A Candid History of the Jesuits

A CANDID HISTORY

OF

THE JESUITS

BY

JOSEPH M^cCABE

AUTHOR OF
"THE DECAY OF THE CHURCH OF ROME" ETC.

LONDON

EVELEIGH NASH

1913

PREFACE

It is the historic custom of the Church of Rome to enlist in its service monastic or quasi-monastic bodies in addition to the ordinary clergy. In its hour of greatest need, at the very outbreak of the Reformation, the Society of Jesus was formed as one of these auxiliary regiments, and in the war which the Church of Rome has waged since that date the Jesuits have rendered the most spirited and conspicuous service. Yet the procedure of this Society has differed in many important respects from that of the other regiments of the Church, and a vast and unceasing controversy has gathered about it. It is probable that a thousand times, or several thousand times, more books and pamphlets and articles have been written about the Jesuits than about even the oldest and most powerful or learned of the monastic bodies. Not a work of history can be opened, in any language, but it will contain more references to the Jesuits than to all the other religious orders collectively. But opinions differ as much to-day as they did a hundred or two hundred years ago about the character of the Jesuits, and the warmest eulogies are chilled by the most bitter and withering indictments.

What is a Jesuit? The question is asked still in every civilised land, and the answer is a confusing mass of contradictions. The most learned historians read the facts of their career so differently, that one comes to a verdict expressing deep and criminal guilt, and another acquits them with honour. Since the foundation of the Society these drastically opposed views of its action have been taken, and the praise and homage of admirers have been balanced by the intense hatred of an equal number of Catholic opponents. It would seem that some impenetrable veil lies over the history and present life of the Society, yet on both sides its judges refuse to recognise obscurity. Catholic monarchs and peoples have, time after time, driven the Jesuits ignominiously over their frontiers; Popes have sternly condemned them. But they are as active, and nearly as numerous, in the twentieth century as in the last days of the old political world.

No marshalling of historical facts will change the feeling of the pronounced admirers and opponents of the Jesuits, and it would be idle to suppose that, because the present writer is neither Roman Catholic nor Protestant, he will be awarded the virtue of impartiality. There seems, however, some need for an historical study of the Jesuits which will aim at impartiality and candour. On one side we have large and important works like Crétineau-Joly's Histoire religieuse, politique, et littéraire de la Compagnie de Jésus, and a number of smaller works, written by Catholics of England or America, from the material, and in the spirit, of the French historian's work. Such works as these cannot for a moment be regarded as serious history. They are panegyrics or apologies: pleasant reading for the man or woman who wishes to admire, but mere untruth to the man or woman who wishes to know. Indeed, the work of M. Crétineau-Joly, written in conjunction with the Jesuits, which is at times recommended as the classical authority on the Society, has worse defects than the genial omission of unedifying episodes. He makes the most inflated general statements on the scantiest of material, is seriously and frequently inaccurate, makes a very generous use of the "mental reserve" which his friends advocate, and sometimes embodies notoriously forged documents without even intimating that they are questioned.

Such works naturally provoke an antagonistic class of volumes, in which the unflattering truths only are presented and a false picture is produced to the prejudice of the Jesuits. An entirely neutral volume on the Jesuits does not exist, and probably never will exist. The historian who surveys the whole of the facts of their remarkable and romantic career cannot remain neutral. Nor is it merely a question of whether the writer is a Roman Catholic or no. The work of M. Crétineau-Joly was followed in France by one written by a zealous priest, the Abbé Guettée, which tore its predecessor to shreds, and represented the Society of Jesus as fitly condemned by Pope and kings.

It will be found, at least, that the present work contains an impartial account both of the virtue and heroism that are found in the chronicles of the Jesuits, and the scandals and misdeeds that may justly be attributed to them. It is no less based on the original Jesuit documents, as far as they have been published, and the work of Crétineau-Joly, than on the antagonistic literature, as the reader will perceive. Whether or no it seems to some an indictment, it is a patient endeavour to give all the facts, within the compass of the volume, and enable the reader to form a balanced judgment on the Society. It is an attempt to understand the Jesuits: to understand the enthusiasm and fiery attachment of one half of the Catholic world no less than the disdain or detestation of the other, to employ the white and the black, not blended into a monotonous grey but in their respective places and shades, so as to afford a truthful picture of the dramatic fortunes of the Society during nearly four centuries, and some insight into the character of the men who won for it such ardent devotion and such intense hostility.

J.M.

CONTENT

A CANDID HISTORY OF THE JESUITS

[CHAPTER I]

THE ORIGIN OF THE SOCIETY

In the early summer of the year 1521, some months after Martin Luther had burned the Pope's bull at Wittenberg and lit the fire of the Reformation, a young Basque soldier lay abed in his father's castle at the foot of the Pyrenees, contemplating the wreck of his ambition. Iñigo of Loyola was the youngest son in a large family of ancient lineage and little wealth. He had lost his mother at an early date, and had been placed by a wealthy aunt at court, where he learned to love the flash of swords, the smile of princes, the softness of silk and of women's eyes, and all the hard deeds and rich rewards of the knight's career. From the court he had gone to the camp, and had set himself sternly to the task of cutting an honourable path back to court. Fearless in war, skilful in sport and in martial exercises, refined in person, cheerful in temper, and ardent in love, the young noble had seen before him a long avenue of knightly adventure and gracious recompense. He was, in 1521, in his thirtieth year of age, or near it—his birth-year is variously given as 1491 or 1493; a clean-built, sinewy little man, with dark lustrous eyes flashing in his olive-tinted face, and thick black hair crowning his lofty forehead. And a French ball at the siege of Pampeluna had, at one stroke, broken his leg and shattered his ambition.

It took some time to realise the ruin of his ambition. The chivalrous conquerors at Pampeluna had treated their brave opponent with distinction, and had, after dressing his wounds, sent him to the Loyola castle in the Basque provinces, where his elder brother had brought the surgeons to make him fit for the field once more. The bone, they found, had been badly set; it must be broken again and re-set. He bore their operations without a moan, and then lay for weeks in pain and fever. He still trusted to return to the camp and win the favour of a certain great lady—probably the daughter of the Dowager-Queen of Naples—whose memory he secretly cherished. Indeed, on the feast of the Apostles Peter and Paul, he spoke of it with confidence; he told his brother that the elder apostle had entered the dark chamber and healed him on the eve of the festival. Unhappily he found, when the fever had gone, that the second setting of his leg had been so ill done that a piece of bone projected below the knee, and the right leg was shorter than the left. Again he summoned the mediæval surgeons and their appalling armoury, and they sawed off the protruding piece of bone and stretched his leg on a rack they used for such purposes; and not a cry or curse came from the tense lips. But the right leg still refused to meet its fellow, and shades gathered about Iñigo's glorious prospect of life. A young man who limps can hardly hope to reach a place of honour in the camp, or the gardens of the palace, or the hearts of women. Talleyrand, later, would set out on his career with a limp; and Talleyrand would become a diplomatist.

Iñigo lay in the stout square castle of rugged stone, which is now reverently enclosed, like a jewel, in a vast home of the Jesuits. It then stood alone in a beautiful valley, just at the foot of the last southern slopes of the Pyrenees, about a mile from the little town of Azpeitia. The mind of the young Basque heaved with confused and feverish dreams as he lay there, in the summer heat, beside the wreck of his ambition. He called for books of knight-errantry, to while away the dreary days, but there were none in the Loyola castle, and someone—a pious sister, perhaps—brought him a Life of Christ and a Flowers of the Saints. For lack of anything better he read them: at first fingering the leaves with the nearest approach to disdain that a Christian soldier dare admit, then starting with interest, at length flushing with enthusiasm. What was this but another form of chivalry? Nay, when you reflected, it was the only chivalry worth so fierce a devotion as his. Here was a way of winning a fair lady, the Queen of Heaven, whose glances were worth more than the caresses of all the dames in Castile: here was a monarch to serve, whose court outshone the courts of France and Spain as the sun outshines the stars: here were adventures that called for a higher spirit than the bravado of the soldier.

