Chapter XPosition of the Jesuits in 1761—Decree for their expulsion sent from Spain—Bucareli sent to suppress the colleges and drive out the Jesuits—They submit without resistance—After two hundred years they are expelled from Paraguay—The country under the new rule—The system of government practically unchanged‘No storm is so insidious’ (said St. Ignatius) ‘as a perfect calm, and no enemy so dangerous as the absence of all enemies.’This dangerous state of calm without an apparent enemy in sight was the position of the Jesuits in Paraguay in 1761. By desperate efforts and intrigues in Spain they had kept their thirty missions from being mutilated; their influence amongst the Indians had never been more absolute. The governors of Buenos Ayres and of Paraguay had tried a fall with them, and the honours of the struggle were with the Jesuits. They had succeeded in getting put into force the clauses of the ‘Laws of the Indies’, which kept Spaniards out of the Indian settlements. Even those sent against them had been forced to testify to their utility[303]in Paraguay. But throughout Spain and her enormous empire in America and in the East perpetual hostility between the Jesuits and the regular clergy had been going on for years. In every portion of America the Jesuits were unpopular, the excuse alleged being their wealth and power;[304]but the real reason was their attitude on slavery. After repeated grumblings of distant thunder, at length the storm broke, and the decree for the expulsion of the Jesuits in Spain and her dominions was signed, and the order sent to Bucareli, Governor of Buenos Ayres, in June of 1767, to put it into force in Paraguay. The reasons which induced King Charles III. to expel the Jesuits, mysterious as they were, and locked up a dead secret in the royal breast,[305]may or may not have been sufficient in Spain, but could in no respect have held good for Paraguay, where there existed little scope for court intrigue, and where the Jesuits were far removed from their fellow Spanish subjects, and occupied entirely with their mission work. Many and various have been the explanations which historians have set forth for this decree. Certain it is in Spain this Order had attained to considerable power, and that in Rome the abler of their Generals occasionally kept the Popes in mental servitude.Some have accounted for the act of Charles III. as being but revenge for the tumult of Aranjuez under the ministry of Esquilace,[306]arguing that the Jesuits were in fact the authors of it, and that it was but the precursor of a plot to dethrone the King and place his brother Don Luis upon the throne, as being not so liberal in his ideas. Others, again, have stated[307]that the Jesuits set about a calumny that Charles III. was not the Queen’s son by her husband, but by a lover whom they said she had. The only reason which seems feasible is that the King was worked on by the fear that the Order had risen to too much power, and that if he did not at once take steps the monarchy would be rendered but a mere appendage of the General of the Jesuits.[308]Whether it is sound policy of any government to expel a race, or sect, or order from its domains, no matter what the immediate exigencies of the times seem to require, is a moot point. The expulsions of the Jews, Moriscos, and Huguenots, and the dissolution of the monasteries in the times of that true Protestant Henry VIII. of ever pious memory, do not exactly seem to have had the effect upon the countries where they took place that was at first expected by their instigators. Expelled by Charles III., the Jesuits to-day in Spain have re-acquired much of their influence. So that it seems that persecution, to be effectual, must not stop on this side of extermination, and this our Lord Protector Cromwell understood full well.The Viceroy Bucareli[309]to whom the task of the expulsion of the Order in the viceroyalty of Buenos Ayres and of Paraguay was entrusted, was no ordinary man.[310]Appointed Viceroy of Buenos Ayres after a distinguished career of public service, he found himself, almost without warning, and without any adequate forces at his command, obliged to execute by far the most important and far-reaching task that had ever fallen to the lot of any Spanish Governor in America to carry out. But as his services had not been chiefly in America, he held the idea which at the time was generally received in Europe, that the Jesuits possessed great wealth, had bodies of trained troops, and so would resist all efforts at expulsion to the death.Full of these visions, says Dean Funes,[311]he considered the order, which was transmitted to him from Spain, as involving serious military risk, and evidently seems to have looked on every Jesuit village as a strong place of arms. July 22, 1767, was the day he chose, keeping his design a secret, and preparing to strike in Corrientes, Cordoba, Monte Video, and Santa Fe, on the same day, or rather night, for the terror of the Jesuits was so great that he designed to expel them all by night.On July 2 two ships arrived in Buenos Ayres bringing the news that the decree had been put in force in Spain on April 2 with success. As all the crew of both the ships knew what had happened in Spain, concealment of his plan became no longer possible. Thus, had the Jesuits possessed either the wish or the means to make an armed resistance, they had ample time to stand on their defence.Nothing was further from their minds, though they had complete dominion over a territory as large as France, and which contained a population of over one hundred and fifty thousand souls.[312]For arms, they had as chief defence some ‘very long English guns, with rests if they wished to use them, which were not very heavy, and had a tolerable range.’[313]These were the preparations that the Jesuits (who, not in Paraguay alone, but throughout all the American dominions of the Spanish crown, ruled over territories stretching from California to Cape Horn)[314]had made, and they were found alone in the missions of Paraguay, where, by a special permission of the Kings of Spain, arms were allowed for defence against the Portuguese.Bucareli, who seems to have been a timid but honest and upright man, made his first experiment upon the Jesuits of Buenos Ayres, Cordoba, and Santa Fe. The colleges in all these places were suppressed on the same night, and without the least resistance from their occupants. He who suppresses a religious Order, takes a town or country, or, in fact, puts into operation any of the forces of the law or military power, always expects, no matter how exalted be his motives at the start, to recoup himself from the treasure of the conquered.Væ victis, together with the vestments of the church, the plainsong, and the saints, came as a pagan heritage to the new faith, and has been held as canon law since Constantine looked at the sky and thought he saw a cross.Great must have been the disgust of the Governor to find the spoil so paltry, and not to have the satisfaction even of saying that the Jesuits had hidden all their gold, as, his own measures having been taken secretly, they had no knowledge of what was in the wind. In the college of Cordoba, esteemed to be a mine of wealth, was found only nine thousand dollars,[315]which sum Ferando Fabro, the commissioner sent by Bucareli to take over the effects of the Jesuits at Cordoba, duly chronicles in his report.But if the college of Cordoba[316]proved a miserable prey, there still remained the Jesuit missions on the Uruguay and Paraná, with all the riches of their fertile territory, and the enormous wealth which every Spaniard firmly believed the Jesuits had acquired. None of the Jesuits, either in Buenos Ayres, Cordoba, Santa Fe, Corrientes, or Monte Video having made the least resistance, but having opened wide their doors to the soldiers, who in all the towns on the same day at two o’clock in the morning came to signify their expulsion to them, it was only natural to think that the same conduct would be observed in Paraguay. But Governors and Governments never seem in the least accessible to common-sense. Almost a year had passed before he plucked up courage for his dangerous task.