A Candid History of the Jesuits

by Joseph McCabe

The long and disastrous reign of Philip was followed by the long and disastrous reign of his weak-minded son, and Spain decayed with frightful rapidity. Piety flourished—on one occasion fifty heretics were put to death for the entertainment of the young Queen—and the misshapen King set an admirable example of chastity. Few were sensible of the greater obligation of arresting the decay of the land, and the Jesuits were content to float on the sluggish stream. It is probable that their wealth reached its highest point during the reign of Charles II.—"one of the most disastrous reigns on record," a distinguished historian calls it. But there would be little interest in chronicling the princely gifts and legacies they received and the handsome houses they erected. Charles died of old age in his fortieth year (1700), and was persuaded to leave the throne to the Duke of Anjou and thus ensure the protection of Louis XIV. for the unfortunate country. From this point the story of the Spanish Jesuits assumes a livelier complexion.

Philip V., a youth of seventeen, was entrusted by Louis XIV. to the care of the French Jesuit Daubenton. Father Letellier was at that time the spiritual guide of the grand monarch, and he had recommended his friend and colleague Daubenton for the important post of ruling the Spanish King's conscience. Daubenton was a stout little man who concealed an immense aptitude and eagerness for intrigue under an air of severe detachment from worldly affairs. On the other hand, a brilliant Frenchwoman, the Princess Orsini, was sent to sustain the interests of France in the Queen's circle, and she succeeded in obtaining so strong an influence that we find her at times writing, without much exaggeration, of "my administration." She was camerara mayor to the young Maria Luisa—a mere girl—and her great power drew on her the hatred of the Spaniards and of some of the French. By the year 1703 the court was seething with intrigue. The memoirs of the Duke de Saint Simon, the work of the contemporary English historian Coxe, and the letters which passed between the Spanish and French courts indicate that Daubenton was the most active and insidious agent in the cabal against the Princess Orsini. A very sordid intrigue ran through the whole of the year 1703, and it ended in the recall of the princess to France. The Queen was, however, so angry that the plot was exposed to Louis XIV. —it is authoritatively narrated in the correspondence of Louis and Philip—and Daubenton was dismissed from the court in disgrace and the Princess Orsini permitted to return.

Another French Jesuit, Father Robinet, succeeded Daubenton, and the fate of his predecessor did not intimidate him from taking an interest in politics, though he at first made the same pretence of aloofness from secular matters. The next ten years, however, passed without notable incident, and the Spanish Jesuits continued to accumulate wealth. Saint Simon tells us that on one occasion a ship from South America discharged at the quays of Cadiz several boxes addressed to "The Procurator-General of the Society of Jesus." The contents were said to be chocolate, but the weight was extraordinary and the officials decided to open one of the boxes. It was, apparently, full of bars of chocolate, but the weight of each was so mysterious that they were more closely examined. They were bars of solid gold, thickly coated with chocolate. This incident probably gave support to the rumour in Spain that the Jesuits had hidden gold mines in their carefully guarded reductions, but we may more probably recognise the direction taken by the great profit on the reductions and the reason for the determined efforts of the Jesuit authorities to support their fathers in this uncanonical industry.

Queen Luisa died in the year 1714, and it was believed at the court, and is not improbable, that Princess Orsini aspired to succeed her. She was then more than sixty years old, but she still had great charm and ability and seemed to be making a tender impression on the chaste and pious and weak-minded young King. Robinet put an end to her ambition with a bold retort. When Philip asked him one day what the latest news was from Paris, he said that it was rumoured that the King was about to marry Mme Orsini. Philip angrily denied it, and the princess very shortly passed out of the political life of Spain. There were, however, many others interested in the exile of Princess Orsini, and the share of Father Robinet must not be exaggerated. Spain had continued to decay. At the peace of 1713 her empire was shorn of Sicily, Milan, Naples, Sardinia, the Netherlands, Gibraltar, and Minorca. Philip consulted his Jesuit advisers several times a day, but neither they nor his other counsellors could do more than intrigue for power in the shrinking kingdom. The Abbé (later Cardinal) Alberoni was now rising to power, and was associated with Robinet in the ruin of Princess Orsini. Alberoni persuaded Philip that Elizabeth Farnese was just the quiet and modest young princess he desired for his second wife, and Philip yielded. But Elizabeth, a haughty and passionate maiden, was instructed beforehand in her duty, and at their first meeting she brutally dismissed the princess. Then Alberoni and Robinet quarrelled about the appointment of a new Archbishop of Toledo. Robinet secured the dignity for a friend of the Society (1715), and he in turn incurred the anger of the Queen and Alberoni and was exiled to Germany.