The young Basque began to look upon a new world from the narrow windows of the old castle. Down the valley was Azpeitia, and even there one could find monsters and evil knights to slay in the cause of Mary. Southward were the broad provinces of Spain, full of half-converted Moors and Jews and ever-flourishing vices. Across the hills and the seas were other kingdoms, calling just as loudly for a new champion of God and Mary. One field, far away at the edge of the world, summoned him with peremptory voice; after all the Crusades the sites in the Holy Land were still trodden by the feet of blaspheming Turks. The blood began to course once more in the veins of the soldier.

During the winter that followed his friends noticed that he was making a wonderful chronicle of the lives of Christ and His saints. He was skilled in all courtly accomplishments—they did not include learning—and could write, and illuminate very prettily, sonnets to the secret lady of his inner shrine. Now he used his art to make a pious chronicle, with the words and deeds of Christ in vermilion and gold, the life of Mary in blue, and the stories of the saints in the less royal colours of the rainbow, and his dark pale face was lit by a strange light. There were times when this new light flickered or faded, and the fleshly queen of his heart seemed to place white arms about him, and the sunny earth fought with the faint vision of a far-off heaven. Then he prayed, and scourged himself, and vowed that he would be the knight of Christ and Mary; and—so he told his followers long afterwards—the heavy stone castle shook and rumbled with the angry passing of the demon. He told them also that he had at the time a notion of burying himself in the Carthusian monastery at Seville, and sent one to inquire concerning its way of life; but such a design is so little in accord with his knight-errant mood that we cannot think he seriously entertained it.

By the spring the struggle had ended and Ignatius—he exchanged his worldly name for that of a saint-model—set out in quest of spiritual adventure. The "sudden revolution," as Crétineau-Joly calls his conversion, had occupied about nine months. Indeed, friends and foes of the Jesuits have conspired to obscure the development of his feelings: the friends in order that they may recognise a miracle in the conversion, the foes in order that they may make it out to have been no conversion at all, but a transfer of selfish ambition from the camp to the Church. Whatever be the truth about Iñigo's earlier morals, he had certainly received a careful religious education in boyhood, and he would just as certainly not learn scepticism at the court set up by Ferdinand and Isabella. His belief that he had a vision of St. Peter, a few weeks after receiving his wound and before he read the pious books, shows that he had kept a vivid religious faith in the camp. Some looseness of conduct would not be inconsistent with this, especially in Spain, but the darker descriptions of his adolescent ways which some writers give are not justified. "He was prone to quarrels and amatory folly," is all that the most candid of his biographers says. Let us grant the hot Basque blood a quick sense of honour and a few love-affairs. On the whole, Iñigo seems to have been an officer of the stricter sort, and a thorough Catholic. Hence we can understand that, as earth grows dark and cheerless for him, and the casual reading brings before him in vivid colouring the vision of faith, his fervent imagination is gradually won, and he sincerely devotes his arms to the service of Christ and Mary.

Piously deceiving his brother as to his destination, he set out on a mule in the month of March. He would go to the shrine of Our Lady at Montserrat, to ask a blessing on his enterprise, and then cross the sea to convert the Mohammedans in Palestine. His temper is seen in an adventure by the way. He fell in with one of the Moors who had put on a thin mantle of Christian profession in order that they might be allowed to remain in Spain, and talked to him of Our Lady of Montserrat. Being far from the town and the ears of Inquisitors, the Moor spoke lightly of the Mother of Christ, and, when the convert showed heat, fled at a gallop. Ignatius wondered, with his hand on his sword, whether or no his new ideal demanded that he should follow and slay the man. He left the point to God, or to his mule, and was taken on the road to Montserrat.

At last he came to the steep mountain, with saw-like peaks, which rises out of the plain some twenty miles to the north-west of Barcelona, with the famous shrine of the Virgin on its flank. In the little town of Iguelada, at the foot of the mountain, he bought the rough outfit of a pilgrim—a tunic of sackcloth, a rope-girdle, a pair of rough sandals, a staff, and a gourd—and made his way up the wild slopes, among the sober cypresses, to the Benedictine monastery which guarded the shrine. For three days he knelt at the feet of one of the holiest of the monks, telling, with many tears, the story of his worldly life. Then he went again to the town, took aside a poor-clad beggar, as Francis of Assisi had done in his chronicle, and exchanged garments with him, putting the sackcloth tunic over his rags. It was the eve of the great festival of Mary, the Annunciation (March 25th), and he spent the night kneeling before the altar, as he had read of good knights doing before they took the field. In the morning he hung his sword in the shrine and set forth. From that moment we shall do well to forget that Ignatius had been a soldier, and seek some other clue to his conduct.

The next step in his journey toward Rome is described at great length in lives of the saint, yet it is not wholly intelligible. Instead of going to Barcelona, where one took ship, he went to Manresa, and his pilgrimage was postponed for nearly a year. He did not take the high road to Barcelona, says his biographer, lest he should meet the people coming to the shrine: a theory which would not only require another theory to explain it, but which gives no explanation of the year's delay. Others think that he heard there was plague in the port; though the plague would not last a year, and one may question if Ignatius would flee it. The truth seems to be that the idea of spending his life in the East was already yielding in his mind to another design: the plan of forming a Society was dimly breaking on him. He had studied the monastic life in the Benedictine monastery at Montserrat, and had brought away with him a book, written by one of their abbots, over which he would brood to some purpose. He had a vague feeling that the appointed field of adventure might be Europe.

However that may be, he took a road that led away from Barcelona, and as he limped and suffered, for he had discarded the mule and would make his pilgrimage afoot, he asked where he could find a hospital (in those days a mixture of hostel and hospital). He was taken to Manresa, a picturesque little town in one of the valleys of the district, where he lodged in the hospital for a few days, and then, instead of going to Barcelona, found an apartment and became a local celebrity. The beggar to whom he had given his clothes had, naturally, been arrested, and Ignatius was forced to tell his strange story, in order to clear the man and himself. The story grew as it passed from mouth to mouth, and it was presently understood that the dirty, barefoot, ill-clad beggar, who asked a little coarse bread at the doors, and retired to pray and scourge himself, was one of the richest grandees of the eastern provinces. Children followed "Father Sackcloth" about the streets; men sneered at his uncut nails and his long, wild black locks and thin face; women wept, and asked his prayers.

After a few months he found a cavern outside the town, at the foot of the hills, and entered upon the period of endless prayer and wild austerity in which he wrote his book, the Spiritual Exercises. He scourged himself, until the blood came, three times a day: he ate so little, and lived so intense a life, that he was sometimes found unconscious on the floor of the cave, and had to be removed and nursed; his deep black eyes seemed to gleam from the face of a corpse. Thus he lived for six months, and wrote his famous book. I need not analyse that passionate guide to the spiritual life, or consider the legend of its miraculous origin. We know from Benedictine writers that Ignatius had received at Montserrat a copy of the Exercitatorium of their abbot Cisneros, and anyone familiar with Catholic life will know that similar series of "meditations" are, and always have been, very common. There is an original plan in Ignatius's book, and the period during which the mind must successively brood over sin and hell, virtue and heaven, Christ and the devil, is boldly extended to four weeks. These are technicalities;[1] the deeply original thing in the work is its intensity, and for the source of this we need only regard those six months of fierce inner life in the cave near Manresa.

In later years Ignatius claimed that the general design of his Society, and even the chief features of its constitution, were revealed to him in that cavern. "I saw it thus at Manresa," he used to say when he was asked why such or such a feature was included. In this he is clearly wrong. His Society was, in essence and details, a regiment enlisted to fight Protestantism, and Ignatius certainly knew nothing of Protestantism as a formidable menace to the Pope's rule in 1522; one may doubt if he was yet aware of the existence of Luther. We may conclude again that he had in mind a vague alternative to his mission to the Mohammedans. Those who are disposed to believe that the Society of Jesus was in any definite sense projected by him at Manresa will find it hard to explain why for five years afterwards he still insisted that his mission was to the Turks.

In January 1523 he set out for Barcelona, trimming his nails, combing and clipping his hair, and exchanging his sack for clothes of coarse grey stuff. He did not wish to attract too much attention, he said. He was detained a few weeks at Barcelona, and begged his bread, and served the poor and the sick, in the way which was to become characteristic of the early Jesuits. On Palm Sunday he entered Rome, lost in a crowd of other pilgrims and beggars, and from there he walked on foot to Venice, whence he sailed in July. Within six months he was back in Venice. The Franciscan monks who controlled the Christian colony at Jerusalem had sent him home very quickly, fearing that his indiscreet fervour would lead to trouble with the Turks. The whole expedition was Quixotic, if it was really meant to be more than a pilgrimage, as Ignatius knew not a word of any language but Basque and Castilian. He returned to Venice in a thin ragged coat, his legs showing flagrantly through his tattered trousers, and in this guise he crossed on foot to Genoa, in hard wintry weather. By the end of February he was again in Barcelona.