[317]He set about it with more preparation than either Cortez or Pizarro made for the conquest of Mexico or of Peru. Having embarked for Spain in the frigateLa Esmeraldaone hundred and fifty Jesuits from the towns of Cordoba, Buenos Ayres, Monte Video, and Santa Fe, he prepared to march upon the missions, when a suspicion of resistance caused him to take precautions which the result proved quite ridiculous. He sent two hundred of the best of the militia of Asuncion to occupy the fords upon the Tebicuari,[318]and a body of equal strength to occupy the port of San Miguel. All these measures being taken for his safety, the conqueror embarked upon May 24, taking with him three companies of grenadiers and sixty dragoons. He disembarked at the town of Salto on the Uruguay, and from thence despatched Captain Don Juan Francisco de la Riva Herrera to occupy the towns upon the Paraná. Don Francisco de Zabala was sent to seize six of the towns upon the Uruguay. Bucareli himself, with several hundred men, marched upon Yapeyu,[319]the southernmost of all the mission towns. The Jesuits, however, gave no trouble to any of the troops, and even stopped the Governor from gathering any laurels, however withered, with which to crown his arms.As he advanced from town to town, the priests, on his arrival at each place, although living in the midst of Indians, some of whom were armed, and many of whom had served the King of Spain in various wars, and all of whom looked on the Jesuits almost as gods, came out and peacefully gave up the keys of all their houses, and submitted quietly to be made prisoners and be carried off in chains from the territories which they and their order had civilized and ruled over almost two hundred years. Seventy-eight Jesuits and their provincials were sent prisoners to Buenos Ayres, and their places all filled up with other priests taken from different Orders, and none of whom had any experience in mission-work. As Dean Funes tartly writes, the miracle that Bucareli wished, but scarcely dared to hope for, had taken place. The Jesuits, in Paraguay, at least, by their conduct in their last public act, most amply vindicated their loyalty to the Spanish crown. Nothing would have been easier, depleted as the viceroyalty was at the time of troops,[320]than to have defied the forces which Bucareli had at his disposal, and to have set up a Jesuit State, which would have taxed the utmost resources of the Spanish crown to overcome. No doubt the very facility with which Bucareli carried out his plans confirmed him in his own mind of their expediency, for men in general are prone to think that right which they accomplish with success. However, be that as it may, he returned in triumph to Buenos Ayres on September 16, having expended in his expedition less than four months. So in a quarter of a year the Jesuits, after more than two hundred years of rule, were all expelled from Paraguay.They made no fight, nor offered any resistance, letting themselves be taken as a butcher takes a sheep, and that surrounded as they were by a population of upwards of one hundred and fifty thousand souls, cut off by countless leagues from the outside world, defended on three sides by virgin forests and by marshes hardly passable to European troops. One word from the Provincial would have set the missions in a blaze. A word would have brought clouds of horsemen—badly armed, ’tis true, but knowing every foot of marsh and forest, all the deep-beaten tracks which wind in the red earth across the lonely plains, the passes of the rivers, springs, natural fastnesses, and having the varied knowledge of a country which of old made Border horsemen and Northumbrian prickers formidable upon the Scottish marches—into the field.The dogged Paraguayan Indians, ancestors of the infantry which, under Lopez,[321]died so bravely under the fire of the Brazilian guns, would, in their red cloaks and scanty linen clothes, have marched fromcapilla[322]and from mission against the enemies of the ‘father-priests’. Seventy-eight Jesuits were marched off to Buenos Ayres, and then shipped off to Europe[323]to join their fellows, who had been brought together by the ministers of the most liberal King who ever filled the Spanish throne from every quarter of the world. Having expelled the Jesuits, Bucareli was bound by the exigencies of his position to calumniate them. Perhaps, as an official, hidebound in his belief in the inalterable right of Governments to commit injustices, he believed all that he wrote. For the welfare of humanity, one could hope he knew all that he wrote was false. What hope is there left for mankind as long as addle-headed, honest men see naught but justice in whatever order they receive? Better a thousand times a rogue who knows he is a rogue than a good, well-intentioned, blundering man quite unaware he is a fool.But, still, he had to justify himself either upon his own account or for the benefit of that posterity to conciliate which so many public men have paltered with the truth. So his first care was to extract a letter from thirty Indians whom he chose to dignify with the title of the mayors of the thirty towns, first having, as he says himself in a letter to the Conde de Aranda, the minister of Charles III., dressed them in the Spanish fashion, and treated them in such a way that they might know how much their lot had been improved.[324]The letter, written originally in Guaraní,[325]bears upon every line of it the dictation of the Governor. After a fine paragraph of salutations, it goes on to give the King many and repeated thanks (‘muchas y repetidas gracias’) for having sent his Excellency Captain-General Don Francisco Bucareli, ‘who has fulfilled, for the love of God and for the love of your Majesty, all the just orders which your Majesty laid to his charge, aiding our poverty, and clothing us like gentlemen.’ Most people, even the heathen, like those who help their poverty and clothe them in the garb of gentlemen. It had not occurred to the poor Indians that the fine clothes might turn out liveries. The mayors all sign their Indian names, which seems to give the lie to the accusation that the Jesuits kept them ignorant. The letter, dated Buenos Ayres, March 10, 1768, seems to show that the Indians, be they who they might have been, were not free agents at the time they wrote. The Indians’ letter duly despatched, the Governor indited a report, in which he fairly and with circumstance reiterates all the old charges against the Jesuits in Paraguay which the inventive brain of Cardenas had first conceived; but to them he adds several little touches of his own, which show he had some observation and an imaginative mind.Amongst his numerous letters to Aranda and to the King, one dated Buenos Ayres, October 14, 1768,[326]contains the fullest account of his proceedings in the missions and of his views (or of what he thought to be his views) about the work in which he was engaged. Time was of small account in 1768 either in Paraguay or in Madrid, so Bucareli relates with some prolixity all that he did, with comments, movements of troops, regrettable occurrences—as when his soldiers let themselves be surprised and lost their horses—and now and then scraps of morality and theology, which shows quite plainly that the art of writing maundering despatches is not so new as optimists may have supposed. Quite in the manner of a modern special correspondent, he sets down all that he suffered from the weather; that it rained incessantly, and, marvellous to tell, that after rain the rivers rose, and gave him difficulty to cross. The roads were bad, provisions scarce and dear, and now and then wild Indians ‘massacred’ an outpost of his men, whilst his brave fellows, when God willed it, occasionally ‘chastised’ the infidel, and by the grace of Heaven slew no small number of them. Still, in the monstrous farrago of words, extending to some sixteen pages of close print, he lets us see he was a man of some capacity, but leaves it doubtful whether he really thought he was engaged upon a noble work, or if he wrote ironically, or if his only object was to satisfy his conscience and his King. But making much of little difficulties is but to be expected from a leader of an expedition or from a General in the field. Without it, how could they justify their existence, or prove to the world at large that they were needed, or but more important than a mere ceremony?