A Candid History of the Jesuits

by Joseph McCabe

The hypothesis of Mr. Pollock is that Coleman had told Godfrey of the meeting of the Jesuits in St. James's Palace. Oates had declared that the Jesuits met to concert their plot, at the White Horse Tavern in the Strand, on the 24th April 1678. James II. admitted some years afterwards that the Jesuits met on that date, but at St. James's Palace, and the Jesuit Father Warner has left it on record that they did hold their Provincial Congregation on that date in St. James's Palace. If it were known at that time that forty Jesuits had held a secret council in the Duke's Palace the consequences might have been very serious, and there is therefore some plausibility in the statement of a later witness, Dugdale, that the Protestant magistrate was removed because he learned this fact from Coleman. We know that Godfrey secretly consulted Coleman after he had received the depositions of Oates and Tonge; we have good reason to believe that he laid those depositions before Coleman; and it is not improbable that Coleman refuted the testimony of Oates by disclosing that the Jesuit meeting took place in James's Palace, not in the White Horse. It would assuredly be a grave matter for the Jesuits if this were known, and it would almost be enough to prevent the succession of James II.

This must remain a mere hypothesis. I may recall that, according to the teaching of many Jesuit theologians, the assassination of a man in order to prevent grave harm to the Church was not a crime, but a laudable act. But many others, besides the Jesuits, would be interested in taking drastic measures to ensure the position of the Duke of York, nor is it more than a conjecture that Godfrey learned of the meeting. It is possible that this meeting was by no means an innocent "congregation" of Jesuits to discuss their affairs; and it is just as possible that the real cause of the murder has never yet occurred to us. It remains one of the numerous unsolved problems in the story of the Jesuits.

The remaining years of the reign of Charles II. were years of suffering for the Jesuits. They continued to enter the country in disguise and minister to the fiercely persecuted Catholics. We learn that in 1682 the Province counted 295 members, and that in 1685 they had no less than 102 priests working in England. In those harsh times they endured the worst rigours of an apostolic life. Whether or no they were innocent of murder, many Catholics felt that their presence in England was inflammatory and their conduct indiscreet, and familiar houses were closed against them. Several of them died from the privations which they had to suffer. But an ardent and steady hope fired them to meet their perils and sufferings, and in the first week of February 1685 the news rang through the stricken and scattered ranks that Charles was dead and a devoted Catholic about to ascend the throne of England.

The historian who realises that this was to be the last chance which the fates would offer to the Catholic Church of obtaining power and majority in England reads the story of those three years of triumph and ineptitude with strange reflections. Never was a great opportunity more tragically wasted. The overwhelming majority of the nation, the officials, and the Parliament were not merely Protestant, but feverishly vigilant and intensely suspicious of the Jesuits. It was a time for infinite patience and restrained diplomacy, and, so far as we can ascertain, the Vatican itself, and Cardinal Howard who advised the Papacy at Rome, fully realised the need. But the Jesuits were in command, and they gave the most flagrant exhibition in their annals of the unwisdom and mischief of their distinctive methods. Although a Protestant prince grimly smiled on their blunders in Holland, and his agents in England eagerly magnified every indiscretion, they proceeded with the most imprudent defiance of Protestant feeling. Within two years they were spreading schools and churches over London, talking of the speedy capture of the universities and the magistracy, and placing one of their own number among the Privy Councillors. And in less than four years James II. was flying ignominiously for France, with the Jesuits in his train.

This romantic episode has inspired one of the finest chapters of Macaulay's History of England, and, whatever blame be laid on the shoulders of Sunderland, there is no question but that the Jesuits were very largely responsible for the unhappy counsels of James II. One of his first acts was to lodge Father Edward Petre in the princely chambers of St. James's Palace, and put the Chapel Royal under his charge; and in a short time he made Petre Clerk of the Closet. The prisons were opened, the recusants now emerged boldly from their secluded homes, and the Jesuits summoned their continental colleagues to come and share the work of harvesting. New chapels were opened in London; and in more than one case, when other priests proposed to open chapels, royal influence cut short their design and secured the buildings for the Jesuits. Free "undenominational" schools were opened, and hundreds of Protestant, as well as Catholic, boys were attracted to these insidious nurseries of the faith by the unwonted absence of fees.

In all this we may see only undue haste and indiscretion, but the policy developed rapidly. When Parliament refused to carry out the wishes of the monarch and his advisers, he proceeded by "dispensing power," and tampered with the judges in order to have his power ratified. Four Catholics were introduced into the Privy Council, and the nobles and officials gradually realised that baptism was the first qualification for higher office. When the Bishop of London refused to suspend a priest for attacking Romanism, an ecclesiastical commission was created to suspend the bishop and stifle the voices of the Protestant clergy. On his own authority James suspended the penal measures, issued a Declaration of Indulgence, interfered with the rights of Protestants in Ireland, solemnly received a papal Nuncio at Windsor, and sent the Earl of Castlemaine as ambassador to the Papacy. The civil and military offices were rapidly transferred to Catholics, and before the end of 1686 Oxford and Cambridge began to feel the illegal pressure of the royal authority in favour of the Catholic creed.