For several years yet Ignatius will continue to speak of the conversion of the Turks as his chief mission, but his actions suggest that the alternative in his mind was growing larger. The year's experience had taught him that the knight of the Lord needed education, and he sat among the boys at Barcelona learning the Latin grammar and startling them by rising into literal ecstasies over the conjugation of the verb "to love." He now dressed in neat plain clothes, but begged his bread on the way to school and took every occasion to preach the gospel. Once, when he had converted a loose community of nuns, the fast young men of Barcelona, who were angry at this interference with their pleasures, sent their servants to waylay him. They nearly killed him with their staves. Many jeered at him as a hypocrite or a fanatic: many revered him, and a few youths became his first disciples. With three of these he went, after two years' study in Barcelona, to the University of Alcalà, and began his higher studies. But he was so eager to make an end of this intellectual preparation, and so busy with saving souls and gaining proselytes, that he tried to take simultaneously the successive parts of the stately mediæval curriculum, and learned very little.

His first attempt to found a Society also ended in disastrous failure. Opinion in Alcalà was divided about "the sackcloth men." Some picturesque figures were known in the religious life of Spain, but no one had yet seen such a thing as this little band of youths, led by a pale and worn man of thirty-two, who went barefoot from house to house, begging their bread, and passed from the schools in the evening to the hospitals or the homes of the poor, or stood boldly in the public squares and told sinners to repent. It was an outrage on the dignity of ecclesiastical life, and so they were denounced to the Inquisition, and two learned priests were sent from Seville to examine them. Mystics were hardly less obnoxious to the Inquisition than secret Jews and Moors, and then there was this new device of Satan which was said to be spreading in Germany. Ignatius and his grey-coated young preachers were arrested and brought before the terrible tribunal. Their doctrine was found to be sound, but they were forbidden to wear a uniform dress and were ordered to put shoes on their feet. They dyed their coats different colours, and returned to their work; as Jesuits have often done since.

Four months afterwards, the officers of the Inquisition fell on them again and put them in prison. Among the women who sought the spiritual guidance of Ignatius were some ladies of wealth, who wished to follow his example. It is said that he did not consent, and they set out, against his will, to beg their bread and tend the sick. This was too much for respectable folk in Alcalà, and Ignatius was closely examined to see whether he was not a secret Jew, since Christians did not do these things. The inquiry ended in the companions being ordered to dress as other students did, and to forbear preaching for four years. It is important to notice how from the first Ignatius, relying on his inner visions, will not bend to any authority if he can help it. He and his youths walked to Salamanca, and resumed their ways, but the eye of the Inquisition was on them, and they were imprisoned again. The authorities now fastened on them a restriction which may puzzle a layman: they were forbidden to attempt to distinguish between mortal and venial sin until their theological studies were completed. It meant, in practice, that they must not disturb the gay sinners of Spain with threats of hell, and for the time it entirely destroyed the design of Ignatius. His disciples fell away, and Ignatius fled to a land where there were no Inquisitors. He crossed the Pyrenees and went the whole length of France on foot.

The seven years which he spent at Paris were of the greatest importance in the life of Ignatius. Of his studies little need be said. He now took the university courses in proper succession, and won his degree in 1534. But these studies were only a means to an end, and he never became a scholar. He discarded books, wrote a very poor Latin, and took long to master Italian. For secular knowledge he had a pious disdain. His followers were to be learned just in so far as it was needed to capture and retain the control of youth and promote the authority of the Pope. The chief interest of the long stay in Paris is that he there founded his Society, and the manner of its foundation is of great importance.

He had not been long at the University before his strange ways set up the usual conflict of opinion. Was he a hypocrite, or a fool, or a saint? From the youths who took the more complimentary view of his ways he picked out a few to form the little band of disciples he was always eager to have, and put them through the Spiritual Exercises. They came out of this fiery ordeal in heroic temper, sold their little possessions, and began to beg their bread; to the extreme indignation of their friends in the Spanish colony. In order to save time for study, Ignatius used to go to the Low Countries in the holidays and beg funds for his "poor students" among the Spanish merchants. One year—the year before Henry VIII. set up the Church of England—he went to London, but we know only that the city was very generous to him. On these alms Ignatius and his disciples maintained their life of prayer, austerity, and philanthropy, living in one of the colleges among the other students and angling prudently for souls. The irritation against Ignatius among the Spaniards became so great that the Rector was persuaded to inflict on him a public flogging, the last disgrace of an unpopular student. He was not flogged, however; nor is there anything really miraculous, as some think, in the Rector's change of mind. Ignatius feared the effect on his disciples and had a private talk with the Rector before the appointed hour. He had a marvellous power of persuasion and penetration.

These earlier followers seem in time to have fallen away, or never been admitted to his secret designs, and it was not until 1530 that he began to gather about him the men whose names have been inscribed in the history of Europe. In 1530 Ignatius shared his room with a gentle and deeply religious youth from Savoy, Peter Favre, a peasant's son who had already won the doctor's cap and priestly orders, as pious as he was clever. He had made a vow of chastity in his thirteenth year, and was now, in his twenty-fifth year, as eager to keep a clean conscience as to advance in learning. He acted as philosophical coach to Ignatius. From Aristotle and Aquinas they passed, in their nightly talk, to other matters, and Favre presently made the Exercises.

Francis Xavier, a Navarrese youth of high birth, was a friend of Favre, and, like him, a brilliant student and keen hungerer for knowledge. He was a young man of great refinement, and his large soft blue eyes looked with disdain on the eccentricities of Ignatius; he was not a little vain of his learning, his handsome person, and his skill in running. Who but Ignatius could have seen the Francis Xavier of a later day, wearing out his life in the conversion of savages, in this elegant and self-conscious scholar? Francis Thompson speaks with admiration of the "holy wiles" by which Ignatius secured this gifted and elusive pupil. He laid hold of him by his vanity. Xavier taught philosophy and was ambitious to have his lecture-room full. Ignatius sat at his feet, brought others to the lectures, and gave them generous praise. After a time Xavier made the Exercises, and, in a secret conversation with Ignatius, was won to the plan of devoting his life to the conversion of the Mohammedans—or to some other religious campaign.

One by one the early Jesuits were captured by the skilful fisher of men. To the first two were soon added Diego Lainez, a Castilian youth of great ability and quiet strength of character, a future General of the Society; Alfonso Salmeron, a fiery and eloquent youth from Toledo, then in his twentieth year, who would become one of the most learned opponents of the Protestants; Nicholas Alfonso, from Valladolid, commonly known, from his native village, as Bobadilla, a fearless and impetuous fighter; and Simon Rodriguez, a handsome Spanish youth of noble birth, who would prove an admirable courtier when kings were to be won. Many others whom Ignatius sought refused to accept his stern ideal, and many were kept in the outer courts of his temple, as it were, and not admitted to share his secret design. The features of the coming Society were singularly foreshadowed. Only these six out of all the friends and companions of Ignatius knew anything of the great plan which filled his mind, and not one of the six knew which of the others were admitted, like himself, to the inner counsels of the master. Each was initiated in the strictest confidence, and forbidden to speak of it to his most intimate friend. It was wholly unlike the foundation of any other religious body.

