causes of their conduct; but, in the mention which has occasionally been made of the Portuguese minister Carvalho, marquis of Pombal, the great persecutor of the Jesuits, too little has been said to account for his hatred of them; I will, therefore, here, make him the subject of a few pages.
During the reign of John V, the Jesuits were in high favour at the court of Lisbon. That king expired in the arms of the famous Malagrida. Carvalho was then a real or pretended friend of the society. The Jesuits, whom king John consulted, recommended him, with little forecast, for the embassies of London and Vienna, and, afterwards, to his successor, Joseph I, as prime minister. He soon, however, betrayed his jealousy of the power and credit of the Jesuits; and he determined to effect their ruin. The first opportunity of persecuting them arose from the treaty with Spain, for an exchange of lands and fixing new boundaries in South America, the motive of which we have
already seen. The disorder, that ensued among the Indians, the marquis imputed to the influence and ambition of the Jesuits; whence arose the absurd fable of the Jesuit king Nicolas, and of the project and attempt to usurp the dominion of South America, which, with great industry and many foul arts, he propagated all over Europe. The insurrection of the Paraguay Indians is usually called the first cause of Pombal's hatred of the Jesuits. In his ambitious views of engrossing all authority and power, he dreaded opposition from the king's brother, don Pedro, who was greatly attached to the order. A dispensation had been obtained from Rome to allow don Pedro to marry his niece, and Pombal, with confidence of success, endeavoured to prevent the marriage. He strove to inspire the king with jealousy of his brother, suggested various reasons why the princess ought to be given to some foreign prince, and recommended William duke of Cumberland in preference to all others. The king consulting his confessor, F. Moreira, that
Jesuit prevailed upon his master to reject the proposal. On that occasion, the marquis vowed vengeance, not only against the prince and F. Moreira, but against the whole order of Jesuits. Another grand cause of his rage against the society was but too well known to the missionaries. The greatest obstacle to the success of their missions among the Indians had always been the prevalence and violence of the rich European settlers, and more frequently still of the royal governors. They had often succeeded, by their credit at Madrid and Lisbon, to protect the poor Indians from personal outrage and slavery, yet it was always a difficult struggle. Pombal had made his brother, who was called Xavier Mendoza, governor general of Maragnon, in the Brazils, and never had the country before known a tyrant so despotic and outrageous. The pious queen dowager, Mariana of Austria, greatly favoured the missions. When any Jesuits sailed for Brazil, she regularly exhorted them to attend seriously to the propagation of religion, and directed them to inform
her exactly of whatever obstacles they might experience from the king's officers, and the Portuguese settlers, promising redress for their injuries and concealment of their names. In full confidence of her protection the missionaries often preferred serious complaints against Xavier Mendoza, and the wrongs of the poor Indians were frequently redressed. The minister's anger at these accusations of his brother, of which he could not discover the authors, almost drove him mad: but the queen dying, he contrived to get possession of her private papers, and discovered the channel of intelligence. His increased rage against the missionaries and Jesuits in general may be imagined. The conduct of the Jesuits, after the earthquake in 1755, afforded him fresh grounds of enmity. They spread themselves through the city and the adjacent country, everywhere inviting the people to repentance. Their sermons were everywhere attended by multitudes, their confessionals were thronged. Penitential processions were instituted, the city was edified. In their
discourses, they attributed the public calamity to a special visitation of Divine Providence, with the design of chastising the increasing depravity of morals in all ranks, and inviting them to repentance. The court was pleased with the exertions of the Jesuits. The king, in particular, thanked their provincial, and ordered the repairs of their professed house to be undertaken and defrayed by the royal treasury. This mark of royal favour sorely mortified the minister: he complained of the fanaticism of the Jesuits, especially of Malagrida, who had printed a discourse on the subject of the earthquake, which was read and highly commended by the king. His majesty had signified his intention of making a spiritual retreat, or exercise, for a week, under the direction of that celebrated father. The marquis, after innumerable other artifices to discredit the Jesuits, and their doctrine of an interfering Providence, assured the king, that a conspiracy was formed to overturn the government; that, unless Malagrida were withdrawn, a public sedition would ensue. The
king, intimidated, at length consented to his removal; but the crafty minister, dreading the resentment of the whole city, applied, the same day, to the pope's nuncio, and stating the king's authority and positive request, prevailed upon him to order Malagrida to retire from Lisbon to Setubal. He then forbade processions, or other marks of public penance and devotion, publicly alleging, that the misfortune of the city was to be attributed solely to natural causes; and by these and other means he succeeded in keeping the weak king in constant dread of imaginary plots, conspiracies, and insurrections. The king was soon completely subdued; every thing was abandoned to the disposal of the minister, his authority and power became absolute, and he soon displayed his real character in such a series of despotic and tyrannical deeds as the annals of mankind cannot equal. These may be found fully detailed in the four volumes of his life, printed at Florence in 1785; in Memoires du Marquis de Pombal; in Anecdotes du Ministère du Marquis de Pombal; and in various other
publications. His power with the king expired in 1777, when he was imprisoned, impeached, and convicted, by the unanimous voices of his judges, of enormous crimes, deserving capital punishment. The queen was prevailed upon, by the intercession of some of the foreign courts, to remit the sentence: he was only banished to Pombal, where he died in 1783. "Who would think," said the abbé Garnier, in his funeral oration for Joseph I, "that one man, by abusing the confidence and authority of a good king, could, for the space of twenty years, silence every tongue, close every mouth, shut up every heart, hold truth captive, lead falsehood in triumph, efface every trace of justice, force respect to be paid to iniquity and barbarity, and enslave public opinion from one end of Europe to the other?" Such was Sebastian Joseph Carvalho, marquis of Pombal, the enemy of the Jesuits, and prime promoter of their destruction. The very enmity of such a man is a strong negative proof of innocence and virtue.
But the cry was up; the society was to be destroyed; envy, hatred, and malice led the chace; atheism, deism, and philosophy, with their attendants, ridicule and sophistry, joined in the pursuit, and the victim was hunted down. The founders, or rather the finishers and embellishers of the modern school of reason, could not endure men, who preached doctrines and maintained principles so opposite to their own new-fangled systems. They knew, that respect for revealed truths, and reverence for established authority, the two objects of their detestation, were the main pivots on which the whole system of the education of the Jesuits turned. Deum timete, regem honorificate, "Fear God and honour the king," was their adopted maxim: religion and loyalty were never disunited by them, and the revolutionary conspirators had determined to subvert both. These everywhere opened schools of philosophy, as they affected to term it; that is, schools of impiety and irreligion; where God, his mysteries and his laws, were cited to the tribunal of proud and depraved