Nor were they disinterested persecutors. They fought here, as elsewhere, not for their faith or their Church, but for their idol—the Order. Let them speak for themselves:—“Corvin Gosiewsky, Palatine of Smolensk, met Gustavus Adolphus near the Dunamunde, defeated him, and, to consecrate the remembrance of this day, he founded a Jesuit house in the town he had delivered. Every victory of that Palatine was for the Jesuits a new mission,”[270] which means the erection of a new house or college. The greatest part of the properties of which the Protestants were iniquitously divested went to enrich the covetous and insatiable disciples of Loyola. The Pope, usurping the right of disposing of those properties, only because they had once belonged to the clergy, by a decree, ordered “that a part of the property which had been recovered be employed in erecting seminaries, boarding-schools, and colleges, as well for the Jesuits who have been the principal authors of the imperial proclamation,[271] as for other religious orders;”[272] which last clause was of course rendered illusory, the Jesuits possessing themselves of whatever portion of those properties was set apart for the aforesaid purpose of building houses and colleges.
We have already seen what influence the Jesuits had acquired in Poland, under Sigismund III., in whose reign “a systematic war of popular riots, excited by the Jesuits or their tools, was begun against the Protestants.”[273] In fact, their temples were overthrown, their burial-grounds profaned, their properties destroyed, their persons injured, and no redress whatever was given or could be expected from judges and magistrates appointed at the recommendation of the Jesuits. Their pupils not unfrequently celebrated Ascension-day by assaulting those of the evangelical persuasion, breaking into their houses, plundering and destroying their property. Woe to the Protestant whom they could seize in his house, or whom they even met on the streets on these occasions!
The evangelical church of Cracow was attacked in the year 1606, and in the following year the church was furiously stormed, the dead being torn from their graves; in 1611, the church of the Protestants in Wilna shared the same fate, and its ministers were maltreated or murdered. In 1615, a book appeared in Posen, which maintained that the Protestants had no right to dwell in that city. In the following year, the pupils of the Jesuits destroyed the Bohemian church so completely, that they left no stone remaining upon another, and the Lutheran church was burnt. The same things occurred in other places; and in some instances the Protestants were compelled by continual attacks to give up their churches. Nor did they long confine their assaults to the towns; the students of Cracow proceeded to burn the churches of the neighbouring districts. In Podlachia, an aged evangelical minister named Barkow was walking before his carriage, leaning on his staff, when a Polish nobleman approaching from the opposite direction, commanded his coachman to drive directly over him; before the old man could move out of the way, he was struck down, and died from the injuries he received.[274]
The University of Cracow, writing to that of Louvain, and referring to one of those expeditions against the Protestants, headed by Jesuits, in 1621, expresses itself as follows: “The Jesuits are very cunning, expert in a thousand artifices, and clever at feigning simplicity; but they were the cause of much innocent blood being shed. The town (Cracow) was deluged with it. The fathers were never satiated with murders, only the arms of those ruffians whom they employed for their crimes were tired; they were moved with compassion, and refused at last to proceed in the massacre.”[275] Indeed, the fiery spirit of intolerance and bigotry which the Jesuits had diffused was so strong and universal, that even Wladislau, Sigismund’s successor, notwithstanding all his efforts, could not arrest the religious persecution and protect his Protestant subjects from the sanguinary fury of the Papists. It is true that Sigismund, in following the Jesuits’ directions, and in attempting to re-introduce Romanism into all his dominions, had lost his hereditary kingdom of Sweden and the magnificent province of Livonia; but that was nothing to the fathers. Protestantism was broken, their opponents were despised or sacrificed, their houses and colleges had received great additional revenues—what did they care for the losses of others?
On the premature death of Wladislau, his brother Cassimir ascended the throne of Poland. He had been a Jesuit, and had sat in the College of Cardinals. The Pope, that he might assume the sceptre, had granted him a dispensation from all his vows. This Jesuit king, by his bad conduct and cowardice, very nigh lost his kingdom; and when his subjects recovered it from the hand of the imperious Charles Gustavus, king of Sweden, he, in gratitude for that fidelity and gallantry, “committed himself and the kingdom to the care of the Virgin Mary, and vowed to convert the heretics;” which meant, says Krasinski, to disperse and extirpate them.
The Jesuits triumphed. We shall not follow those pitiless and relentless monks in all the iniquities they committed, in all the miseries they inflicted on poor Poland, which owes in great part to them the loss of her literature, of her glory, and, in part, of her national existence.