[327]When the land troubles were got over, and Bucareli, having arrived at Yapeyu, embarked upon the river, the very winds proved contrary, so that it took him many days to arrive at Candelaria, which port he reached upon August 27, 1768. But before quitting Yapeyu the Governor made a solemn feast, riding himself before his grenadiers, whose caps, he says, caused much amazement, the Indians never having seen such headgear in their lives. The difficulties of his journey over, the Jesuits dispossessed and sent down-stream to be remitted home, Bucareli in his letter next deals with questions of religion, about which he shows himself as well informed as all the Spanish conquerors seem to have been in the New World. If for the dogma of the faith he was a bar of iron, for ‘cold morality’, as Scottish preachers of the perfervid type used to refer to it, he was most keen. The Indians’ clothes, especially the gracefultupoiworn by the women, shocked him exceedingly. It was impossible to touch upon it without an outrage upon modesty.[328]Masculine virtue is a most precarious thing, but little, if at all, more stable than its female counterpart; therefore perhaps the Governor was right not to expose his soldiers to temptation, so he did well, as he informs us, in serving out clothes which obscured their charms, or perhaps hid them quite from view. ‘Such tyrannies,’[329]says the modest Governor, ‘occasioned many offences against God, and frequent illnesses and epidemics.’ The sentence is a little doubtful in its meaning, for if a scantiness of women’s dress occasioned illnesses and epidemics amongst the population of a town, Belgravia and Mayfair should surely be the most unhealthy spots on earth; though even there, I verily believe, no more offences against God occur than amongst the Moors, whose women show only their eyes to the shrinking gaze of easily offended men.As in duty bound, Bucareli kept for the end of his despatch a rehash of all the old charges made against the Jesuits. They kept the Indians in slavery, would never let them learn Spanish, and were themselves inordinately rich. The first two accusations Father José Cardiel, in his ‘Declaracion de la Verdad’, abundantly disproves.[330]The last the Governor disproves himself; for had he found much treasure he most assuredly would have made haste to send it to the King. What he did find, a reference later to Brabo’s inventories will show, and the same source discloses all the wealth the richest Order in the world, according to their enemies, took with them in their involuntary journey back to Spain. All being finished in the missions and the Jesuits expelled, Bucareli found himself obliged to institute some system for the government of the Indian population, which he had deprived both of its spiritual and of its temporal guides.The Jesuits’ government having been so bad, according to his own despatch, the Indians having been kept in such a miserable state, their education having been so neglected, and, above all, their women having been dressed in such light attire that Bucareli could not with modesty even describe their dress, it might have seemed but natural that he should have evolved some system of government differing in all respects from that he had destroyed. So far from that, in his instructions to his interim successor, dated at Candelaria,[331]August 23, 1768, he practically followed slavishly all the policy which the Jesuits had pursued. He ordered Captains Riva Herrera and Bruno de Zavala, to whom the arrangements were committed, to see that the Indians were instructed ‘in the true knowledge of our holy faith’, a work which the Jesuits, whatever might be their faults, had not neglected to insure. After some platitudes as to the vivifying effects of free and open trade, and an injunction to his captains to take care the Indian girls were decorously and virtuously dressed, he launched into a sermon about honest work, which, as he said, would make the Indians rich, happy, and virtuous, and alone could ever make a kingdom prosper; in fact, he used almost precisely similar language to that to-day used by a European Governor in Africa when about to make a people slaves. On the whole, however, his instructions were wise and liberal, and had they been carried out in the same spirit, and with fidelity, the Indians might have long continued in the same half-Arcadian, half-Christian state in which the Jesuits left them, and to which it seems they could attain, but not go farther without exposure to that vivifying commerce without which nations cannot prosper, but with which the greater portion of their citizens must remain ever slaves.The instructions given, he left the missions never to return, leaving behind him the reputation of an honest man, having made, as it would appear, no money during his sojourn in their territories. On October 20, 1768, he wrote from Buenos Ayres to Aranda, telling him that his work was done, and asking him as a particular favour to implore the King to give him some employment ‘out of America, and particularly not under either the secretaryship or the Council of the Indies.’[332]Thus it appears that either the work in which he had been engaged was uncongenial to him, or he mistrusted the future and the Indians when the Jesuits’ sheltering hands had been withdrawn, and thought the King might blame him for what was sure to come. One passage in his letter of instructions shows that the antique, but still current, fashion of going to any length to obtain a country in which are situated even supposititious gold-mines had its influence even with such an honest man as Bucareli was. He specially enjoins upon the officials left in charge ‘to find out from what quarter the Indians of those towns extract those pieces of the precious metals which they sometimes bring to their priests.’ So that the fable of the false mines started by Cardenas, although a thousand times disproved, still lingered in the minds of those who could not understand what motive except that of growing rich could cause the Jesuits to bury themselves in the recesses of the Paraguayan woods. The release from things American and under the jurisdiction of the Council of the Indies did not come to Bucareli for almost two more years, during which time he struggled manfully with the affairs of the Jesuit missions, repelled the Chaco Indians on one side, and on the other implored for troops to defend the island of Chiloe against the heretic English, who at that time appear to have been meditating the advancement of their empire in the extremest south. One curious letter was reserved for Bucareli to indite before he quitted Buenos Ayres for the last time. On January 15, 1770, he sent a long declaration signed by the celebrated Nicolas Ñeenguirú and other Indians, giving an account of the part played by him in the abortive resistance which he made against the cession of the seven towns. This is the last time that Nicolas, the ‘King’ of Paraguay and ‘Emperor of the Mamelucos’, appears in any document as far as I can find. His name at one time was well known in Paraguay, the River Plate and Spain, and served to father many lies upon; and at the last, the Jesuits gone, he seems to have turned against them, and said all that was required by Bucareli to get up his case. It appears from Bucareli’s letter that the family of the Ñeenguirú had been well known in the missions from the time of Cardenas. In 1770[333]we find him shorn of his kingly and imperial dignities, the mayor of Concepcion in Paraguay, tall, taciturn, with long, lank hair, and much respected by his brother Indians, who held his stirrup for him when he got upon his horse. To find him in the humour to give tongue about the Jesuits was a trump-card in Bucareli’s hand, for if it could be proved that in 1750 they had resisted the forces of the crown of Spain, the public, always anxious to believe a lie, would naturally applaud the action of the King in their expulsion from his territories. Nicolas, who seems to have been but a poor creature at the best, testified that everything which he had done as General of the Indians was by the order of Fathers Limp and Ennis, and that he was a poor Indian who did but that which he was told. He finished up his testimony with thanks to the good King for having taken him out of the power of the Jesuits, and kept him in his post of mayor at Concepcion. In fact, all was the same to him as long as he was left with his alcalde’s staff.[334]Upon August 14, 1778, Bucareli sailed for Spain, leaving Don Juan José Vertiz as his successor in the viceroyalty of the provinces of the River Plate. The missions were all placed under the care of friars of the begging Orders, chiefly Franciscans, and the system of the Jesuit government was left unchanged. In 1771, writing from San Lorenzo (el Escorial) in Spain, Bucareli, who seemed fated never to escape from the affairs of Paraguay, sends a long constitution for the thirty towns which follows all the Jesuits’ rules of government to the last tittle of their policy. Brabo has preserved the document, which runs to forty-seven pages of close print in its entirety. A carefully thought-out and well-conceived digest of a constitution it most certainly is, and yet it follows to the most minute particular the policy the Jesuits laid down.Dean Funes[335]seemed to see that the flattering of Nicolas Ñeenguiru and the other Indian chiefs was an entire affair of artifice, and that it was but a mere crowning of the victims who were destined to be sacrificed. It may be that the constitution made by Bucareli at the Escorial was similarly but a blind to keep the Indians quiet till the Government had time to exploit them at its ease. Still, Bucareli in all his actions seems to have been an honest man; one of those honest, narrow-minded men who have sown more misery in the world than all the rogues and scoundrels since the flood. Be all that as it may, his constitution in a thousand ways recalled the Jesuits’ polity in their days of rule. In a former chapter[336]I have pointed out a curious instance in which this constitution traverses entirely statements made by the Jesuits’ enemies that their exclusive policy was for their own ends, and not, as they alleged, for the protection of the Indians. But there are other instances quite as remarkable which show that the Jesuits not only had grasped perfectly what the best course of treatment was for their subjects, but that the official mind of Bucareli, trained as he was, so to speak, in the strictest sect of Pharisees, and prejudiced against the Jesuits in every way, yet discerned clearly as an honest man that the plan they had laid down was the most suitable for future rulers to pursue.At the time of forming his constitution he had been gone but scarce a year from Buenos Ayres, and yet he writes[337]complaining bitterly of what was happening in the missions of Paraguay. He points out that all his trouble will have been in vain ‘if the Governor and his lieutenants are not stimulated to address themselves to the service of God and of the King, with that zeal which everyone should impart to his duty.’ Then, after a puff preliminary of the beauty of freedom, human and Divine, he sets forth how the Indians are in future to be ruled. First, as in duty bound, he points out that anything savouring of communism is against the laws of Heaven and of man; that the Indians in their semi-communism were really slaves, the industrious working for the idle, and so forth; that their clothes were scanty; that they were not allowed to freely mix with Spaniards, and were kept a race apart. Then like a prudent statesman having made his apologia ‘pro existentia sua’, and blown off much virtuous steam, he comes to business, and business, as we know, is the great soberer of theorists, no matter on what side they theorize.After the article to which I have referred in Chapter IX. comes this most curious paragraph, taken in connection with the inalienable right which, according to himself, the Indians had of free communication with the outer world:[338]‘And because I am informed that many Indians who have been absent in the army of the Portuguese, and have resided for lengthened periods in Rio Pardo, Viamont and other parts, have returned to their towns, you will take care that all these with their families shall be removed to those (towns) either in the interior or distant from those frontiers, as it is not convenient that they should remain on them (the frontiers) or close to them; and thus you will proceed successively with the Indians who return, without leaving one, in order to avoid any chance of communication, which might be most prejudicial.’ Surely a satire on his own abuse of the Jesuits for keeping the Indians mewed up from intercourse with the outside world. It may be that he had perceived the Indians were not fit to hold their own; indeed, it is certain he had done so, for on p. 326 he writes, ‘It is not convenient to leave them (the Indians) entire liberty,[339]for it would be in the extreme fatal and prejudicial to their interests, because the astuteness and sagacity of the Spaniards would triumph easily over their rusticity.’ ‘Sagacity’ is an ingenious euphuism, and might well be used with good effect in the like circumstances, when occasion serves, to-day. But as no single article of any document set forth by any Government can be straightforward and single in its purpose, and as all laws are made with an eye upon some party presently in power, after the paragraph just quoted, on the next page occurs the following sentence under the head of ‘Commerce with the Spaniards is to be free’.[340]‘It is laid down that between the Indians and the Spaniards commerce should be free, in order that mutual dealings should unite them in friendship.’ Therefore to the ordinary mind it is impossible to make out what really was intended, and whether commerce was to be free or not. Those little differences apart, the constitution ran entirely upon Jesuit lines. That semi-communism which was so prejudicial during the Jesuits’ rule was formally re-organized in chapter iv. of the constitution (p. 343) the instant that their power was placed in other hands. Even the prohibition to the Spaniards to enter the Jesuit towns, and reside there, was formally kept up in chapter iii., with the sole alteration that for three months of the year they might reside amongst the Indians on certain well-defined conditions most prolixly set forth. So that it will be seen that, if the Jesuits did ill, as usual, any ill they did was carefully perpetuated by their successors, and, quite as naturally, all that they strove to do in favour of the Indians was most carefully undone.