At last, in July 1534, the six youths were permitted to know each other as comrades in arms. It was time to discuss what form their crusade should take, and Ignatius proposed that, after a week or two of increased austerity and prayer, they should make the vow of self-dedication and decide upon their future. There is the characteristic impress of Ignatius on every feature of the enterprise. The ceremony was not to be in one of the churches of Paris, but away across the meadows in the quiet little chapel of St. Denis on Montmartre; in fact, in the crypt underneath the chapel. And on August 15th they went out from the city gates in the early morning for what proved to be the historic foundation of the Society of Jesus. Paris was still, at that time, a comparatively narrow strip of town on either bank of the Seine centring upon the island which bore the cathedral and the palace. A mile or two of meadows and vineyards lay between it and the green hill of Montmartre, on the slope of which was the old chapel of St. Denis. Underneath the choir was a small vault-like chapel, and in this, on the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin, the little band of fervent southerners gathered to hear Peter Favre, the only priest amongst them, say the Mass of the Virgin. At its close they knelt in turns before the altar, and each vowed that he would live in poverty and chastity, and either go out to convert the Turks or go wherever the Pope should direct. No rumbling of angry devils was heard on this occasion: the life of Paris flowed on its sparkling way; yet there was born in that dim vault on that August morning one of the most singular and formidable forces in the religious life of Europe.

The Society of Jesus was thus formed, though the seven men did not know it, or adopt any corporate name. They broke their fast and spent the day on the slope of the hill, elated with the joy of brotherhood and the promise of mighty enterprise, talking of the adventurous future. What should be the next step? Again we find the stamp of the peculiar genius of Ignatius on their decision: the features which would degenerate into what is called Jesuitry in the hearts and minds of less sincerely religious men. They were to return to their studies, their philanthropy, and their secrecy, for two years, and they would meet at Venice at the beginning of 1537. Ignatius never hurried. He lived as if he intended to quit the world very speedily; he acted as if he were assured of long life. He was founding a body whose supreme and distinctive aim should be to serve the Pope, yet he concealed his work from the Pope's representatives as carefully as if he were really forming an auxiliary troop for Martin Luther. Let it be carefully noted, too, that they vowed either to go to Palestine or to serve the Pope in some other way appointed by him. It seems clear that, if Ignatius had not already abandoned the idea of a mission to the Turks, he held it lightly. In Paris he had learned that the spirit of the Reformation was spreading over Europe as fire spreads over a parched prairie. Men talked much of Luther and Calvin, little of Mohammed.

They returned to their colleges and their hospitals for two years, and were known to their companions only as monks who were too ascetic to enter a monastery. Ignatius practised fearful austerities, and his followers fasted and scourged themselves. Xavier looked back with such contrition on his former fame as a runner that he tied cords round his legs until they bit into the flesh and caused a dangerous malady. Probably the long delay was proposed by Ignatius in the hope that he might add to the number of his followers, but he found no more at Paris worthy or willing to be initiated; though three—Le Jay, Paschase Brouet, and Codure—were added after his departure. He had gone to Spain in the spring of 1535. Those of the youths who had property to sacrifice had talked of going to Spain to arrange their affairs, but Ignatius took the work on himself. His health was poor, he said, and he would try his native air; he was also eager to keep them from their native air and disapproving families. In March he walked afoot from Paris to Loyola, begging his bread by the way.

The report of his life had reached the quiet valley at the foot of the Pyrenees, and he found his brother and many admirers waiting in the last stage of his journey. He remained three months in Azpeitia, and, as no one could now interfere with his fiery preaching, he urged his townsmen to repent and startled the province. His sanctity was now beyond question, because a woman had recovered the use of a withered arm by washing his linen. Then he arranged the affairs of his disciples and went to Venice. Here Hozes and the Eguia brothers were added to the secret fraternity, and a year was spent in tending the sick and other work of edification. The year 1537 broke at last, and in its first week the six disciples, worn and ragged from the long journey, joined their master. Walking in demure pairs, a staff in one hand and a chaplet in the other, begging their bread and exhorting all they met to virtue and repentance, the six learned students of the Paris University had covered afoot, in the depth of winter, the hundreds of miles that lay between Paris and Venice; flying before the advances of bold women, beaming under the abuse of the new heretics, facing the Alps more bravely than a Hannibal or a Napoleon. Strong efforts had been made to keep them at Paris. Why abandon their precious work at the University for an unknown world? They had a secret vow, they said; though they probably had little more idea than Ignatius of going to Palestine. None of them learned Arabic or Turkish, or studied the Koran: what they did learn was the Catholic doctrine assailed by the followers of Luther.

For a month or two the strange missionaries mystified and edified Venice. It was known that some of them were nobles, and all brilliant scholars, yet they performed the most repulsive offices for the sick, and at times put their mouths to festering wounds. Cardinal Caraffa, a stern Neapolitan reformer, asked Ignatius to join the new Theatine order which he had just founded, and Ignatius replied that they had vowed to go to Palestine. They would remember their refusal when Caraffa became Pope. At last, in the middle of Lent, Ignatius sent his followers to Rome to ask the Pope's blessing on their mission. He would not go himself, as he feared the enmity of Caraffa and of the Spanish envoy Ortiz, who had opposed them at Paris. There was, in fact, little danger of Ignatius going without the Pope's blessing, as a new war with the Turk had broken out, and it would not be unjust to conclude that the real object of Ignatius was to bring his little troop to the notice of Paul III. Ortiz himself procured them an audience, and they received the papal blessing to accompany them to Palestine—if they could get there, the Pope lightly said. It is singular that Ignatius, after waiting so long, should choose a time for their departure when the seas were closed against them.

They were ordained priests at Venice, and then they scattered over Northern Italy, to allow a year's grace to the Palestinian mission and let other cities see their ways. Bologna, Ferrara, Siena, and Padua—all university towns—now witnessed the strange labours of the nameless knights of Christ. The years were not far distant when men would start with suspicion at the coming of a "Jesuit" and wonder what dark intrigue brought him amongst them, but in those early days they seemed the plainest and most guileless of ministers. Two soberly dressed, barefooted youths, their pale faces warmed by the smile which the master bade them wear under the eyes of men, would enter the gate one evening, covered with the dust of long roads, and mount some stone in the busy street or square; and, when men and women gathered round to see the tricks of these foreign jugglers or tumblers, they would be startled to hear such fiery preaching as had not been heard in Italy since the fresh spring-time of the followers of Francis and Dominic. Then the preachers would beg a crust of bread and a cup of water, and ask for the hospital, where they might serve the sick. They had no name, the inquirer learned, and belonged to no monastic body; they were simple knights-errant in the cause of Christ and the poor. The one feature by which they might, to some close observer, have given an inkling of the future was that they hung about the universities and impressed youths with their learning; or that, while they served the poor, they were pleased to direct the consciences of noble and wealthy women. Yet who would suppose that within twenty years these men would be intriguing for the control of the universities and shaping the counsels of kings?

Ignatius, Favre, and Lainez went to Vicenza, and found a lodging in a ruined monastery near the town. From this they went out daily to beg, and tend the sick, and startle townsfolk and villagers with explosive exhortations, in broken Italian, to lay aside their sins. Again the Inquisition summoned them, and dismissed them. At last, when it was clear that the road to the East was indefinitely closed, Ignatius called his followers from their several towns, and a council was held in the old convent. The events of these early days are known to us only from Jesuit writers of the next generation, and, discarding only the miracles with which they unnecessarily adorn the ways of their founders, we may follow them with little reserve. These men were, beyond question, in deadly earnest, though we shall see that some of them sheltered little human frailties under their hair-shirts. But it is quite plain that, however high and pure their aim was, they formed and carried their plans with a diplomacy, almost an astuteness, of which you will not find a trace in the founding of any other monastic body. One monastic virtue is conspicuously absent from the aureole of St. Ignatius—holy simplicity.

It was decided that Ignatius, Favre, and Lainez should go to Rome, and the others should return to work in their university cities until they were called to Rome. Before they parted, however, they gave themselves a name, since people demanded one. We are, said Ignatius, the "Compañia de Jesu," the "Company of Jesus"; although the prose of a later generation has translated it the "Society of Jesus." Then Xavier and Bobadilla went to Bologna, Rodriguez and Le Jay to Ferrara, Salmeron and Brouet to Siena, Codure and Hozes to Padua, to tend the sick, and instruct the children, and angle for recruits; and Ignatius and his companions went on foot, in the depth of winter, to Rome.

