[27] I have in earlier chapters quoted Father Jouvency's volume of the Historia Societatis. This volume, recalling and praising the action of the French Jesuits in the time of Henry III. and Henry IV., was published in 1713, and gave such offence that the Parlement suppressed it.
THE EXPULSION FROM PORTUGAL AND SPAIN
In the Iberian Peninsula we have the same romantic story of the Jesuits being cast down from a splendid prosperity and expelled with every token of ignominy from countries in which they had almost attained a spiritual dictatorship. Here again, moreover, our chronicle will deal almost exclusively with the actions of a junta of court-Jesuits who bring the calamity upon their Society. It would not be unnatural to suspect that in this there is some partiality; that I ignore the saintly or learned or philanthropic achievements of the majority and bring into prominence only the court-intrigues and abuses of power of a few. But a glance at the works of apologetic writers will show that the candid historian has no alternative. Considering the number and resources of the Jesuits in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, their record is singularly barren of great and good deeds. A few examples of shining devotion, which we will notice as we proceed, and a few small scandals, which we will generally ignore, do little to vary the undistinguished monotony of the general life. The majority of the Portuguese and Spanish Jesuits merely continue the work of teaching, preaching, and writing works of theology, in comfortable and unascetic homes, which we have previously described. Our story, like the general history of Spain and Portugal at the time, is mainly concerned with courtiers and politicians.
We begin with Portugal, where the first destructive blow fell on the Society. A Portuguese Jesuit, Father Franco, has left us an admiring chronicle of the doings of his colleagues down to the end of the first quarter of the eighteenth century. His work (Synopsis Annalium Societatis Jesu in Lusitania, 1726) entirely confirms the feeling that the life of the vast majority of the Portuguese Jesuits is not material for history; it is little more than a record of the deaths of undistinguished (but always very saintly) Jesuits, with a few discreet references to those events at court which are of real interest. It is true that Father Franco appends a list of thousands of Jesuits who have gone to spend or lose their lives in Brazil or India, but we shall see that in the period with which we are dealing these missionary fields provided much comfort and little danger. The heroic age was over; it was the age when royal confessors enabled their brethren to sun themselves indolently in the warmth of royal favour.
The close of the reign of John IV. in 1656 saw the power and wealth of the Jesuits greater than they had ever been before. We saw that at the revolution of 1640, when Portugal won its independence from Spain, the Jesuits had so nicely distributed their forces that some were sure to be on the winning side; and John IV. was not the man to inquire too closely into their conduct. His court soon filled with Jesuits. Father Nuñez, a man of great piety and austerity, who had an excellent moral influence on the noble dames of the court, guarded the consciences of Queen Luisa and her children. Father Fernandez, a very different type of Jesuit, was confessor to the King, and had great political influence. He was a member of the State-Council and Bishop of Japan, and he bore his dignities with a consciousness which greatly irritated the nobles. When his humbler colleague, Nuñez, died, he became confessor to the Queen also, and attained a great ascendancy over the King. When the Viceroy of India, remarking that Jesuits were forbidden to engage in commerce, took from the Jesuits in that country property worth twenty thousand crowns a year, which they had acquired by commerce, Fernandez induced the King to overrule him and order the restoration of the property. In addition, John IV. gave large annual sums to the foreign missions, and a comfortable sum as "viaticum" to each priest who left Portugal for the missions; and he made them presents of palaces, and showered other benefits on them.
When John died, and Luisa became Regent for her young son, the angry nobles made a vigorous effort to dislodge the Jesuits. John's elder son, who had had a Jesuit tutor, had refused to marry, and had wished to join the Society. Men recalled the earlier King Sebastian, and said that the Jesuits were attempting to seize the crown. The Jesuit-tutor was even accused of betraying the military secrets of the country; and one of his colleagues, Father Vieira, was so badly compromised by a letter of his which was intercepted that John had been compelled to make a foreign ambassador of him; another Jesuit was the diplomatic representative of Portugal at Rome. The nobles resented this situation; but Fernandez was in too strong a position, and the rule of the Jesuits continued under the Regency. Fernandez died, however, in 1660, and it is a second Jesuit of that name (as is sometimes forgotten) who took a leading part in the extraordinary events of the year 1668.