“Concentrate at Fushima,” commanded he, of Hidetada, now his favorite, and most trusted commander.

“But Hideyasu is intractable: refuses to obey Hidetada, his younger,” replied Esyo, before Hidetada, her husband, could make any answer.

“Then let him be humbled; I declare Hidetada my successor, and do invest him with supreme authority under me,” declared Ieyasu; Esyo withdrawing to convey the intelligence, to her displaced brother-in-law, with all the force and color at her tongue’s end.

A thousand regiments stood ready to assemble and fight under Ieyasu’s colors, and no daimyo of position would raise the feeblest protest—though fully cognizant of the motive and bitterly regretting the coup—against the cry of:

“Out with the Christians!”

The edict had gone forth, and regardless of Ieyasu’s intent no loyal defender, not a supporter of the taiko’s regime, much less any true believer in the mikado, had failed to respond to a call so vital to their existence, as obnoxious to their ways of living and welfare in death. Those godly men, the priests, and their converts, by word and by deed, had proven themselves marauders and evil-boding. They had reached over men’s consciences, struck at the state, and meddled with the home—and for what? To substitute one religion for another—and why?

“To gratify ambition,” replied Ieyasu, and for once Christianity found a foe worthy its steel.

“This stupid pilot’s inadvertent speech, he of the San Felipe, however petty, but echoes the cornerstone of a philosophy, disguised and spread as religion, intended to profit the sophisticated at the expense of the confiding,” continued he, reasoning with the court at Kyoto. “Why, they are already sniffling at the largest treasury in the empire, seek under the guise of patriots to invest the strongest fortress left us, and are poisoning the mind, as they abused a reliance, of our departed taiko’s widow, the princess Yodogima; than whom, till their withering touch defiled, none better, purer, or more faithful lived. Give me this appointment, I say; influence our beloved mikado to make me shogun—Yoshiaki is dead and Minamoto blood is in me—and I shall oust them and close these doors to the world. Then, and not till then, shall peace reign in this most favored and only blessed domain.”

Enthusiasm bore them on, as it always does, when founded well, however conceived, and Ieyasu thereat became shogun—an honor Hideyoshi had striven all his life, yet died to see lowering upon another.

“It proves nothing,” continued Ieyasu, shrugging his shoulders, “except the value of blood, establishes the divinity of the mikado, and preserves to us the religion we know resolves in practice what it preaches. I pronounce it.”