History of the Jesuits: Their origin, progress, doctrines, and designs

by G. B. Nicolini

The parliament first abolished and suppressed all the congregations, those powerful engines of the order; then, on the 6th of August 1762, it declared that the Institute of the Jesuits was opposed to all authority, spiritual and temporal, ecclesiastical and civil, and was calculated to render them entirely independent of such authority by all sort of means, and even to favour their usurpation of the government; it therefore declared that the order should be irrevocably and for ever expelled from the kingdom.[344] In consequence of this decree, the eighty-four colleges of the Jesuits were shut up. The fathers were expelled from all their houses, their properties were confiscated;[345] each individual, however, being allowed a small income from the public treasury, and being permitted for the moment to reside in France, separately, and as secular clergymen. This permission was withdrawn two years after, and in 1764, the repugnance of Louis XV. having been overcome, the Jesuits were ordered to quit the French territories.

But a more serious and unexpected calamity befel the Company only three years after. Till the present moment, the Jesuits and their partisans had boasted of their defeats and persecution, and had haughtily proclaimed in the face of the world that they were only persecuted by the philosophic spirit which had pervaded Europe, and which, its principal aim being the destruction of the Catholic religion, had begun by attacking its firmest bulwark—the Society of Jesus. Pombal and Choiseul were but the emissaries of Voltaire; Joseph and Louis, indolent and voluptuous monarchs, entirely under the guidance and yoke of the two ministers. But what had they to say, now that they were going to be expelled from the dominions of a king not only adverse to the philosophers, not only a bigoted Roman Catholic, but, till the present moment, the friend and the protector of the Order? What had they to say against this exemplary Christian, Charles III. of Spain, loyal, frank, virtuous, chaste, and irreproachable, as he was? Narrow-minded, indeed, he may have been, but no less clear-sighted, active, and considerate; self-willed rather than disposed to succumb to the influence of any person; and if he can be reproached with anything, it were with the fault of having been rather partial to that nursery of monks and nuns which infested Spain, and for one or other of whom he was continually petitioning Rome for a canonisation. Yet this man, more than any other, contributed to the abolition of the order.

The motives which induced Charles to take such a decided part in the destruction of the Society are not very well ascertained, and the two parties attribute it to different causes. We will try to throw some new light on this obscure affair. As every one, in the absence of proofs, has been obliged to have recourse to conjectures, we beg leave to give our own also. We begin by relating the facts.

The long and ample cloaks, and the low, large-brimmed hats, worn at this epoch in Spain, served to facilitate the perpetration of many crimes, and to conceal the criminals. Squillace, the king’s prime minister, by Charles’s order, issued a proclamation prohibiting the use of them; but the populace of Madrid broke out in insurrection, besieged the minister in his house, pulled it down, repulsed the Walloon guards which had marched against them, and obliged the king, whose exhortation they despised, to retire for the moment from Madrid. The revolt lasted for several days, when the Jesuits, mingling amongst the rioters, appeased them in a moment with the greatest facility. This revolt, which happened in 1766, is known in history as the Emeute des Chapeaux.

This outbreak, which had no result, was entirely forgotten, when, on the 2d of April 1767, appeared a royal proclamation abolishing the Society of the Jesuits in the peninsula, and expelling them from the Spanish monarchy. Let the reader imagine the astonishment which the proclamation produced throughout Europe, and the consternation and despair into which it threw the Jesuits. What had happened that could furnish a motive for such a harsh and most severe measure? No sign of change had been the precursor of the storm; no warning had been given to the Jesuits; no signs of enmity had been shewn to them. The proclamation not only was silent as to the motives which had elicited it, but forbade every man to appreciate and discuss either the measure or its causes; and this redoubled the astonishment and the curiosity. Let us try to penetrate this mystery. First of all we shall give the reasons which, according to the Marquis d’Ossun, French ambassador at the court of Madrid, were adduced to him by Charles himself, as having induced him to the suppression of the order.

“Charles pledged his honour to the Marquis d’Ossun that he had never entertained any personal animosity against the Jesuits; that, before the last conspiracy, he had even repeatedly refused to sanction any measures inimical to them. Notwithstanding that he had been warned by confidential advisers, on whose word he could rely, that, ever since 1759, the Jesuits had incessantly traduced his government, his character, and even his faith; his reply to these ministers had uniformly been that he believed them to be either prejudiced or ill-informed. But the insurrection of 1766 had opened the king’s eyes; Charles was convinced that several members of the Society had been arrested in the act of distributing money among the populace. After they had prepared the way by poisoning the minds of the citizens with insinuations against the government, the Jesuits only awaited the signal to spring the mine. The first opportunity was sufficient, and they were content with the most frivolous pretexts;—in one instance, the form of a hat or cloak; in another, the misconduct of an intendant, or the knavery of a corregidor. The attempt (the émeute of 1766) failed, as the tumult had broken out on Palm Sunday. The time fixed upon had been Holy Thursday, during the ceremonies of visiting the churches, when the king was to be surprised and surrounded at the foot of the cross. Such is the substance of the motives stated by the King of Spain to the Marquis d’Ossun, accompanied by a reiterated protest of the truth of what he had said, and, in proof of this, he appealed to judges and magistrates of the most incorruptible integrity; he even reproached himself with having been too lenient to such a dangerous body, and then drawing a deep sigh, added, ‘I have learned to know them too well.’”[346]

