue ran through the whole of the year 1703, and it ended in the recall of the princess to France. The Queen was, however, so angry that the plot was exposed to LouisXIV.—it is authoritatively narrated in the correspondence of Louis and Philip—and Daubenton was dismissed from the court in disgrace and the Princess Orsini permitted to return.
Another French Jesuit, Father Robinet, succeeded Daubenton, and the fate of his predecessor did not intimidate him from taking an interest in politics, though he at first made the same pretence of aloofness from secular matters. The next ten years, however, passed without notable incident, and the Spanish Jesuits continued to accumulate wealth. Saint Simon tells us that on one occasion a ship from South America discharged at the quays of Cadiz several boxes addressed to "The Procurator-General of the Society of Jesus." The contents were said to be chocolate, but the weight was extraordinary and the officials decided to open one of the boxes. It was, apparently, full of bars of chocolate, but the weight of each was so mysterious that they were more closely examined. They were bars of solid gold,thickly coated with chocolate. This incident probably gave support to the rumour in Spain that the Jesuits had hidden gold mines in their carefully guarded reductions, but we may more probably recognise the direction taken by the great profit on the reductions and the reason for the determined efforts of the Jesuit authorities to support their fathers in this uncanonical industry.
Queen Luisa died in the year 1714, and it was believed at the court, and is not improbable, that Princess Orsini aspired to succeed her. She was then more than sixty years old, but she still had great charm and ability and seemed to be making a tender impression on the chaste and pious and weak-minded young King. Robinet put an end to her ambition with a bold retort. When Philip asked him one day what the latest news was from Paris, he said that it was rumoured that the King was about to marry Mme Orsini. Philip angrily denied it, and the princess very shortly passed out of the political life of Spain. There were, however, many others interested in the exile of Princess Orsini, and the share of Father Robinet must not be exaggerated. Spain had continued to decay. At the peace of 1713 her empire was shorn of Sicily, Milan, Naples, Sardinia, the Netherlands, Gibraltar, and Minorca. Philip consulted his Jesuit advisers several times a day, but neither they nor his other counsellors could do more than intrigue for power in the shrinking kingdom. The Abbé (later Cardinal) Alberoni was now rising to power, and was associated with Robinet in the ruin of Princess Orsini. Alberoni persuaded Philip that Elizabeth Farnese was just the quiet and modest young princess he desired for his second wife, and Philip yielded. But Elizabeth, a haughty and passionate maiden, was instructed beforehand in her duty, and at their first meeting she brutally dismissed the princess. Then Alberoni andRobinet quarrelled about the appointment of a new Archbishop of Toledo. Robinet secured the dignity for a friend of the Society (1715), and he in turn incurred the anger of the Queen and Alberoni and was exiled to Germany.
Before he left, Robinet persuaded Philip to recall Daubenton to his side, and from that moment the court intrigue turned against Alberoni. In this Daubenton played a subordinate, but important, part. The English and French courts, as well as many of the Spaniards, were eager for the dismissal of the Italian favourite, and Daubenton, who confessed Philip twice a day and had other consultations with him, was employed by them to poison the King against his minister. Philip was persuaded that the great plans of Alberoni contained a danger to the country and he dismissed him. In this case the Jesuit confessor allowed himself to become the tool of the enemies of Spain and intrigued against its ablest statesman.
In the year 1724 Philip handed the crown to his son Louis, and retired to consecrate his useless life to religious devotions. There is no serious evidence that the Jesuits pressed Philip to resign, though they certainly tried to dissuade him from resuming the crown, and they had taken part in marrying Louis to the daughter of the Duke of Orleans. However that may be, Louis died a few months later and Philip returned to the throne.
Daubenton had died in 1723, and his place had been taken by the Jesuit Bermudez, who sustained the tradition of intrigue. The successor of Alberoni was a Spaniard from the Low Countries, Ripperdá, who was obnoxious to the Jesuits on many grounds. In Holland he had consulted his ambition by turning Protestant, and on his return to Spain, where he found favour with theKing, he promptly recovered his belief in the older creed. The Queen's confessor, a Jesuit who rejoiced in the title and robes of Archbishop of Amida, intrigued against this singular adventurer and overthrew him. Here again the Jesuit merely used his opportunities to voice the resentment of many others, nor do historians regard the downfall of Ripperdá with any sympathy, but the intrigues of the spiritual guides of the court were now so flagrant and so much discussed in Europe that Philip was angry. When, shortly afterwards, Father Bermudez offended the Queen by stealthily communicating to the King letters from France, to be concealed from her, and was found to be intriguing like his predecessors, he was dismissed from office. It was related in the court that Bermudez offered to swear on the crucifix that he was innocent, and that Philip answered: "I have too much respect for the image of Christ to suffer you to perjure yourself thus." Bermudez was dismissed, and an Irish Jesuit, Father Clarke, was made royal confessor for the remainder of the melancholy reign of PhilipV.
