The most interesting adventure under the rule of Mercurian is the attempt to penetrate Sweden. The principles of the Reformation had been cordially received in Sweden, and it seemed to King John III. that peace could be secured only by some kind of compromise between the old faith and the new. John was, however, married to the sister of the Queen of Poland, and the Jesuits, who were sternly forbidden to enter the kingdom, saw in this a means of outwitting the vigilant Protestants. The combination of women and Jesuits was the supreme agency in checking the progress of the Reformation in Europe.
In 1574 an envoy came to Stockholm to convey the compliments of Anne of Poland to her sister Catherine. One could not close the gates against an envoy, though it was known that the fine clothes of the ambassador were a thin disguise of the Polish Jesuit Father Warsevicz, and the secret instructions of the envoy were to correct the liberalism of John and offer him an alliance with Spain. John knew theology and wrangled with the envoy for a week in the palace. The mission was fruitless, and in 1576 John was persuaded to countenance an even more romantic adventure. A young Norwegian presented himself to the Protestant clergy of Stockholm, and said that, having spent some years at southern universities, he would like a place as professor in the new college they were forming. He begged that they would recommend him to the king, and they did, so that he secured the appointment. It was the Jesuit Father Nicolai, who had, as John knew, been sent from Rome with instructions to perpetrate this amazing fraud. Nicolai must certainly have lied to the Protestant authorities about his beliefs, in order to obtain a place as teacher of theology in a Protestant college. When we reflect that he acted on instructions from Rome, and that no Jesuit or pro-Jesuit writer seems to see anything reprehensible in his conduct, we feel that Jesuit diplomacy had already reached a stage which it would be impolite to characterise in plain English.
Nicolai seems to have held his chair of Lutheran theology for a considerable time. There were those who scented heresy in his lectures, but they were promptly expelled, and Nicolai even became rector of the college. One would give much to have to-day a copy of the Lutheran-Jesuit's lectures. The masterful Possevin was next dispatched, in the quality of Legate, with the Irish Jesuit, William Good, for companion. He was to prevent a union of Sweden and Holland, and to correct the king's errors. Possevin went first to Prague, where he induced the widow of Maximilian to name him her ambassador to Sweden, and then, dressed for the part, with a sword dangling at his side, he boldly entered Stockholm, where Professor Nicolai was still teaching Lutheran theology in his subtle way. The counter-Reformation had different methods from those of Luther. John was willing to return to the faith and enter the Spanish alliance, if Rome would grant the marriage of priests, the mass in Swedish, and other claims of the Reformers. Possevin hastened to Rome, leaving his sword by the way, and stormily pressed the commission of cardinals to grant these concessions. It is (apart from certain remarkable indulgences later on the foreign missions) the only occasion on which a Jesuit pleaded for compromise, but Possevin was ambitious. Failing to obtain the concessions, Possevin hurried to the Duke of Bavaria, the Emperor, and the King of Poland, in order that he might at least be able to offer to John the material alliances he had promised him, if he would break with England and Holland. But he had little to offer, and the Protestants were now alarmed; and Possevin, Good, Warsevicz, and Professor Nicolai were politely ushered from the country.
Of the foreign missions which will enrage us more fully when the Jesuits are firmly established, a few words must suffice. In India the use of the civil power to support their preaching continued to augment the number, and restrain the quality, of the converts. The Japanese mission made slow progress, and was extinguished in some of the large towns. The gates of China were politely opened to admit a Portuguese legation (containing disguised Jesuits), but, after an interview at Canton, politely closed again by the wary mandarins. The settlement in Brazil was deeply injured by the diseases which European Christians brought to South America, terrifying the natives; and a serious loss was sustained in 1570, when a ship conveying forty Jesuits to Brazil was captured by "Huguenot pirates." They were all slain. Florida, Mexico, and Peru were visited for the first time in this decade, and a few fathers laid the foundations of new missions. On the whole, the missionary record under Borgia and Mercurian does not fulfil the earlier promise.
Mercurian died in the summer of 1580, just forty years after the establishment of the Society. Assuredly a remarkable advance had been made in those four decades. The ten Jesuits had become a formidable army of 5000 socii (including novices and lay-brothers), fighting heresy in the boudoirs of queens and the market-places of Germany, educating hundreds of thousands of youths, all over Europe, in a fanatical zeal for the papacy, extending its influence through the laity by means of sodalities and confraternities, pouring out a vast literature, from the blistering pamphlet to the ponderous folio volume, relating to the great religious controversy, wearing the garb of the beggar or the silk of the noble as occasion needed, speaking a hundred tongues, and sending scores of men yearly to lands whence they would never return and where fever or the axe awaited them. They were the backbone of the counter-Reformation, formidable alike by the simple and austere devotion of some, the brilliance and learning of others, and the unscrupulousness of yet others in the service of the Church. And every man, and every movement of every man, was registered in that central bureau at Rome, where four sagacious heads directed the strategy and tactics of this planet-scattered regiment.
Our survey of the growth and evolutions of this spiritual army warns us to avoid generalisations. It is not true that from the start the Jesuits were avaricious, ambitious, and unscrupulous: it is not true that they maintained their spirit untainted for half a century, and then degenerated. No epithet will apply to them as a body, except that they differed, corporately, from all other religious bodies in the diplomatic nature of their action. Every variety of man was found in their ranks: the austere flagellant and the genial courtier, the man who served the poor because they were poor, and the man who served them in order to edify the rich; the man who flung himself with a smile into the arms of death, and the man who loved disguises and the adventurous evasion of death, the saint and the sinner, the peasant, the noble, and the scholar. No uniform stamp effaced their individual characters. The weak or sensual or casuistic degenerated in the first decade: the strong maintained their idealism to the last. But that original tendency to consecrate worldly devices to a high end, to regard the effectiveness rather than the intrinsic propriety of means, to seek wealth and power because they procured speedier success, was running its inevitable course, and from the recommendation of lying in the cause of Christ we shall soon see some of them go on to the condonation of vice and the counsel of crime.
FOOTNOTES:
[ [4] I have previously explained the distinction between simple and solemn vows, and the advantage which the Jesuits had in confining the latter to a chosen few of their body. See p. 30. These "simple" vows are now admitted in other orders, but they were for centuries peculiar to the Jesuits, and were very distasteful to the older orders.
[ [5] It will appear later that Manares was a man of robust conscience, and later incurred the censure of his brethren for improper conduct.
[ [6] I may draw attention to a curious illustration of the difficulty of reaching a verdict on the St. Bartholomew massacre. In the same volume of the Cambridge Modern History we are told (p. 20) that "Gregory XIII. is said to have expressed dismay," and (p. 285) that he heard the news with "triumphant acclamation." There is surely no serious doubt that the second statement is correct.