These are the motives assigned for this conduct by the opponents of the Jesuits, and they rest, as may be seen, on very high authority. On the other hand, the Jesuits and their friends assert that the whole affair was an abominable and dishonourable plot of Choiseul. They pretend that the duke had managed to put into the hands of Charles an autograph letter supposed to be written by the General of the order to a provincial in Spain, in which it was asserted that Charles was an illegitimate son of Cardinal Alberoni, and that the throne belonged to Don Louis, the king’s younger brother, and that it was this letter that excited the resentment of Charles. Crétineau affirms that such was the case. “Charles, who remained a fervent Christian, would not have destroyed the institute, but that they affixed upon his royal escutcheon the stigma of illegitimacy.... This fact is certified by other contemporary testimonies, and by the documents of the Company.”[347] Ranke, without accusing either party, seems to incline to this supposition, and says, “Charles III. became persuaded that it was one of the purposes of the Jesuits to raise his brother Don Louis to the throne in his place.”[348] Now, rejecting the absurd accusation of the forgery of this letter, which many reasons render altogether impossible, and which is by no means consistent with the character of Choiseul, and adopting the version of Ranke or of Ossun, there still remains to be explained the enmity of the Jesuits against such a good Roman Catholic as Charles; and this enmity, no historian, as far as we know, has ever attempted to explain. Yet this is the point most necessary to be examined; because, unless we suppose that such a sagacious and clear-sighted man as Charles III., after a year of strict and severe investigation, came to the serious decision of condemning the Jesuits solely on the authority of a forged letter, without any other proof of their ill-will to him, it remains certain that the Jesuits were guilty, and adverse to his person and government. Whence, we repeat, this enmity? By considering a little the well-known character of the Jesuits, we may perhaps be able to answer the query.

Every one who directly, or indirectly even, opposes the wishes or the designs of the Society, is regarded as its mortal enemy, and every enemy must, by whatever means, be broken down. Charles, from the beginning of his reign, had constantly insisted upon the canonisation of Palafox, the abhorred opponent of the Society—first grief. Charles did not shew the Jesuits any particular affection, and had protected and befriended them only as he did all other monastic orders—second grief. Charles would not submit as his predecessors had done to the influence of the fathers, and his confessor was of the order of the Dominicans, the ancient and implacable enemy of the Company—third and most serious grief. Now, if once it is admitted that the Jesuits had reason to dislike Charles, all is easily explained. Then no act of enmity on their part ought to surprise us. They would not have hesitated a moment to spread the report that Charles was a bastard, to raise a conspiracy, to excite the people to revolt, and to endeavour to supplant the king by his younger brother. Thus it becomes clear how Charles, after obtaining the proofs of their machinations, became furious against them; and it may easily be conceived that, from pride and delicacy, he did not mention to the French ambassador, among the other causes of resentment against the Jesuits, that of their having slandered him as a bastard liable to be dethroned. This is the view we take of the matter, and we doubt if the conduct of Charles can be explained in any other plausible way.

Such, in our opinion, were the motives which induced the pious King of Spain to expel the Jesuits from all his estates. The way in which this was accomplished was also most remarkable, and deserves to be mentioned. Immediately after l’émeute des chapeaux, which seems to have awakened Charles’s suspicions, the proceedings against the Jesuits commenced, and were continued for a year with the greatest secrecy. D’Aranda, now the principal minister, conducted them. He neglected no precautions to insure the success of his plan. He took great care, above all, that the Court of Rome should have no suspicion of his projects. The king and his ministers admitted into their confidence only Don Manuel de Roda, an able jurist, and previously an agent of Spain in Rome. D’Aranda conferred with Moniño and Campomanes, two very influential magistrates, in a singular and romantic manner. They repaired separately and unknown to one another, to a kind of ruined house, worked alone, communicating afterwards only with the prime minister, who either transcribed himself their informations or intrusted them to his page, who was too young to be mistrusted. Those informations the minister carried himself to the king.[349] Notwithstanding these precautions, it seems the Jesuits were not altogether ignorant that some strange measures were contemplated against them. In fact, it would have been almost incredible that a judicial investigation, although surrounded with mystery and secrecy, in which many persons, no matter of what measure of discretion, were interrogated, could have been so conducted that not a word should have come to the ears of the fathers. They certainly were ignorant of the real state of things, and were perhaps far from suspecting the calamity impending over their heads. But what proves that they must have had some intimation of what was going on, is, that some short time before their expulsion they had requested of the king the confirmation of their privileges, and had removed their papers and their money.[350]

When all measures were ready, despatches were sent from Madrid to all the governors of all the Spanish possessions of Africa, Asia, America, and throughout all the peninsula. These despatches, signed by the king, and counter-signed by D’Aranda, were sealed with three seals. On the second envelop was written, “Under pain of death, you shall not open this despatch but on the 2d April 1767, towards the closing of the day.”[351] The orders to be executed in the different places, on the 2d of April, were all of the same tenor. The alcaldes were enjoined, on the severest penalties (Crétineau says on pain of death), immediately to enter the establishments of the Jesuits armed, to take possession of them, to expel the Jesuits from their convents, and to transport them within twenty-four hours as prisoners to such ports as were designated. The fathers were to embark instantly, leaving their papers under seal, and carrying away with them only a breviary, a purse, and some apparel.[352] The orders were executed everywhere with the utmost rigour, and six thousand Jesuits were very soon floating at the same time on the waste ocean on their way to the coast of Italy.