The accession of his son, FerdinandVI., in 1746 brought little relief to the country and no change in the power of the Jesuits. Ferdinand, a weak and virtuous monarch, of the type which proved so congenial to the Jesuits, was devoted to the Society. His confessor, Father Rabago, was his chief adviser, and courtiers gathered thickly about the Jesuit in the hope of winning his influence. His position and power, and the feebleness of the monarch, made him bolder, and a few years later he ventured upon an action which was to have disastrous consequences for his Society. In spite of all the efforts of the Jesuits Spain agreed to cede a part of Paraguay containing seven of the Jesuit reductions to Portugal, in exchange for Sacramento, I have alreadymentioned this incident in speaking of Portugal, and will narrate in a later chapter what happened in Paraguay. Briefly, an army of 15,000 Indians from the reductions—not merely the seven reductions in question, which would not afford more than a few hundred soldiers, but evidently the full force of the Jesuit troops drafted from the whole of their scattered reductions—drew up in the path of the Spanish and Portuguese troops, and it was only after many battles, and at the end of three years, that the agreement between the two governments could be carried out.
The Marquis de Pombal, who was then in power at Lisbon, at once claimed that the Jesuits had inspired this treasonable resistance. It would be difficult for any impartial person to imagine that this army had been mobilised from the whole area of Jesuit influence and maintained for so long a period against the will of the Jesuit fathers, who so completely dominated the Indians and were accustomed to lead them to battle. Ferdinand hesitated, but at last Pombal intercepted a secret letter from Father Rabago to the Spanish fathers, in which he urged them to resist. The English ambassador, Sir Benjamin Keene (quoted by Coxe in hisMemoirs of the Kings of Spain), tells us that this letter and other proofs were put before Ferdinand, and the King expressed great indignation with the Jesuits in his presence. Coxe himself, who is often quoted by the Jesuits as an impartial authority, says that the letter was "undoubtedly" genuine. Rabago was, he says, ignorant at first of foreign affairs, and ruled by a junta of his colleagues in his direction of the King, but he became ambitious and intrigued against the power of the leading statesmen Carvajal and Enseñada. The letters intercepted in 1754 opened the King's eyes, and when, in the following year, the confessor was detected in hisintrigues against Enseñada, he was peremptorily dismissed from office.
Ferdinand continued to trust the other Jesuits and resist the pressure of Pombal, but he died in 1759, and an abler ruler, CharlesIII., came to the throne. Charles was a devout Catholic and was devoted to the Society. He was, like his predecessor, deaf to the warnings and entreaties of Pombal, and the ruthless expulsion of the Jesuits from Portugal (in 1759) only increased his benevolence toward them in Spain. All their errors were forgotten, and Pombal's charges against their conduct in the colonies were warmly rejected. Few could have anticipated that, under such a ruler, in less than ten years from his accession, the gorgeous structure of Jesuit prosperity in Spain would be thrown to the ground and the fathers ignominiously expelled.
The first action of the Jesuits to modify the feeling of the King toward them was their opposition to the canonisation of Bishop Palafox. Charles keenly desired that the highest honours of the Church should be paid to this saintly Spanish bishop of the previous century, but, as we shall see later, Palafox had submitted to Pope InnocentX.a very grave indictment of the conduct of the Jesuits and, if he had been canonised, his letters "would have brought disgrace on the Society," as the Jesuit historian Cordara says. Cordara admits that the means they adopted to prevent canonisation were not approvable; they were, in fact, chiefly bribery and an unscrupulous vilification of the bishop. The process did not get beyond the stage of declaring the bishop "Venerable," and Charles was displeased with the Jesuits.
In 1766 a less clear, but much more serious, grievance arose. An attempt to shorten the long cloaksand broad-brimmedsombrerosof the Spanish people, which favoured assassins, led in the spring of 1766 to a revolt at Madrid. Charles was a stern maintainer of royal authority, and the outbreak greatly angered him. His chief minister Aranda, a scholar and politician of the liberal school, who was in sympathy with Choiseul and Pombal and opposed to the Jesuits, now succeeded in persuading the King that the Jesuits had inspired the revolt. According to the official "historian" of the Society, the only ground for this was that the Jesuits had flung themselves bravely upon the angry mob and disarmed it; which aroused an improper suspicion of their power. The historian is careful not to relate that in the autumn of the year a lawyer named Navarro was arrested for bringing a false charge against certain monks (whom the Jesuits disliked) in connection with the riot, and that, when the case turned against him, he declared that the Jesuits had prompted him to do this in order to avert suspicion from their own conduct. Charles was convinced that they were the authors of the riot, and he was now prepared to listen to the charges of Pombal and Choiseul.