Paul III. occupied the papal throne in the year 1537, and looked with troubled eyes to the lands beyond the Alps, where the Reformation was now in full blast. He was by temperament a Pope of the Renaissance, a man of genial culture and artistic feeling, a man who owed his elevation to his sister's intimacy with a predecessor, and who might, if the age had not turned so sour, have carried even into the papal apartments the graceful vices of his youth. But there was now no mistaking the roll of the distant thunder; Rome was sobered and disposed to put its house in order. Paul, knowing that the appalling corruption of the Vatican, the clergy, and the monks must cease, or else the Vatican and clergy and monks would cease, had appointed a commission of the sterner cardinals to examine Luther's indictment of his Church, and one of the clearest points of agreement was that the unquestioned degradation of the monks throughout Christendom must be severely punished. The general feeling was that most, if not all, of the monastic orders should be suppressed. It was therefore a peculiarly inopportune time to propose the establishment of a new order. Was Ignatius more holy than Benedict, or Bruno, or Francis, or Dominic? And had not every order that had yet been founded fallen into evil ways within fifty years?

Ignatius was not more holy than Dominic and Francis, but he was shrewder and more alert to the circumstances. He did not propose to rush into the presence of Paul III. He and his companions settled at the Spanish hospital, and began to tend the sick and instruct the children. They began also to have influential admirers. "Let us," Ignatius had said, as they entered Rome, "avoid all relations with women, except those of the highest rank." In later years he said of their early work at Rome: "We sought in this way to gain men of learning and of position to our side—or, to speak more correctly, to God's side." This identification of "our" side and God's is the clue to early Jesuitism. Men who were convinced of it might be intensely earnest and unworldly, yet act as if they were ambitious. In fact, they were ambitious to win the wealthy and powerful—Ignatius says it repeatedly—"for the greater glory of God." And the work went forward with great speed. They received a poor little house in a vineyard at the foot of the Pincian Hill, and went out daily to minister and to edify. One of their first friends was Codacio, a wealthy and important official of the papal court. The better disposition of Ortiz, the Spanish envoy, was also encouraged. Ignatius put him through the Exercises in the old Monte Cassino Abbey, and, when the strain nearly drove him mad, entertained him by performing some of the old Basque dances: a subject for a painter, if ever there was. After a time the Pope received Ignatius very affably, encouraged him to preach, and found academic chairs for Favre and Lainez. Within a month or two Ignatius had made so much progress that Roman gossip marked him as an intriguer for the red hat, which he was not wealthy enough to buy.

Within four months, or at Easter 1538, Ignatius summoned the whole of his followers to Rome. The poor little house in a vineyard was now too small, and Codacio gave them a large house in the Piazza Margana. From this they went out daily to beg and teach and preach, and to visit "ladies of the highest rank." These eleven eloquent and learned preachers, these nobles who begged their bread and washed verminous invalids, soon divided the Roman world into ardent admirers and ardent critics. An Augustinian friar, in particular, opened fire on them from his pulpit. Ignatius was "a wolf in sheep's clothing," he insisted; let people inquire at Alcalà, and Salamanca, and Paris, and Venice, and see whether he was not wanted by the Inquisition here and there. Friends at the Vatican were reminded that this sort of thing interfered with their good work, and the Pope was induced to inquire into the charges; but even the Pope's acquittal of them did not silence their critics, and for a time they bore much poverty and anxiety. Half of Rome, if not half of Catholicism, hated the Jesuits from their first year; and it would be absurd to think that this was due to their fervour in denouncing sin. It was due in a very large measure to the diplomatic character of the work of Ignatius, which we perceive so clearly even in the discreet narratives of the early Jesuit historians.

The infant Society was delivered from its perils by returning from the cultivation of the rich and powerful to the service of the weak and powerless. We shall constantly find the fortunes of the early Jesuits vacillating according as they practise one or other of these incongruous activities, and we can quite understand that their critics came to see an element of calculation even in their philanthropy. By their brave ministration to the poor they win the favour of the rich: by the favour of the rich they rise to political and educational work, and the poor are almost forgotten until some epidemic of criticism threatens their very existence. It is quite useless to deny that there was calculation in their humbler ministration when we find Ignatius admitting it from the outset; yet it would be equally untrue to deny that they served the poor with a sincere and often heroic humanity, and that the favour and power they trusted to obtain by doing so were not sought for their personal profit, but for the better discharge of what they conceived to be a high mission.

So it was in the winter which closed the year 1538, in which their project ran some risk of being buried under the stones of their critics. The terrible cold of that winter led to a famine in Rome, and the followers of Ignatius spent day and night in relieving the sufferers and begging alms for them. Their house in the Piazza Margana was converted into a hospital, and no less than four hundred destitute men found a home in it. The sympathy of the pious slowly returned to them. "So happy a diversion had to be put to account," says Crétineau-Joly, and Ignatius began to draw up the rules of his Society for presentation to the Pope. Night by night the eleven priests sat in council to determine the broad features of their association: to say, especially, if they would add a vow of obedience to their vows of poverty and chastity and thus become a monastic body. In April they decided that they would have a Superior and vow obedience to him; in May they resolved to adopt that masterpiece of the "holy wiles" of Ignatius, the most distinctive and most serviceable feature of the Society—the vow to put themselves at the direct disposal of the Pope. Naturally there was, and is, no religious body in the Catholic Church whose members would not leap with alacrity to obey any order of the Pope, and think it an honour to be selected for such a distinction; indeed, we shall see that no other religious ever ventured to defy or evade the commands of Popes as Jesuits have done. But we must observe how happily this parade of obedience fitted the circumstances. The Pope had entered upon a war against half of Christendom. Heresy was, like an appalling tide, invading even his southern dominions, and it was inevitable that he should be attracted by the proposal to put at his service a body of men of high culture and heroic purpose, who would be ready, at a word, to fly to a threatened point, to penetrate in disguise into the lands of the heretics, to whisper in the ears and fathom the counsels of kings, or to bear the gospel to the new countries beyond the seas.

This was the beginning of the famous Jesuit Constitutions, which were not completed and printed until 1558. A short summary of their proposals was handed by Ignatius, in September, to Cardinal Contarini, who would present it to the Pope. It was read and approved by one of the Pope's monk-advisers, and Contarini then read it himself to Paul III. "The finger of God is here," the Pope is reported to have said, and he appointed three cardinals to examine the document with care. Unfortunately for Ignatius, one of the three, Cardinal Guiddiccioni, was so disgusted with the state of the monastic orders that he would not even read the document. It seemed to him preposterous to add to their number at a time when their corruption was ruining the Church. In that sense he and his colleagues reported to the Pope, and Ignatius betook himself, by prayer and good works, to a strenuous assault upon the heavens, that some miracle might open the eyes of the cardinal. And about a year later, the Jesuit historians say, the hostility of Guiddiccioni was miraculously removed. He read the document, and was enchanted with it; and on 27th September 1540 the bull "Regimini militantis Ecclesiae" placed the Society of Jesus at the service of the Counter-Reformation.

It need hardly be added that the "miracle" is susceptible of a natural explanation. There is a curt statement in Orlandini, one of the first historians of the Society, that during the year 1540 letters came to Rome from all the towns where the followers of Ignatius had already worked, telling the marvellous results of their preaching. Ignatius had done much more than pray. Many a time in the course of the next few chapters we shall find a shower of testimonial-letters falling upon a town where there is opposition to the admittance of the Jesuits, and they were not "unsolicited testimonials." Contarini, too, would not lightly resign himself to defeat by his brother-cardinal. Codacio, Ortiz, and many another, would help the work, under the discreet guidance of Ignatius. Long before the Society was authorised, the Pope was induced to employ the Jesuits for important missions. He had chosen Rodriguez and Xavier, at the pressing request of the King of Portugal, to carry the gospel to the Indies; he had sent Lainez and Favre, at the prayer of a distinguished cardinal, to fight the growth of Protestantism in Parma. Other members of the little group had gone to discharge special missions, and glowing reports of their success came to Rome. The Pope was won, and, when the Pope willed, it would hardly need a miracle to induce Cardinal Guiddiccioni to read a document which it was his office to read. Indeed, the statement that he refused for twelve months to read a paper which the Pope enjoined him to read is incredible; it was a good pretext for a change of mind, and for a miracle. The Society of Jesus was founded on diplomacy.

FOOTNOTES:

[ [1] A good study of the controversy as to the indebtedness of Ignatius to the Benedictines, and even the Mohammedans, from the point of view of an outsider, will be found in H. Müller's Les origines de la Compagnie de Jésus (1898).