Position of the Jesuits in 1761—Decree for their expulsion sent from Spain—Bucareli sent to suppress the colleges and drive out the Jesuits—They submit without resistance—After two hundred years they are expelled from Paraguay—The country under the new rule—The system of government practically unchanged
‘No storm is so insidious’ (said St. Ignatius) ‘as a perfect calm, and no enemy so dangerous as the absence of all enemies.’
This dangerous state of calm without an apparent enemy in sight was the position of the Jesuits in Paraguay in 1761. By desperate efforts and intrigues in Spain they had kept their thirty missions from being mutilated; their influence amongst the Indians had never been more absolute. The governors of Buenos Ayres and of Paraguay had tried a fall with them, and the honours of the struggle were with the Jesuits. They had succeeded in getting put into force the clauses of the ‘Laws of the Indies’, which kept Spaniards out of the Indian settlements. Even those sent against them had been forced to testify to their utility[303]in Paraguay. But throughout Spain and her enormous empire in America and in the East perpetual hostility between the Jesuits and the regular clergy had been going on for years. In every portion of America the Jesuits were unpopular, the excuse alleged being their wealth and power;[304]but the real reason was their attitude on slavery. After repeated grumblings of distant thunder, at length the storm broke, and the decree for the expulsion of the Jesuits in Spain and her dominions was signed, and the order sent to Bucareli, Governor of Buenos Ayres, in June of 1767, to put it into force in Paraguay. The reasons which induced King Charles III. to expel the Jesuits, mysterious as they were, and locked up a dead secret in the royal breast,[305]may or may not have been sufficient in Spain, but could in no respect have held good for Paraguay, where there existed little scope for court intrigue, and where the Jesuits were far removed from their fellow Spanish subjects, and occupied entirely with their mission work. Many and various have been the explanations which historians have set forth for this decree. Certain it is in Spain this Order had attained to considerable power, and that in Rome the abler of their Generals occasionally kept the Popes in mental servitude.
Some have accounted for the act of Charles III. as being but revenge for the tumult of Aranjuez under the ministry of Esquilace,[306]arguing that the Jesuits were in fact the authors of it, and that it was but the precursor of a plot to dethrone the King and place his brother Don Luis upon the throne, as being not so liberal in his ideas. Others, again, have stated[307]that the Jesuits set about a calumny that Charles III. was not the Queen’s son by her husband, but by a lover whom they said she had. The only reason which seems feasible is that the King was worked on by the fear that the Order had risen to too much power, and that if he did not at once take steps the monarchy would be rendered but a mere appendage of the General of the Jesuits.[308]
Whether it is sound policy of any government to expel a race, or sect, or order from its domains, no matter what the immediate exigencies of the times seem to require, is a moot point. The expulsions of the Jews, Moriscos, and Huguenots, and the dissolution of the monasteries in the times of that true Protestant Henry VIII. of ever pious memory, do not exactly seem to have had the effect upon the countries where they took place that was at first expected by their instigators. Expelled by Charles III., the Jesuits to-day in Spain have re-acquired much of their influence. So that it seems that persecution, to be effectual, must not stop on this side of extermination, and this our Lord Protector Cromwell understood full well.
The Viceroy Bucareli[309]to whom the task of the expulsion of the Order in the viceroyalty of Buenos Ayres and of Paraguay was entrusted, was no ordinary man.[310]Appointed Viceroy of Buenos Ayres after a distinguished career of public service, he found himself, almost without warning, and without any adequate forces at his command, obliged to execute by far the most important and far-reaching task that had ever fallen to the lot of any Spanish Governor in America to carry out. But as his services had not been chiefly in America, he held the idea which at the time was generally received in Europe, that the Jesuits possessed great wealth, had bodies of trained troops, and so would resist all efforts at expulsion to the death.
Full of these visions, says Dean Funes,[311]he considered the order, which was transmitted to him from Spain, as involving serious military risk, and evidently seems to have looked on every Jesuit village as a strong place of arms. July 22, 1767, was the day he chose, keeping his design a secret, and preparing to strike in Corrientes, Cordoba, Monte Video, and Santa Fe, on the same day, or rather night, for the terror of the Jesuits was so great that he designed to expel them all by night.
On July 2 two ships arrived in Buenos Ayres bringing the news that the decree had been put in force in Spain on April 2 with success. As all the crew of both the ships knew what had happened in Spain, concealment of his plan became no longer possible. Thus, had the Jesuits possessed either the wish or the means to make an armed resistance, they had ample time to stand on their defence.
Nothing was further from their minds, though they had complete dominion over a territory as large as France, and which contained a population of over one hundred and fifty thousand souls.[312]For arms, they had as chief defence some ‘very long English guns, with rests if they wished to use them, which were not very heavy, and had a tolerable range.’[313]These were the preparations that the Jesuits (who, not in Paraguay alone, but throughout all the American dominions of the Spanish crown, ruled over territories stretching from California to Cape Horn)[314]had made, and they were found alone in the missions of Paraguay, where, by a special permission of the Kings of Spain, arms were allowed for defence against the Portuguese.
Bucareli, who seems to have been a timid but honest and upright man, made his first experiment upon the Jesuits of Buenos Ayres, Cordoba, and Santa Fe. The colleges in all these places were suppressed on the same night, and without the least resistance from their occupants. He who suppresses a religious Order, takes a town or country, or, in fact, puts into operation any of the forces of the law or military power, always expects, no matter how exalted be his motives at the start, to recoup himself from the treasure of the conquered.Væ victis, together with the vestments of the church, the plainsong, and the saints, came as a pagan heritage to the new faith, and has been held as canon law since Constantine looked at the sky and thought he saw a cross.
Great must have been the disgust of the Governor to find the spoil so paltry, and not to have the satisfaction even of saying that the Jesuits had hidden all their gold, as, his own measures having been taken secretly, they had no knowledge of what was in the wind. In the college of Cordoba, esteemed to be a mine of wealth, was found only nine thousand dollars,[315]which sum Ferando Fabro, the commissioner sent by Bucareli to take over the effects of the Jesuits at Cordoba, duly chronicles in his report.