Much has been said and written about the conversion to Romanism, by the Jesuits, of Christina, the daughter of the heroic Gustavus Adolphus, king of Sweden. But as this event did not produce any material change on that country, we shall be very brief in our account of it. No doubt, the Jesuits had a great share in bringing that capricious and haughty woman into the pale of the Roman Church. The sad glory belongs to Macedo, confessor to the Portuguese ambassador at the court of Sweden. He persuaded her to seek rest to her disquieted mind in the unchanged and unchangeable doctrines of Rome. By her order, Macedo went to Rome to ask the General of the Jesuits to send her some of the most trusted members of the order.[276] Some time after, two very handsome and young Italian noblemen, travelling, as they gave out, for their improvement, arrived at the Swedish court, and were introduced to the queen, and admitted to the royal table. In these two very pleasing young men were to be recognised two Jesuits, sent by the General; and these, being admitted to secret interviews with the princess, achieved the work begun by Macedo. Christina, on her conversion, renounced the crown, and went to Rome to worship on his own pedestal of pride the idol which the bigoted Papists adore in the place of God the Lord.
We must now return to examine the conduct of the Jesuits in England, and we could wish that we were spared the task; for, in connexion with their plots and crimes, we shall have to speak of the shameful and unchristian proceedings of their opponents, which were such as we cannot think of without sadness, and which convey but a poor idea of the goodness of human nature when acting under the influence of exciting passions. By the one party, the conception of a most abominable and infernal crime is extolled as a meritorious and heroic action; while the other, to punish the intended crime, violates the most sacred laws of justice and humanity.
There is no event in the annals of any nation, the memory of which has been so carefully perpetuated as has been in England the gunpowder plot. It is the first page of the national history which is taught to children by its annual commemoration every fifth of November. We therefore shall relate of it only so much as is necessary to demonstrate the part in it that may be attributed to the Jesuits. Here, as in the affair of Campion, it is rather difficult, amidst the many contradictory versions and documents, to arrive at a clear and satisfactory conclusion regarding the degree of culpability of the accused. We shall neither credit the apologists of the Jesuits, Eudemon and Bellarmine,[277] nor Abbott’s Antologia, and the assertions of James VI. himself, who, forgetting the dignity of a king, entered the lists to shew his pedantic learning and love of controversy. Instead of filling hundreds of pages with contradictory quotations, we shall frankly state the conclusions to which we have come after a careful examination of what has been written on the subject.[278]
That the Jesuits were from first to last the contrivers of all the machinations against Elizabeth and James, is an incontestable fact, and we have in part proved it. The notorious and unrelenting Parson, who, after he fled from England, became rector of the English college in Rome, and possessed very great influence at the Papal court, was the chief instigator of these plots. During Elizabeth’s lifetime, he had had the idea of unceremoniously disposing of the English crown in favour of the Duke of Parma, or of Cardinal Farnese, his brother; a ridiculous and absurd project of a fanatic conspirator, which was ridiculed at the time, by Pasquino,[279] in these words: “If any man will buy the kingdom of England, let him repair to a merchant with a black square cap, in the city, and he shall have a very good pennyworth of it.”[280] It was Parson, and his brethren the Jesuits, who obtained from Paul V., against the representation of Henry IV. of France, the bull which forbade all the Roman Catholics to take the oath of allegiance, and which produced so many miseries. It was he, too, who constrained the Pope to disgrace the arch-priest Blackwell for having taken it, and who compelled the secular priests to become rebels and victims against their own will; which circumstance elicited from them the memorial to the Pope which we have reported at p. 163. But, that no doubt may remain about it, listen to the ingenuous Crétineau, who, enumerating the benefits rendered by the Jesuits to Romanism, says, “Have they not preserved in England the germ (of Popery) which is now developing itself with such vigour, and which in Ireland, after three hundred years of martyrdom, BECAME A LEGITIMATE REVOLUTION?”[281] No words can prove better than these that the Jesuits were constantly and actively employed in Great Britain in propagating Romanism, a doctrine which, according to them, confers upon the Pope the right of supremacy, of disposing of the crown at his pleasure, and of releasing the subjects from their allegiance to a heretic sovereign, and which, consequently, amounts to high treason. In this aspect alone can be in part excused those sanguinary laws of persecution and tyranny enacted in the reigns of Elizabeth and James against the Roman Catholics. We insist upon this consideration.