As these things coincided with the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and persecution of the Protestants in France (from which James, like his brother, received royal alms) the Protestants saw before them a prospect of violence and persecution. Yet James multiplied his indiscreet and, in many cases, illegal acts with blind fanaticism. When the inevitable catastrophe came, the Jesuits deplored the injudiciousness of their patron and cast all the blame on Sunderland. While, however, Sunderland remained a Protestant until a few months before the fall of James, the monarch was throughout the three years surrounded by Jesuits and abjectly devoted to them. A letter written by the Jesuits of Liège to the Jesuits of Freiburg, and intercepted by the Dutch, informs us of the influence they had on James II.[25] He is a devoted son of the Society; he is determined to convert England by its means; he refuses to allow any Jesuit to kiss his hand. And the public action corresponds to the secret letter. Father Warner, the Provincial of the Society, is the King's confessor; Father Petre, a vain and pompous mediocrity, is so much esteemed by him that he besieges the Vatican with a demand of a red hat for Petre. Already courtiers pleasantly address the conceited Jesuit as "Your Eminence." But Innocent XI. is stern and will not countenance the blunders of the English monarch. Castlemaine vainly seeks to impress the Pope with his ambassadorial splendour, and is forced to return with a curt reminder that Jesuits cannot receive dignities. So James makes the Jesuit a Privy Councillor, and Father Petre takes the Oath of Allegiance (with its supposed heresy) and sits in clerical garb in the supreme council of the land. His Roman superiors have not a word to say, either when Petre acquiesces in the demand for a red hat or when he becomes a Privy Councillor. M. Crétineau-Joly is shocked; Father Taunton opines that the whole policy is directed by the Jesuit authorities at Rome.

In later years, when the Jesuits and courtiers gathered about the fallen monarch in his pleasant exile, the entire blame for the folly was naturally laid upon the wicked Earl of Sunderland, and historians have, perhaps, paid unnecessarily serious attention to this charge. We need not stay to analyse the possible motives of Sunderland, who assuredly had no sincere wish to see England return to its old creed. Like Louis XIV., Pedro I., and Charles II., who then ruled in France, Portugal, and Spain, James II. was surrounded by a junta of Jesuits, and he was even more docile than his fellow-monarchs to their suggestions. Those who find it possible may believe that these Jesuits were so reluctant to interfere in politics that they silently permitted an unscrupulous minister to blast the prospects of their Society and Church. We have, on the contrary, sufficient documentary evidence that they applauded, if they did not inspire, every rash step taken by the King, and we recognise their familiar maxims in his whole policy. They were, no doubt, well acquainted with the political principles advocated by their colleague, Adam Contzen, a Jesuit professor at Munich. In a work which he published in 1620 (Politicorum libri decem), Father Contzen, incidentally, proposed some effective devices by which a Catholic monarch might lead his heretical country back to the faith. After very properly condemning "the impious doctrine of Machiavelli," Father Contzen enumerates a number of measures that should be taken, and he expressly mentions England as a field of experiment. Violence is recommended as an obvious course; the leaders of the heretics must be expelled, and they must be forbidden to hold either public or private meetings. But the distinctive suggestions of the learned Jesuit are, that the prince must cover his initial efforts with a profession of toleration, he must first choose for attack those heresiarchs who are unpopular, he must ingeniously set the rival sects to rend each other and "take care that they often dispute together," he must enact that no marriage shall take place unless it be preceded by a profession of the true faith, and he must transfer all the offices and dignities of the State to Catholics.

On these principles, or maxims, James II. was proceeding in his zealous attempt to destroy the Church of England in five years. All the Lord Lieutenants and most of the judges were already Catholic, the Jesuits boasted, and in a short time all the magistrates in England would be Catholic. Trinity College, Dublin, was already promised to the Jesuits, and Oxford was not showing a very stern resistance to their advance. Soon all education and civil and military government would be in Catholic hands. The Queen had as yet given no heir to the throne, it was true, but they had ground to believe that, if he died childless, James would leave the English crown at the disposal of Louis XIV.

Then James, besides sending Judge Jeffreys to deal with insurgents in the provinces, made a bolder attack upon the Church. He ordered the bishops to direct the clergy to read from their pulpits his declaration of liberty of conscience. It is well known how seven of the bishops refused, were committed to the Tower, and acquitted by the jury, to the frenzied delight of the city. Just at this time the Queen was delivered of a son, and the announcement was greeted with derision. Another trick of the Jesuits, people said; but, genuine or not genuine, the child meant a continuance of the tyranny of the Catholic minority, and the Prince of Orange was invited to come and seize the crown. He set sail in four months; and before Christmas, William entered London, and James and his Jesuits were in exile. Six of them shared his luxurious retreat at St. Germains, and discussed with him the naughtiness of Sunderland and the appalling wreck of their hasty enterprise.