But if the college of Cordoba[316]proved a miserable prey, there still remained the Jesuit missions on the Uruguay and Paraná, with all the riches of their fertile territory, and the enormous wealth which every Spaniard firmly believed the Jesuits had acquired. None of the Jesuits, either in Buenos Ayres, Cordoba, Santa Fe, Corrientes, or Monte Video having made the least resistance, but having opened wide their doors to the soldiers, who in all the towns on the same day at two o’clock in the morning came to signify their expulsion to them, it was only natural to think that the same conduct would be observed in Paraguay. But Governors and Governments never seem in the least accessible to common-sense. Almost a year had passed before he plucked up courage for his dangerous task.[317]He set about it with more preparation than either Cortez or Pizarro made for the conquest of Mexico or of Peru. Having embarked for Spain in the frigateLa Esmeraldaone hundred and fifty Jesuits from the towns of Cordoba, Buenos Ayres, Monte Video, and Santa Fe, he prepared to march upon the missions, when a suspicion of resistance caused him to take precautions which the result proved quite ridiculous. He sent two hundred of the best of the militia of Asuncion to occupy the fords upon the Tebicuari,[318]and a body of equal strength to occupy the port of San Miguel. All these measures being taken for his safety, the conqueror embarked upon May 24, taking with him three companies of grenadiers and sixty dragoons. He disembarked at the town of Salto on the Uruguay, and from thence despatched Captain Don Juan Francisco de la Riva Herrera to occupy the towns upon the Paraná. Don Francisco de Zabala was sent to seize six of the towns upon the Uruguay. Bucareli himself, with several hundred men, marched upon Yapeyu,[319]the southernmost of all the mission towns. The Jesuits, however, gave no trouble to any of the troops, and even stopped the Governor from gathering any laurels, however withered, with which to crown his arms.
As he advanced from town to town, the priests, on his arrival at each place, although living in the midst of Indians, some of whom were armed, and many of whom had served the King of Spain in various wars, and all of whom looked on the Jesuits almost as gods, came out and peacefully gave up the keys of all their houses, and submitted quietly to be made prisoners and be carried off in chains from the territories which they and their order had civilized and ruled over almost two hundred years. Seventy-eight Jesuits and their provincials were sent prisoners to Buenos Ayres, and their places all filled up with other priests taken from different Orders, and none of whom had any experience in mission-work. As Dean Funes tartly writes, the miracle that Bucareli wished, but scarcely dared to hope for, had taken place. The Jesuits, in Paraguay, at least, by their conduct in their last public act, most amply vindicated their loyalty to the Spanish crown. Nothing would have been easier, depleted as the viceroyalty was at the time of troops,[320]than to have defied the forces which Bucareli had at his disposal, and to have set up a Jesuit State, which would have taxed the utmost resources of the Spanish crown to overcome. No doubt the very facility with which Bucareli carried out his plans confirmed him in his own mind of their expediency, for men in general are prone to think that right which they accomplish with success. However, be that as it may, he returned in triumph to Buenos Ayres on September 16, having expended in his expedition less than four months. So in a quarter of a year the Jesuits, after more than two hundred years of rule, were all expelled from Paraguay.
They made no fight, nor offered any resistance, letting themselves be taken as a butcher takes a sheep, and that surrounded as they were by a population of upwards of one hundred and fifty thousand souls, cut off by countless leagues from the outside world, defended on three sides by virgin forests and by marshes hardly passable to European troops. One word from the Provincial would have set the missions in a blaze. A word would have brought clouds of horsemen—badly armed, ’tis true, but knowing every foot of marsh and forest, all the deep-beaten tracks which wind in the red earth across the lonely plains, the passes of the rivers, springs, natural fastnesses, and having the varied knowledge of a country which of old made Border horsemen and Northumbrian prickers formidable upon the Scottish marches—into the field.
The dogged Paraguayan Indians, ancestors of the infantry which, under Lopez,[321]died so bravely under the fire of the Brazilian guns, would, in their red cloaks and scanty linen clothes, have marched fromcapilla[322]and from mission against the enemies of the ‘father-priests’. Seventy-eight Jesuits were marched off to Buenos Ayres, and then shipped off to Europe[323]to join their fellows, who had been brought together by the ministers of the most liberal King who ever filled the Spanish throne from every quarter of the world. Having expelled the Jesuits, Bucareli was bound by the exigencies of his position to calumniate them. Perhaps, as an official, hidebound in his belief in the inalterable right of Governments to commit injustices, he believed all that he wrote. For the welfare of humanity, one could hope he knew all that he wrote was false. What hope is there left for mankind as long as addle-headed, honest men see naught but justice in whatever order they receive? Better a thousand times a rogue who knows he is a rogue than a good, well-intentioned, blundering man quite unaware he is a fool.
But, still, he had to justify himself either upon his own account or for the benefit of that posterity to conciliate which so many public men have paltered with the truth. So his first care was to extract a letter from thirty Indians whom he chose to dignify with the title of the mayors of the thirty towns, first having, as he says himself in a letter to the Conde de Aranda, the minister of Charles III., dressed them in the Spanish fashion, and treated them in such a way that they might know how much their lot had been improved.[324]The letter, written originally in Guaraní,[325]bears upon every line of it the dictation of the Governor. After a fine paragraph of salutations, it goes on to give the King many and repeated thanks (‘muchas y repetidas gracias’) for having sent his Excellency Captain-General Don Francisco Bucareli, ‘who has fulfilled, for the love of God and for the love of your Majesty, all the just orders which your Majesty laid to his charge, aiding our poverty, and clothing us like gentlemen.’ Most people, even the heathen, like those who help their poverty and clothe them in the garb of gentlemen. It had not occurred to the poor Indians that the fine clothes might turn out liveries. The mayors all sign their Indian names, which seems to give the lie to the accusation that the Jesuits kept them ignorant. The letter, dated Buenos Ayres, March 10, 1768, seems to show that the Indians, be they who they might have been, were not free agents at the time they wrote. The Indians’ letter duly despatched, the Governor indited a report, in which he fairly and with circumstance reiterates all the old charges against the Jesuits in Paraguay which the inventive brain of Cardenas had first conceived; but to them he adds several little touches of his own, which show he had some observation and an imaginative mind.
