Most of the seven towns were half deserted, the Indians having fled for refuge to the woods,[299] and the commission set to work upon its labours in a desert which it itself had made. Out of the fourteen thousand Indians who had inhabited the seven flourishing towns upon the Uruguay but few remained; yet still the work of pacification and working at the boundary went on slowly, for from 1753 to 1759 nothing of consequence was done. In 1760 Ferdinand VI. died, and his son Charles III. succeeded him, and still the boundary commission worked on hopelessly in Paraguay. The Jesuits, who had worked unceasingly during the last eight years to annul the treaty handing the seven missions over to the Portuguese, at length, in 1761, obtained from Charles III. a treaty annulling all that had been done, and providing that the seven towns should remain part of the dominions of the Spanish crown.
They triumphed; but their triumph added another step towards their ruin, for the jealousy which they evoked by their persistent fight raised up much animosity towards themselves in Spain. How great a share they had in the resistance of the Indians cannot be known with certainty. Papers preserved in the archives of Simancas charge them with stirring up the Indians to resist;[300] but they are chiefly from Valdelirios and others, who, naturally finding resistance, put it down at once to the Jesuits, whom then, as now, it was the fashion to abuse. The Indians themselves seem to have been perplexed, no doubt encouraged by their priests on one hand, and on the other seeing the commissary Altamirano, himself a Jesuit, calling upon them to submit. In a pathetic letter written to the Governor of Buenos Ayres, and dated ‘en la estancia de San Luis, Feb. 28 de 1756’, Primo Ibarrenda, of San Miguel, says:[301] ‘This our writing I send to you that you may tell us finally what is to be our lot, and that you take a resolution what it is that you shall do. You see how that last year the father commissary[302] came to this our land to bother us to leave it: to leave our towns and all our territories, saying it was the will of our lord the King: besides this you yourself sent us a rigorous letter telling us to burn our towns, destroy the fields, even pull down our church, which is so beautiful (tan lindo), and saying also that you would kill us. You also say, and therefore we ask you if it is the truth, for if it is, we will all die before the Holy Sacrament; but spare the church, for it is God’s, and even the infidels would not do it any harm.’ They go on to say they have always been obedient subjects of the King, and that it is impossible that his wish could be to injure them—in fact, the letter of innocent men, half civilized, and thinking justice, mercy, and right-doing were to be found with Governors and Kings. Had many of the Jesuits chosen to take the field, their knowledge of the country and the vast influence that they had upon the Indians would have made the campaign perilous enough even for the united military power of Portugal and Spain. As it was, the miserable war dragged on for eight long years, and for result ruined seven missions where before the Indians lived happily. Then, when the fields were desolate, the villages deserted, and the Indian population half dispersed, statesmen in Spain and Portugal saw fit to change their minds, to annul the treaty, and to pass a diplomatic sponge over the ruin and the misery they had caused.
Chapter X
Position of the Jesuits in 1761—Decree for their expulsion sent from Spain—Bucareli sent to suppress the colleges and drive out the Jesuits—They submit without resistance—After two hundred years they are expelled from Paraguay—The country under the new rule—The system of government practically unchanged
‘No storm is so insidious’ (said St. Ignatius) ‘as a perfect calm, and no enemy so dangerous as the absence of all enemies.’
This dangerous state of calm without an apparent enemy in sight was the position of the Jesuits in Paraguay in 1761. By desperate efforts and intrigues in Spain they had kept their thirty missions from being mutilated; their influence amongst the Indians had never been more absolute. The governors of Buenos Ayres and of Paraguay had tried a fall with them, and the honours of the struggle were with the Jesuits. They had succeeded in getting put into force the clauses of the ‘Laws of the Indies’, which kept Spaniards out of the Indian settlements. Even those sent against them had been forced to testify to their utility[303] in Paraguay. But throughout Spain and her enormous empire in America and in the East perpetual hostility between the Jesuits and the regular clergy had been going on for years. In every portion of America the Jesuits were unpopular, the excuse alleged being their wealth and power;[304] but the real reason was their attitude on slavery. After repeated grumblings of distant thunder, at length the storm broke, and the decree for the expulsion of the Jesuits in Spain and her dominions was signed, and the order sent to Bucareli, Governor of Buenos Ayres, in June of 1767, to put it into force in Paraguay. The reasons which induced King Charles III. to expel the Jesuits, mysterious as they were, and locked up a dead secret in the royal breast,[305] may or may not have been sufficient in Spain, but could in no respect have held good for Paraguay, where there existed little scope for court intrigue, and where the Jesuits were far removed from their fellow Spanish subjects, and occupied entirely with their mission work. Many and various have been the explanations which historians have set forth for this decree. Certain it is in Spain this Order had attained to considerable power, and that in Rome the abler of their Generals occasionally kept the Popes in mental servitude.
Some have accounted for the act of Charles III. as being but revenge for the tumult of Aranjuez under the ministry of Esquilace,[306] arguing that the Jesuits were in fact the authors of it, and that it was but the precursor of a plot to dethrone the King and place his brother Don Luis upon the throne, as being not so liberal in his ideas. Others, again, have stated[307] that the Jesuits set about a calumny that Charles III. was not the Queen’s son by her husband, but by a lover whom they said she had. The only reason which seems feasible is that the King was worked on by the fear that the Order had risen to too much power, and that if he did not at once take steps the monarchy would be rendered but a mere appendage of the General of the Jesuits.[308]
Whether it is sound policy of any government to expel a race, or sect, or order from its domains, no matter what the immediate exigencies of the times seem to require, is a moot point. The expulsions of the Jews, Moriscos, and Huguenots, and the dissolution of the monasteries in the times of that true Protestant Henry VIII. of ever pious memory, do not exactly seem to have had the effect upon the countries where they took place that was at first expected by their instigators. Expelled by Charles III., the Jesuits to-day in Spain have re-acquired much of their influence. So that it seems that persecution, to be effectual, must not stop on this side of extermination, and this our Lord Protector Cromwell understood full well.
The Viceroy Bucareli[309] to whom the task of the expulsion of the Order in the viceroyalty of Buenos Ayres and of Paraguay was entrusted, was no ordinary man.[310] Appointed Viceroy of Buenos Ayres after a distinguished career of public service, he found himself, almost without warning, and without any adequate forces at his command, obliged to execute by far the most important and far-reaching task that had ever fallen to the lot of any Spanish Governor in America to carry out. But as his services had not been chiefly in America, he held the idea which at the time was generally received in Europe, that the Jesuits possessed great wealth, had bodies of trained troops, and so would resist all efforts at expulsion to the death.
Full of these visions, says Dean Funes,[311] he considered the order, which was transmitted to him from Spain, as involving serious military risk, and evidently seems to have looked on every Jesuit village as a strong place of arms. July 22, 1767, was the day he chose, keeping his design a secret, and preparing to strike in Corrientes, Cordoba, Monte Video, and Santa Fe, on the same day, or rather night, for the terror of the Jesuits was so great that he designed to expel them all by night.