It was then submitted to the King that the Jesuits were conspiring to replace him on the throne by his brother Louis. One of our best authorities, Coxe, declares that a forged letter in this sense, purporting to come from General Ricci to the heads of the Spanish Jesuits, was used amongst the evidence. However that may be, the King was convinced, a searching inquiry was made into the condition and activity of the Society, and the King entrusted to the willing hands of Aranda the task of destroying it. Aranda realised that secrecy was essential to success, and he and a few confidential colleagues stealthily drew up the indictment of the Society. Such precautions had to be taken to outwitthe Jesuit spies that the minister would take pen and ink in his pocket, in order that it should not be known that the King was signing a document. By the beginning of 1767 it was decided to banish the Jesuits from the Spanish dominions, and Aranda set to work to arrange the expulsion without giving the Jesuits an opportunity to provoke a rising in their favour. Sealed orders were sent to the local officials all over the empire, and it was strictly enjoined under pain of death that they were not to be opened until the evening of 2nd April.[28]
By the end of March the Jesuits must have been aware that some grave step against them was meditated, but the secret was well kept and the plan carried out to the letter. Some time after midnight on 2nd April the troops silently gathered round the six Jesuit colleges at Madrid and all the other houses and residences of the Society. The sentence was carried out simultaneously, with perfect order. The astounded Jesuits awoke to find a soldier and official in every cell, and they were ordered to dress and proceed to the refectory. There the royal decree of banishment was read to the assembled community, and they were promptly conducted by the troops, with such small personal possessions as their breviaries and their tobacco, to the appointed port. They were put in separate carriages, and carefully secluded from each other and the people until they were aboard ship. It seems that Aranda's precautions were excessive. The Jesuits complain rather of the harshness of the soldiers than attempt to discover any sympathy to which they might appeal. Sympathy and anger there were, of course, as well as delirious rejoicing, when the fall of the Society becameknown. But before the country had fully realised that the proud Society had been doomed to exile by a Spanish king, the 6000 Jesuits of Spain and its colonies were mournfully crossing the Mediterranean, in overcrowded vessels, toward the coast of the papal states. A pension was allotted to each out of their confiscated property, but they were informed that the pensions of all would cease if one of their number ventured to assail Spain and defend the Society; this was not an unjust measure in view of the fact that no Jesuit could publish without authority.
Another very painful experience awaited the fathers at the Italian shore. Charles sent word to the Pope that he had found it necessary to banish the Jesuits, and he was committing them to the Pope's "wise and holy direction." The letter is not as disrespectful as this may suggest, but ClementXIII.was so angry that he took an unpardonable step. It will be remembered that Pombal had previously unloaded his ships on the papal shores, and the suppression in France had driven large numbers to Italy. We may assume that the aim of Pombal, Choiseul, and Aranda was to dispose the Pope to receive their demand for the abolition of the Society. Clement was so angry that he refused to receive the wretched exiles. The case is not, as is sometimes said, that he forgot to send, or refrained from sending, orders to receive the Jesuits. When the first vessel, bearing 600 dejected priests, made for the port of Civitá Vecchia, it was warned off by the roar of papal cannon, and for some weeks the miserable men tossed on the waves of the Mediterranean in sight of the inhospitable papal states. In the end they were dispatched to Corsica, to enjoy their slender pensions. Some apostatised, and some crept back in disguise to their native land, and were hunted as traitors; but in six years their lasthopes were extinguished by the papal abolition of the Society.
The verdict of the historian on this romantic fall of the Society of Jesus in the two countries which seemed especially adapted for its operations must always be coloured by his creed. Protestant historians have at times commented on the harsh execution of the sentence and the character of some of the evidence on which it was obtained, but none questions the justice of the expulsion. On the other hand, although the Catholic Church was, to say the least, equally divided on the matter at the time, no modern Catholic historian would admit the justice of the sentence. I do not propose to consider this in detail until we come to the abolition of the Society by the Pope. Indeed, we cannot quite appreciate the whole case of the Spaniards and Portuguese Catholics against the Jesuits until we have examined their conduct in the colonies. When we have covered the whole ground we shall be in a position to weigh the stern and lengthy indictment which ClementXIV.—who is wilfully misrepresented by Catholic writers—passes on the Society in pronouncing the solemn sentence of death. For the moment I need only say that, apart from their great irregularities in the colonies, the Jesuits were hated in Spain and Portugal on the ground that, in spite of their high professions, they sought and accumulated wealth, indulged in commerce, lent themselves to political intrigue, wronged other spiritual bodies, were lax in moral principles, and drained the resources of the decaying country without rendering it any proportionate service. This record of their deeds must suffice to enable the reader to say if the indictment and sentence were just.