Amongst his numerous letters to Aranda and to the King, one dated Buenos Ayres, October 14, 1768,[326]contains the fullest account of his proceedings in the missions and of his views (or of what he thought to be his views) about the work in which he was engaged. Time was of small account in 1768 either in Paraguay or in Madrid, so Bucareli relates with some prolixity all that he did, with comments, movements of troops, regrettable occurrences—as when his soldiers let themselves be surprised and lost their horses—and now and then scraps of morality and theology, which shows quite plainly that the art of writing maundering despatches is not so new as optimists may have supposed. Quite in the manner of a modern special correspondent, he sets down all that he suffered from the weather; that it rained incessantly, and, marvellous to tell, that after rain the rivers rose, and gave him difficulty to cross. The roads were bad, provisions scarce and dear, and now and then wild Indians ‘massacred’ an outpost of his men, whilst his brave fellows, when God willed it, occasionally ‘chastised’ the infidel, and by the grace of Heaven slew no small number of them. Still, in the monstrous farrago of words, extending to some sixteen pages of close print, he lets us see he was a man of some capacity, but leaves it doubtful whether he really thought he was engaged upon a noble work, or if he wrote ironically, or if his only object was to satisfy his conscience and his King. But making much of little difficulties is but to be expected from a leader of an expedition or from a General in the field. Without it, how could they justify their existence, or prove to the world at large that they were needed, or but more important than a mere ceremony?[327]
When the land troubles were got over, and Bucareli, having arrived at Yapeyu, embarked upon the river, the very winds proved contrary, so that it took him many days to arrive at Candelaria, which port he reached upon August 27, 1768. But before quitting Yapeyu the Governor made a solemn feast, riding himself before his grenadiers, whose caps, he says, caused much amazement, the Indians never having seen such headgear in their lives. The difficulties of his journey over, the Jesuits dispossessed and sent down-stream to be remitted home, Bucareli in his letter next deals with questions of religion, about which he shows himself as well informed as all the Spanish conquerors seem to have been in the New World. If for the dogma of the faith he was a bar of iron, for ‘cold morality’, as Scottish preachers of the perfervid type used to refer to it, he was most keen. The Indians’ clothes, especially the gracefultupoiworn by the women, shocked him exceedingly. It was impossible to touch upon it without an outrage upon modesty.[328]Masculine virtue is a most precarious thing, but little, if at all, more stable than its female counterpart; therefore perhaps the Governor was right not to expose his soldiers to temptation, so he did well, as he informs us, in serving out clothes which obscured their charms, or perhaps hid them quite from view. ‘Such tyrannies,’[329]says the modest Governor, ‘occasioned many offences against God, and frequent illnesses and epidemics.’ The sentence is a little doubtful in its meaning, for if a scantiness of women’s dress occasioned illnesses and epidemics amongst the population of a town, Belgravia and Mayfair should surely be the most unhealthy spots on earth; though even there, I verily believe, no more offences against God occur than amongst the Moors, whose women show only their eyes to the shrinking gaze of easily offended men.
As in duty bound, Bucareli kept for the end of his despatch a rehash of all the old charges made against the Jesuits. They kept the Indians in slavery, would never let them learn Spanish, and were themselves inordinately rich. The first two accusations Father José Cardiel, in his ‘Declaracion de la Verdad’, abundantly disproves.[330]The last the Governor disproves himself; for had he found much treasure he most assuredly would have made haste to send it to the King. What he did find, a reference later to Brabo’s inventories will show, and the same source discloses all the wealth the richest Order in the world, according to their enemies, took with them in their involuntary journey back to Spain. All being finished in the missions and the Jesuits expelled, Bucareli found himself obliged to institute some system for the government of the Indian population, which he had deprived both of its spiritual and of its temporal guides.
The Jesuits’ government having been so bad, according to his own despatch, the Indians having been kept in such a miserable state, their education having been so neglected, and, above all, their women having been dressed in such light attire that Bucareli could not with modesty even describe their dress, it might have seemed but natural that he should have evolved some system of government differing in all respects from that he had destroyed. So far from that, in his instructions to his interim successor, dated at Candelaria,[331]August 23, 1768, he practically followed slavishly all the policy which the Jesuits had pursued. He ordered Captains Riva Herrera and Bruno de Zavala, to whom the arrangements were committed, to see that the Indians were instructed ‘in the true knowledge of our holy faith’, a work which the Jesuits, whatever might be their faults, had not neglected to insure. After some platitudes as to the vivifying effects of free and open trade, and an injunction to his captains to take care the Indian girls were decorously and virtuously dressed, he launched into a sermon about honest work, which, as he said, would make the Indians rich, happy, and virtuous, and alone could ever make a kingdom prosper; in fact, he used almost precisely similar language to that to-day used by a European Governor in Africa when about to make a people slaves. On the whole, however, his instructions were wise and liberal, and had they been carried out in the same spirit, and with fidelity, the Indians might have long continued in the same half-Arcadian, half-Christian state in which the Jesuits left them, and to which it seems they could attain, but not go farther without exposure to that vivifying commerce without which nations cannot prosper, but with which the greater portion of their citizens must remain ever slaves.