[CHAPTER II]

THE FIRST JESUITS

From this account of the influences which shaped the character of the Society of Jesus before and during its birth we may derive our first clue to the singular history of the Jesuits. They might not implausibly make a proud boast of the fact that they have always borne the intense hostility of heretics and unbelievers, but the very reason they assign for this—their effective service to the Church—prevents them from explaining why they have, from their foundation, incurred an almost equal enmity on the part of a very large proportion of the monks, priests, and laymen of their own Church. "Jealousy," they whisper; but since no other body in the Church, however learned or active, has experienced this peculiar critical concentration of its neighbours, we are bound to seek a deeper explanation. There are distinctive features of the Jesuit Society which irritate alike the pious and the impious, the Catholic and the non-Catholic.

We begin to perceive these features at the very birth of the Society. Its founder has the temper of a monk, but the times will not permit the establishment of a monastic order of the old type; a new regiment of soldiers of the Church must engage in active foreign service, not degenerate into fatness in domestic barracks. The success of Ignatius was due to the fact that he had other qualities than those of the monk, and he met the new conditions with remarkable shrewdness. It seems to me a mistake to conceive him as a soldier above all things. He was pre-eminently a diplomatist. He infused into the Society the energy and fearlessness of the soldier, but he also equipped it with the weapons of the diplomatist, or, one might say, of the secret-service man. He was a most sincerely and unselfishly religious man, but he used, and taught others to use, devices which the profoundly religious man commonly disdains. The Jesuits were Jesuits from the start. It is a truism, a fulfilment of the known command of Ignatius, that they sought the favour of the rich and powerful; it is a fact lying on the very surface of their history, as written by themselves, that they accommodated their ideals to circumstances as no other religious order had ever done in the first decades of its life; it is the boast of their admirers that they used "holy wiles" in the attainment of their ends. This stamp was impressed on them by inheritance from their sire and the pressure of their surroundings. These things were consecrated by the undoubted sincerity of the early Jesuit ideal; they wanted power only for the service of Christ and the salvation of men. What happened later was that the inner fire, the glow of which sanctified these worldly manœuvres in the mind of the first Jesuits, grew dim and languid, and the traditional policy was developed until even crime and vice and hypocrisy were held to be lawful if they contributed to the power of the Jesuits.

An examination of the rules and the activity of the early Jesuits will make this clear. The Constitutions of the Society were not completed by Ignatius until several years after the establishment, and they were afterwards modified and augmented by Lainez, a less religious man than Ignatius, but it will be useful to consider at once their distinctive and most important features. In the main they follow the usual lines of monastic regulations, and many points which are ascribed to the soldier Ignatius and usually held to be distinctive of his Society are ancient doctrines of the monastic world; such are, the duties of blind obedience, of detachment from family and country, and of surrendering one's personality. The famous maxim, that a Jesuit must have no more will than a corpse, is familiar in every monastic body, and is even found in the rules of Mohammedan brotherhoods. Some writers have conjectured that Ignatius borrowed much from the Moorish fraternities, but it is difficult to see how he could have any knowledge of them, and the parallels are not important. In any case, the story of the Society will very quickly show us that this grim theory of blind obedience and self-suppression was not carried out in practice; even the earliest Jesuits were by no means will-less corpses and men who sacrificed their affections and individuality.

Omitting points of small technical interest, I should say that the most significant features of the Jesuit Constitutions are: the establishment of a large body of priests (Spiritual Coadjutors) between the novices and the professed members, the extraordinary provisions by which a superior gets an intimate knowledge of his subjects, the stress on the duty of teaching, the distinction between a "house" and a "college," the deliberate recommendation to prefer youths of wealthy or distinguished families (cæteris paribus) to poor youths, the despotic power and lifelong appointment of the General, the fallacious and imposing vow of direct obedience to the Pope, and the absence of "choir." These primitive and fundamental features of the Society, taken in conjunction with the special privileges which the Society gradually wheedled from the Popes, go far toward explaining its great material success and its moral deterioration. Some of these points need no explanation, or have already been explained, and a few words will suffice to show the effect of the others.

First as to the Spiritual Coadjutors. One who aspires to enter the Society passes two years of trial as a "novice," then takes "simple" (or dissolvable) vows and becomes a "scholastic" (student). In the other monastic bodies, which now have simple vows, the aspirant takes his "solemn" (or indissoluble) vows three years afterwards, before he becomes a priest. The peculiarity of the Jesuits is that they defer the taking of the "solemn" vows for a considerable number of years, and they thus have a large body of priests who are not rigidly bound to the Society and cannot hold important office in it. This gives the General, who has a despotic power of dismissing these Spiritual Coadjutors, a very lengthy period for learning the intimate character of men before they are admitted to the secrets of the Society.

Then there is the remarkable scheme of spying, tale-bearing, and registering by which this knowledge of men is secured. The aspirant must make a general confession of his life to the superior, or some priest appointed by him, when he enters the Society. He is from that day closely observed and subjected to extraordinary tests, and a strict obligation is laid on each to tell the faults and most private remarks of his neighbour. The local superiors then send periodical full reports on each man to the headquarters at Rome, where there must be a bureau not unlike the criminal intelligence department of a great police-centre: except that the good and the mediocre are as fully registered as the suspects.

The important place assigned to teaching in the programme of the Society also leads to serious modifications of the monastic ideal. Every order has some device or other by which it escapes the practical inconveniences of its vow of poverty, but the Jesuits have gone beyond all others. They have drawn a casuistic distinction between a "college" and a "house of the professed," and have declared that the ownership of the former is not inconsistent with their vow of poverty. The result is that they may heap up indefinite wealth in the shape of colleges and their revenues, yet boast of their vow of poverty. The various devices of the monastic bodies to, at the same time, retain and disclaim the ownership of their property are many and curious. This is the one instance of a monastic body boldly saying that its vow is consistent with the ownership of great wealth. Hence the mercantile spirit which will at once spread in the Society.

The deliberate counsel to prefer rich or noble youths to poor, when their other qualifications are equal, is a further obvious source of material strength and moral weakness; we shall soon find them making wealth, or social standing, or talent, the first qualification. The exemption from "choir" (or chanting the psalms in choir for several hours a day) falls in the same category. When we add to these elements of their Constitutions the extraordinary privileges they secured from the Popes in the course of a decade or two, we have the preliminary clues to the story of the rise and fall of the Society. They were allowed to grant degrees in their colleges (and so ruin and displace universities); they were declared exempt from the jurisdiction of the local authorities, spiritual or secular; they might encroach on the sphere of any existing monastery; and they received many other powers which enabled them to pose as unique representatives of the Papacy.

The tendency which we thus detect in the legislation of the Society is equally visible in much of the personal conduct of its founder, and soon shows its dangers in the lives of his less fervent followers. We have seen how the sanction of the Society was secured, and we must note that Ignatius was not more ingenuous in obtaining control of it. The conventional account of his appointment to the office of General is edifying. About Easter 1541 he summoned to Rome, for the purpose of electing a General, the nine fathers who had taken the solemn vows. Four were unable to come, but they sent, or had left at Rome, written votes, and Ignatius was unanimously elected. He protested, however, that he was unworthy to hold the office, and compelled them to hold a second ballot. At this ballot he received two-thirds of the votes, three being cast for Favre. He then consulted his confessor, and was told to accept the office; and for several days afterwards he washed the dishes and discharged the humblest offices.

Orlandini naively confesses, however, that at the election Ignatius gave a blank vote, and we can hardly suppose that he was so far lost in contemplation as to be unaware that a blank vote was a vote for himself. Further, the result of the second ballot plainly suggests that, if Ignatius had again refused to accept the office, Favre would have been appointed. It is difficult to doubt that he intended from the first to hold the office of General, and indeed it would have been ludicrous for them to appoint any other. But Ignatius knew his young followers, and he seems to have acted in this way in order that they might place the authority in his hands in the most emphatic manner. They are described in the chronicles as little less than angelic, but we shall presently find that some of them were very human, especially in the matter of obedience, and that at the death of Ignatius they quarrel like petty princes for the succession. Ignatius was piously diplomatic. He would use his power unreservedly in the cause of Christ and the Pope, but it is important to note how from the start the founder of the Society employs casuistry or diplomacy in getting power.