Before he left, Robinet persuaded Philip to recall Daubenton to his side, and from that moment the court intrigue turned against Alberoni. In this Daubenton played a subordinate, but important, part. The English and French courts, as well as many of the Spaniards, were eager for the dismissal of the Italian favourite, and Daubenton, who confessed Philip twice a day and had other consultations with him, was employed by them to poison the King against his minister. Philip was persuaded that the great plans of Alberoni contained a danger to the country and he dismissed him. In this case the Jesuit confessor allowed himself to become the tool of the enemies of Spain and intrigued against its ablest statesman.

In the year 1724 Philip handed the crown to his son Louis, and retired to consecrate his useless life to religious devotions. There is no serious evidence that the Jesuits pressed Philip to resign, though they certainly tried to dissuade him from resuming the crown, and they had taken part in marrying Louis to the daughter of the Duke of Orleans. However that may be, Louis died a few months later and Philip returned to the throne.

Daubenton had died in 1723, and his place had been taken by the Jesuit Bermudez, who sustained the tradition of intrigue. The successor of Alberoni was a Spaniard from the Low Countries, Ripperdá, who was obnoxious to the Jesuits on many grounds. In Holland he had consulted his ambition by turning Protestant, and on his return to Spain, where he found favour with the King, he promptly recovered his belief in the older creed. The Queen's confessor, a Jesuit who rejoiced in the title and robes of Archbishop of Amida, intrigued against this singular adventurer and overthrew him. Here again the Jesuit merely used his opportunities to voice the resentment of many others, nor do historians regard the downfall of Ripperdá with any sympathy, but the intrigues of the spiritual guides of the court were now so flagrant and so much discussed in Europe that Philip was angry. When, shortly afterwards, Father Bermudez offended the Queen by stealthily communicating to the King letters from France, to be concealed from her, and was found to be intriguing like his predecessors, he was dismissed from office. It was related in the court that Bermudez offered to swear on the crucifix that he was innocent, and that Philip answered: "I have too much respect for the image of Christ to suffer you to perjure yourself thus." Bermudez was dismissed, and an Irish Jesuit, Father Clarke, was made royal confessor for the remainder of the melancholy reign of Philip V.

The accession of his son, Ferdinand VI., in 1746 brought little relief to the country and no change in the power of the Jesuits. Ferdinand, a weak and virtuous monarch, of the type which proved so congenial to the Jesuits, was devoted to the Society. His confessor, Father Rabago, was his chief adviser, and courtiers gathered thickly about the Jesuit in the hope of winning his influence. His position and power, and the feebleness of the monarch, made him bolder, and a few years later he ventured upon an action which was to have disastrous consequences for his Society. In spite of all the efforts of the Jesuits Spain agreed to cede a part of Paraguay containing seven of the Jesuit reductions to Portugal, in exchange for Sacramento, I have already mentioned this incident in speaking of Portugal, and will narrate in a later chapter what happened in Paraguay. Briefly, an army of 15,000 Indians from the reductions—not merely the seven reductions in question, which would not afford more than a few hundred soldiers, but evidently the full force of the Jesuit troops drafted from the whole of their scattered reductions—drew up in the path of the Spanish and Portuguese troops, and it was only after many battles, and at the end of three years, that the agreement between the two governments could be carried out.

The Marquis de Pombal, who was then in power at Lisbon, at once claimed that the Jesuits had inspired this treasonable resistance. It would be difficult for any impartial person to imagine that this army had been mobilised from the whole area of Jesuit influence and maintained for so long a period against the will of the Jesuit fathers, who so completely dominated the Indians and were accustomed to lead them to battle. Ferdinand hesitated, but at last Pombal intercepted a secret letter from Father Rabago to the Spanish fathers, in which he urged them to resist. The English ambassador, Sir Benjamin Keene (quoted by Coxe in his Memoirs of the Kings of Spain), tells us that this letter and other proofs were put before Ferdinand, and the King expressed great indignation with the Jesuits in his presence. Coxe himself, who is often quoted by the Jesuits as an impartial authority, says that the letter was "undoubtedly" genuine. Rabago was, he says, ignorant at first of foreign affairs, and ruled by a junta of his colleagues in his direction of the King, but he became ambitious and intrigued against the power of the leading statesmen Carvajal and Enseñada. The letters intercepted in 1754 opened the King's eyes, and when, in the following year, the confessor was detected in his intrigues against Enseñada, he was peremptorily dismissed from office.

Ferdinand continued to trust the other Jesuits and resist the pressure of Pombal, but he died in 1759, and an abler ruler, Charles III., came to the throne. Charles was a devout Catholic and was devoted to the Society. He was, like his predecessor, deaf to the warnings and entreaties of Pombal, and the ruthless expulsion of the Jesuits from Portugal (in 1759) only increased his benevolence toward them in Spain. All their errors were forgotten, and Pombal's charges against their conduct in the colonies were warmly rejected. Few could have anticipated that, under such a ruler, in less than ten years from his accession, the gorgeous structure of Jesuit prosperity in Spain would be thrown to the ground and the fathers ignominiously expelled.