The missionaries also found a new friend in Terazawa, a young man appointed governor of Nagasaki, and who, not long after, was secretly baptized. He represented to the emperor that, if the Portuguese merchants were still to be admitted to trade at Nagasaki, they ought to be allowed some priests, since it was the influence and authority of the priests that kept the merchants in order, settled their quarrels, and obliged them to strict justice in their commercial transactions; and, upon the strength of these plausible representations, Terazawa obtained leave for the Jesuits to rebuild their house and church at Nagasaki. Father Gnecchi, also, in consideration of his age and infirmities, was allowed to remain at Miyako, though without any church, or permission to celebrate divine service openly.

CHAPTER XVI

Jealousy on the Part of the Dominicans and Franciscans towards Jesuits—This Jealousy coöperates with the Mercantile Jealousy of the Spaniards at Manila—Franciscan Friars establish themselves at Miyako, Ōsaka, and Nagasaki—Edicts against them—Deposition and Death of the Emperor’s Nephew—A. D. 1593-1595.

It was not alone against the emperor’s hostility and the mercantile envy of the Spanish that the Jesuits had to contend. The rapid rise and great successes of the Company of Jesus had excited against them not only the dread and deadly hatred of the Protestants (which might naturally enough have been expected), but feelings also of envy and jealousy, scarcely less hostile, and by no means very scrupulous, on the part of their monastic brethren of the Catholic church,—the Dominicans, and especially the numerous bodies of Franciscans, who had attempted, by various reforms and modifications, to revive and purify that ancient order so as to make it equal to compete with the Jesuits.

A brief of Pope Gregory XIII, dated in 1585, had forbidden, under pain of the greater excommunication, any but Jesuits to proceed to Japan with the view of exercising any ecclesiastical function there; and this bull was not less disagreeable to the Dominicans and Franciscans, than the Portuguese monopoly of the Japanese trade was to the Spanish merchants. At Manila these feelings of dissatisfaction, both mercantile and ecclesiastical, combined in a common focus, giving rise to the most injurious and unfounded reports, which were even embodied in print, of extensive apostasies among the Japanese converts, and of the great jeopardy into which Catholicism had been brought by the misconduct of the Jesuits, who, at this moment, were out of favor in Spain.

The same Harada, already mentioned, having gone in person to Manila, inflamed the zeal of some Franciscans whom he found there, by representing that it was to the Jesuit missionaries personally, and not to their religion, that the emperor was opposed. The Spanish governor, not having received the emperor’s answer to his former letter, was induced, in the hope of opening the door to commercial intercourse, to write a new one; and four Franciscans attached themselves to the bearer of it, eagerly seizing upon this opportunity to gain admission into Japan.

When the emperor found that these new deputies had not brought the submission which he had demanded, at first he was very angry, but was finally persuaded to allow them to travel through the empire in order to see and to report its greatness. The Franciscans were even suffered to build or buy a house at Miyako, to which they presently added a church; and, being joined by others of their order, a convent was established at Ōsaka. Two of them having gone to Nagasaki, took possession of a church in the environs of that city, which had remained closed since the commencement of the persecution; and here, as well as in the other two cities, they performed their religious functions with an ostentation and publicity which greatly alarmed the Jesuits, whom the Franciscans accused of an unworthy timidity.

The Jesuits, under these circumstances, thought proper to call the attention of these new-comers to the bull of Gregory XIII, above referred to, prohibiting the entry into Japan of any ecclesiastics except those of the Company of Jesus; to which the Franciscans replied, that they had entered Japan not as ecclesiastics, but as envoys from the governor of Manila; and that being there without any violation of the bull, nobody had any right to prevent them from exercising their ecclesiastical functions,—a piece of casuistry which not even a Jesuit could have outdone. Very soon, however, the governor of Nagasaki closed the church of the Franciscans, and, before long, an edict appeared threatening the punishment of death to all who frequented the convent and church at Miyako,—procedures which the Franciscans were uncharitable enough to ascribe to the intrigues of the Jesuits. It seems probable, however, that decisive steps would still earlier have been taken against these over-zealous Franciscans, had not the emperor’s attention been engrossed by other more pressing matters. He had conceived a jealousy against his nephew and colleague, whom, by slow and cautious steps, he stripped of all his authority, sending him at length to a monastery of bonzes, where he soon received an order to cut himself open. The thirty-one wives of the deposed prince, with all their children, were publicly beheaded, and all his closest adherents shared his disgrace, and many of them his tragical fate.[59] An infant son, by name Hideyori, borne to the emperor from his new wife [Yodo-gimi by name], and to whom he desired to secure the succession, was the innocent cause of these cruelties. No sooner was the nephew out of the way than that infant received from the Dairi the title of Kwambacudono.

CHAPTER XVII

Great Earthquake—Mission from China—Arrival of a Spanish Galleon—Friars on Board her—New Accusations on her Account against the Jesuits—Connection of the Jesuits with the Trade to Japan—Arrest of Missionaries and Converts—First Martyrs—A. D. 1595-1597.