During the next fifteen years Ignatius remained at Rome, making only three short and relatively unimportant missions into Italy. They had moved from the house in the Piazza Margana to the foot of the Capitoline Hill, where the famous church of the Gesù now is. The old church of Sta Maria della Strada had been given to them, and Codacio (who had joined the Society and given his wealth to it) had built a house beside it for them. When Sta Maria proved too small, they proposed to build a larger church, and nearly secured the services of Michael Angelo; but the actual Gesù was begun in 1568 by Cardinal Alexander Farnese.

From their house beside the old church the keen eyes of the General followed the travels of his subjects to the ends of the earth and kept watch on Rome. He was now approaching his fiftieth year: a bald, worn man, with piercing black eyes in his sallow face, concealing an immense energy and power of intrigue under his humble appearance. Under his eye the novices were trained, and it was characteristic that he used to protest, when others urged him to expel an unruly brother, that—to put it in modern phrase—he liked a little "devil" in his novices. One of the first was young Ribadeneira, a cardinal's page, a noble by birth. He had come to their house one day when he was playing truant, and had been caught by the romance of the life. He was only fourteen years old, yet Ignatius received him and bore his fits of temper and rebellion until he became a useful and obedient member. Between the fiery Spanish boy and the aged and simple Codacio, the former papal official, there was every shade of character to be studied and humoured. The younger novices—they went down to the age of eleven—were encouraged to laugh and play, and come to the General's room to have fruit peeled for them; perhaps on the very day on which he was stirring the Pope to set up an Inquisition on the Spanish model at Rome or in Portugal. He loved the flowers of their garden, and tender ladies had no more sympathetic confidant. Great austerities, of the Manresa type, he rigorously forbade. The Jesuit was to be neat, clean, cheerful, strong, industrious, guarded in speech—and obedient. When it was necessary to strike, he struck at once. One night, when the prefect of the house came to make his report, it appeared that one of the novices (a young nobleman) had ridiculed the excessive zeal of another. Brother Zapata was at once summoned from bed and put out of doors.

His personal life was simple, to the eye. A Bible, a breviary, and an Imitation of Christ were the only books in his poor chamber, which is still shown to the visitor; and of these the breviary was not used, as he wept so much in reading the office that he endangered his sight, and the Pope excused him from reading it. He spent the first four hours of his early day in meditation and the saying of Mass, then worked until noon, when all dined together, in silence, and afterwards spent an hour in conversation under his observant eye. Then he returned to his desk, or took his stick and his sombrero, and limped to the hospital, or to the houses of the very poor or the rich, or to the chambers of cardinals or papal officials. Many a jeer and curse followed him as he walked, in neat black cloak, with downcast eyes and grave smile, courteous to every beggar or noble who addressed him. Rome was rich with monuments of his philanthropy—schools, orphanages, rescue-homes, etc.; but the fierce hostility never died, and at times it rose to the pitch of a gale. After his round of visits he limped back, grave and humble, to the house for the silent evening meal. When the novices were abed, the prefect came to give him a minute account of the day's life in the house, and, when the prefect was abed, the large eyes still flashed in the worn, olive-tinted face. He slept only four hours a night.

But all these pages of the written biography of Ignatius are of less interest than the unwritten. To understand his real life during those fifteen years of twenty-hour workdays you have to study the adventures of his colleagues far away: to mark how the hostility of bishops and doctors and princes is disarmed by a papal privilege or a papal recommendation, how the Protestant plague cannot break out anywhere but a Jesuit appears, how the most nicely fitted man is sent for each special mission, how the man disappears when there is, rightly or wrongly, a cry of scandal, how the long white arms of Ignatius Loyola seem to stretch over the planet from Sta Maria della Strada, near the Pope's palace. This vast and obscure activity of the General will be best gathered from a short survey of the fortunes of the Jesuits during his reign.

The first mission of interest to us, though not quite the first in point of time, was the sending of two Jesuits to the British Isles. It seemed that England was lost, and all that could be done was to resist Henry's attempt to stamp out the old faith in Ireland and persuade James V. to follow his profitable example in Scotland. The mission was perilous, for, on the word of these Jesuits of the time, nearly every chief in Ireland had gone over to Protestantism, and in Scotland the nobles and officials were looking with moist lips at the fat revenues of the monasteries. The Archbishop of Armagh, who had fled to Rome, asked the Pope to send two Jesuits to his country, and Codure and Salmeron were appointed. Codure died, however, during the negotiations, and Paschase Brouet was named in his place. As usual, Ignatius chose his men with shrewdness. Brouet, the "angel of the Society," was the counterpart of Salmeron's vigour and learning. They were granted the privileges of Nuncii by the Pope, though Ignatius directed them to mention these privileges only when the success of the mission required. In fact, he gave them a written paper of instructions as to their personal behaviour when, on 10th September 1541, they left for Paris and Edinburgh. They were to travel as poor Jesuits—but the wealthy young noble Zapata was permitted to accompany and care for them.

What the precise aim of this mission was we do not know, but it was from every point of view a complete failure. It is, of course, represented as a success, and its purpose is said to have been merely to hearten the suffering Irish people in their resistance and convey to them indulgences and absolutions. But from the circumstances of the time and the duration of the mission we may be sure that the two Jesuits learned very little English, and less or no Gaelic, so that the idea seems absurd. In Scotland, certainly, their mission was political. They saw James at Stirling Castle, and easily got from him an assurance that he would resist the allurements of Henry VIII. What they trusted to do in Ireland we are not informed, and it seems most reasonable to suppose that they were to see the chiefs and stiffen them in their opposition to England. This they wholly failed to do, for the leading men would have nothing to do with them. The customary Catholic version of the enterprise is that they happily accomplished their mission, traversed "the whole of Ireland" (as even Francis Thompson says), consoling and absolving, and went home to report success. One fears that this account may be typical of these early Jesuit reports of missions. To learn Gaelic and traverse the whole of Ireland, or any large part of it, in thirty-four days (Orlandini), in the sixteenth century, and in circumstances which compelled them to travel with the greatest prudence, would assuredly be a miracle, especially when we are told that for some time even the common folk shrank from them, and it is hinted that the scattered Irish priests were unfriendly.

Apparently they travelled a little in disguise, or hid in the farms here and there, for a few weeks, granting indulgences and dispensations, probably through some Gaelic interpreter, until the English officials heard of their presence and put a price on their heads. The Jesuit narrative credits them with the bold idea of going to London and bearding the wicked Henry in his palace. Their behaviour was singularly prudent for men with such exalted ideas. Leaving Ireland, possibly at the entreaty of the Irish, as soon as the search for them grew hot, they returned to Scotland, and finding that country also aflame, they went on at once to Paris. There they received orders to return to Scotland and discharge a secret mission similar to that they had had in Ireland. They "hesitated and informed the Pope of the state of things in Scotland," says the Jesuit historian; in fact, they remained in Paris until the Pope allowed them to return to Rome. If any be disposed to criticise their conduct, he may be reminded that Brouet and Salmeron had spent several weeks in Ireland at the risk of their lives. However, it is plain that we have to look closely into these early Jesuit accounts of missions which covered the infant Society with glory. A prudent examination of them discovers features which have been carefully eliminated from later Jesuit, or pro-Jesuit, works on the subject.

As Henry VIII. died in 1547, and Edward VI. in 1553, it may seem singular that Ignatius did not, when the Catholic Mary acceded to the throne, at once dispatch a band of his priests to help in restoring the old faith. Neither Orlandini nor his discreet follower, Crétineau-Joly, throws any light on the mystery, but a few important hints may be gathered from the more candid early Jesuit historian Polanco, a close associate of Ignatius, and the full solution is indicated in Burnet's History of the Reformation (ii. 526, in the Oxford edition). This rare discovery of an independent document suggests that the early story might read somewhat differently in many particulars if we were not forced to rely almost entirely on Jesuit authorities.

From the brief statements scattered over the various volumes of Polanco's Historia Societatis it appears that from 1553 until his death Ignatius made the most strenuous efforts to secure admission into England. Cardinal Pole, it seems, asked the prayers of Ignatius for his success when he was summoned to England, and, when Ignatius died and Lainez again approached Pole, the cardinal pointedly replied that the only way in which the Jesuits could aid him was by their prayers. In the meantime (1554) Ignatius pressed Father Araoz, who was in great favour at the Spanish court, to urge Philip, and induce ladies of the court to urge him, to take Jesuits to England. In 1556 he sent Father Ribadeneira, a courtly priest, to join Philip in Belgium and press the request, but the reply was always that Pole was opposed to admitting the Jesuits. Polanco makes it quite clear that Pole resisted all the efforts of Ignatius from 1554 to 1556.