The instructions given, he left the missions never to return, leaving behind him the reputation of an honest man, having made, as it would appear, no money during his sojourn in their territories. On October 20, 1768, he wrote from Buenos Ayres to Aranda, telling him that his work was done, and asking him as a particular favour to implore the King to give him some employment ‘out of America, and particularly not under either the secretaryship or the Council of the Indies.’[332]Thus it appears that either the work in which he had been engaged was uncongenial to him, or he mistrusted the future and the Indians when the Jesuits’ sheltering hands had been withdrawn, and thought the King might blame him for what was sure to come. One passage in his letter of instructions shows that the antique, but still current, fashion of going to any length to obtain a country in which are situated even supposititious gold-mines had its influence even with such an honest man as Bucareli was. He specially enjoins upon the officials left in charge ‘to find out from what quarter the Indians of those towns extract those pieces of the precious metals which they sometimes bring to their priests.’ So that the fable of the false mines started by Cardenas, although a thousand times disproved, still lingered in the minds of those who could not understand what motive except that of growing rich could cause the Jesuits to bury themselves in the recesses of the Paraguayan woods. The release from things American and under the jurisdiction of the Council of the Indies did not come to Bucareli for almost two more years, during which time he struggled manfully with the affairs of the Jesuit missions, repelled the Chaco Indians on one side, and on the other implored for troops to defend the island of Chiloe against the heretic English, who at that time appear to have been meditating the advancement of their empire in the extremest south. One curious letter was reserved for Bucareli to indite before he quitted Buenos Ayres for the last time. On January 15, 1770, he sent a long declaration signed by the celebrated Nicolas Ñeenguirú and other Indians, giving an account of the part played by him in the abortive resistance which he made against the cession of the seven towns. This is the last time that Nicolas, the ‘King’ of Paraguay and ‘Emperor of the Mamelucos’, appears in any document as far as I can find. His name at one time was well known in Paraguay, the River Plate and Spain, and served to father many lies upon; and at the last, the Jesuits gone, he seems to have turned against them, and said all that was required by Bucareli to get up his case. It appears from Bucareli’s letter that the family of the Ñeenguirú had been well known in the missions from the time of Cardenas. In 1770[333]we find him shorn of his kingly and imperial dignities, the mayor of Concepcion in Paraguay, tall, taciturn, with long, lank hair, and much respected by his brother Indians, who held his stirrup for him when he got upon his horse. To find him in the humour to give tongue about the Jesuits was a trump-card in Bucareli’s hand, for if it could be proved that in 1750 they had resisted the forces of the crown of Spain, the public, always anxious to believe a lie, would naturally applaud the action of the King in their expulsion from his territories. Nicolas, who seems to have been but a poor creature at the best, testified that everything which he had done as General of the Indians was by the order of Fathers Limp and Ennis, and that he was a poor Indian who did but that which he was told. He finished up his testimony with thanks to the good King for having taken him out of the power of the Jesuits, and kept him in his post of mayor at Concepcion. In fact, all was the same to him as long as he was left with his alcalde’s staff.[334]
Upon August 14, 1778, Bucareli sailed for Spain, leaving Don Juan José Vertiz as his successor in the viceroyalty of the provinces of the River Plate. The missions were all placed under the care of friars of the begging Orders, chiefly Franciscans, and the system of the Jesuit government was left unchanged. In 1771, writing from San Lorenzo (el Escorial) in Spain, Bucareli, who seemed fated never to escape from the affairs of Paraguay, sends a long constitution for the thirty towns which follows all the Jesuits’ rules of government to the last tittle of their policy. Brabo has preserved the document, which runs to forty-seven pages of close print in its entirety. A carefully thought-out and well-conceived digest of a constitution it most certainly is, and yet it follows to the most minute particular the policy the Jesuits laid down.
Dean Funes[335]seemed to see that the flattering of Nicolas Ñeenguiru and the other Indian chiefs was an entire affair of artifice, and that it was but a mere crowning of the victims who were destined to be sacrificed. It may be that the constitution made by Bucareli at the Escorial was similarly but a blind to keep the Indians quiet till the Government had time to exploit them at its ease. Still, Bucareli in all his actions seems to have been an honest man; one of those honest, narrow-minded men who have sown more misery in the world than all the rogues and scoundrels since the flood. Be all that as it may, his constitution in a thousand ways recalled the Jesuits’ polity in their days of rule. In a former chapter[336]I have pointed out a curious instance in which this constitution traverses entirely statements made by the Jesuits’ enemies that their exclusive policy was for their own ends, and not, as they alleged, for the protection of the Indians. But there are other instances quite as remarkable which show that the Jesuits not only had grasped perfectly what the best course of treatment was for their subjects, but that the official mind of Bucareli, trained as he was, so to speak, in the strictest sect of Pharisees, and prejudiced against the Jesuits in every way, yet discerned clearly as an honest man that the plan they had laid down was the most suitable for future rulers to pursue.
At the time of forming his constitution he had been gone but scarce a year from Buenos Ayres, and yet he writes[337]complaining bitterly of what was happening in the missions of Paraguay. He points out that all his trouble will have been in vain ‘if the Governor and his lieutenants are not stimulated to address themselves to the service of God and of the King, with that zeal which everyone should impart to his duty.’ Then, after a puff preliminary of the beauty of freedom, human and Divine, he sets forth how the Indians are in future to be ruled. First, as in duty bound, he points out that anything savouring of communism is against the laws of Heaven and of man; that the Indians in their semi-communism were really slaves, the industrious working for the idle, and so forth; that their clothes were scanty; that they were not allowed to freely mix with Spaniards, and were kept a race apart. Then like a prudent statesman having made his apologia ‘pro existentia sua’, and blown off much virtuous steam, he comes to business, and business, as we know, is the great soberer of theorists, no matter on what side they theorize.
After the article to which I have referred in Chapter IX. comes this most curious paragraph, taken in connection with the inalienable right which, according to himself, the Indians had of free communication with the outer world:[338]‘And because I am informed that many Indians who have been absent in the army of the Portuguese, and have resided for lengthened periods in Rio Pardo, Viamont and other parts, have returned to their towns, you will take care that all these with their families shall be removed to those (towns) either in the interior or distant from those frontiers, as it is not convenient that they should remain on them (the frontiers) or close to them; and thus you will proceed successively with the Indians who return, without leaving one, in order to avoid any chance of communication, which might be most prejudicial.’ Surely a satire on his own abuse of the Jesuits for keeping the Indians mewed up from intercourse with the outside world. It may be that he had perceived the Indians were not fit to hold their own; indeed, it is certain he had done so, for on p. 326 he writes, ‘It is not convenient to leave them (the Indians) entire liberty,[339]for it would be in the extreme fatal and prejudicial to their interests, because the astuteness and sagacity of the Spaniards would triumph easily over their rusticity.’ ‘Sagacity’ is an ingenious euphuism, and might well be used with good effect in the like circumstances, when occasion serves, to-day. But as no single article of any document set forth by any Government can be straightforward and single in its purpose, and as all laws are made with an eye upon some party presently in power, after the paragraph just quoted, on the next page occurs the following sentence under the head of ‘Commerce with the Spaniards is to be free’.[340]‘It is laid down that between the Indians and the Spaniards commerce should be free, in order that mutual dealings should unite them in friendship.’ Therefore to the ordinary mind it is impossible to make out what really was intended, and whether commerce was to be free or not. Those little differences apart, the constitution ran entirely upon Jesuit lines. That semi-communism which was so prejudicial during the Jesuits’ rule was formally re-organized in chapter iv. of the constitution (p. 343) the instant that their power was placed in other hands. Even the prohibition to the Spaniards to enter the Jesuit towns, and reside there, was formally kept up in chapter iii., with the sole alteration that for three months of the year they might reside amongst the Indians on certain well-defined conditions most prolixly set forth. So that it will be seen that, if the Jesuits did ill, as usual, any ill they did was carefully perpetuated by their successors, and, quite as naturally, all that they strove to do in favour of the Indians was most carefully undone.