Burnet supplies the solution of the mystery. A friend of his discovered a manuscript at Venice, from which it appears that Ignatius had overreached himself and aroused the hostility of the cardinal. He had written to Pole that, as Queen Mary was restoring such monastic property as had fallen to the throne, it would be advisable to entrust this to the Jesuits, since the monks were in such bad odour in England; and he added that the Jesuits would soon find a way to make other possessors of monastic property disgorge. Pole refused their co-operation and left the Jesuits angry and disappointed. The historian cannot regard an anonymous manuscript as in itself deserving of credence, but the statement very plausibly illumines the situation. I may add that in 1558 Father Ribadeneira was actually smuggled into England in the suite of Count Gomez de Figueroa, who had gone to console the ailing Queen.[2] The count was a warm patron of the Jesuits, but Queen Mary died soon after his arrival, and the last hope of the Jesuits was extinguished.

We cannot examine with equal freedom all the chronicles of early Jesuit activity, and must be content to cull from the pages of the Historia Societatis Jesu, the first section of which is written by Father Orlandini, such facts as may enable us to form a balanced judgment of the Society under Ignatius. Italy was, naturally, the first and chief theatre of their labours, and in the course of a few years they spread from the turbulent cities of Sicily to the foot of the Alps. I have already described the work of Ignatius at Rome, and need add only that, as Orlandini tells us, he was one of the most urgent in pressing the reluctant Pope to "reform" the Roman Inquisition, or to equip it with the dread powers of the Spanish tribunal. At the very time when he was devising pleas for toleration in Protestant and pagan lands, he was urging that in Italy and Portugal there should be set up the most inhuman instrument of intolerance that civilisation has ever known. The psychology of his attitude is simple; he was convinced that he was asking tolerance for truth and intolerance for untruth. The liberal-minded Romans were not persuaded of the justice of his distinction, and the opposition to the Society increased. The hostility, which at times went the length of breaking Jesuit windows, is ascribed by his biographers chiefly to his zeal for the conversion of prostitutes. He founded a large home for these women, and would often follow them to their haunts in the piazze and lead them himself to St. Martha's House. On the whole, his great philanthropic services and personal austerity secured respect for his Society at Rome, and it prospered there until his later years.

In the south of Italy the Society met little opposition in the early years. Bobadilla had done some good work in troubled Calabria before the Society was founded, and within the next ten years colleges were opened at Messina (1548), Palermo (1549), and Naples (1551). The poet Tasso was one of the first students of the Naples college. It was in the north that the more arduous work had to be done. The seeds of the Reformation were wafted over the Alps and found a fertile soil in the cities of the Renaissance. Hardly anywhere else were monks and clergy so corrupt and ignorant, and nowhere was there so much familiarity with the immorality of the Vatican system. Rome itself lived on this corruption and regarded it with indulgence, but in the university towns of the north educated men, and even women, who almost remembered the lives of Sixtus IV., Innocent VIII., Alexander VI., Julius II., and Leo X., were but provoked to smile when they were exhorted to cling to the "Vicar of Christ."

To tear these prosperous seedlings of heresy out of the soil of northern Italy was the congenial task of the early Jesuits, and Lainez, Brouet, and Salmeron, with some of the new recruits, went from city to city, challenging the Protestants to debate, strengthening the Catholics to resist, and founding colleges for the sound education of youth. Their procedure, and the resentment it constantly excited, may be illustrated by their experience at Venice. Lainez was sent by the Pope to Venice in 1542, at the request of the Doge. An honourable apartment awaited him in the Doge's Palace, but he humbly declined and went to live among the sick at the squalid hospital, varying his learned campaign against the Lutherans with the lowliest services to the poor and ailing. Many were edified, especially one Andrea Lippomani, an elderly and wealthy noble. Presently there came an instruction from Ignatius that Lainez must accept the hospitality offered him by Lippomani; and a little later the noble's heirs were infuriated to learn that he had assigned a rich benefice of his at Padua to the Jesuits. They appealed to the Venetian Council, and lost, for Lainez and Salmeron were ordered by the General to defend the donation. So the first college of the Society was founded, at Padua, and Lippomani afterwards enabled them to found one at Venice. Whatever view one takes of it, this was the normal procedure: tend the sick and beg your bread until "men of wealth and position" open their purses, then throw all your energy into the founding of colleges and the securing of novices. It was unquestionably a most effective method of serving the Church; it also had an aspect which attracted critics.

In the Catholic atmosphere of Spain and Portugal the Society might be expected to grow luxuriantly, as it eventually did, but its fortunes in the Peninsula are rather due to the General's policy of securing influential patrons than to any popular welcome. As early as 1540 Ignatius had sent his nephew Araoz into Spain, and one reads—between the lines—that he had little success. At last a college was founded at Alcalà, to the anger of many of the University professors. One professor maintained his opposition so long and so violently that Father Villanueva, the Jesuit rector, fraternally informed him that the Inquisition proposed to put him a few questions, and the professor sullenly withdrew. Then a learned ex-rector of the university itself was won by Ignatius, during a visit to Rome, and was sent back, a Jesuit, to found a college at Salamanca. It was, as usual, founded in poverty; the fathers had not even a crucifix to put over their altar, and one of their number had to draw the figure on a sheet of paper. From the general laws of these phenomena one might deduce that the story brought a shower of crucifixes. However, the favour of the King of Portugal and the influence of Rome smoothed their paths, and little colonies were soon planted at Valladolid, Toledo, Saragossa, and other towns.

It was in Spain that the Society encountered the most virulent of its early Catholic antagonists, Melchior Cano. He was a very learned and sober Dominican monk, and a professor at the university: an enemy of mysticism and eccentricity. He knew of the early penances and "visions" of Ignatius, and had seen him at work in Rome. When the pale, black-robed, mysterious youths walked demurely into learned Salamanca and set up a college for the instruction of youth, the monk erupted. They were hybrids—neither the flesh of the secular clergy nor the fish of the regular clergy: they were leeches, fastening on wealthy saints and sinners; and so on. Miguel de Torres, the rector, called upon the irate friar, and told him of the great privileges the Pope had bestowed on the Society and the high missions he had entrusted to its members. This inflamed him still more, and he flung at them Paul's fiery warnings against the hypocrites who would come after him. He exaggerated heavily, especially in regard to the personal character of the Jesuits, but he saw very clearly those dangerous features and practices of the early Society which I have indicated. The struggle came to a diplomatic close. Melchior Cano was appointed Bishop of the Canaries, and the Jesuits invite us to admire the way in which Ignatius returned good for evil. It may be added that Cano afterwards recognised the ruse, laid down his mitre, and returned to plague his benefactors.

In the midst of this conflict the Jesuits made a most important convert, and their future in Spain was assured. Francis Borgia, Duke of Gandia, one of the leading nobles of the kingdom, met and was enchanted by Favre in 1544, when the King of Portugal brought that gentle and persuasive Jesuit on a visit to the Spanish court. He was conducted through the Exercises by Favre, one of the most lovable and sincere of the early fathers. When Favre died two years afterwards, prematurely worn by his labours, Borgia wrote to ask Ignatius to admit him to the order. Observe the procedure once more. He was secretly initiated, not even the Pope knowing his name: which enabled him to remain in the eyes of men the Duke of Gandia, and shower his wealth and his patronage on the Society. It really matters little what lofty purposes are alleged for such sinuous procedure; it was a new policy in the history of religious founders. When, a few years later, the Pope offered a cardinal's hat to the Duke of Gandia, and the King of Spain insisted that he should accept it, the truth had to come out. Ignatius had sternly enjoined that no dignity should ever be accepted by any member of his Society, yet, to avoid giving offence to the king, he said that he left the decision to Borgia.

Under Borgia's patronage the net of the Society spread over Spain, many blessing and some cursing. At Saragossa, where they had built a chapel, the Augustinian friars complained that it encroached on their sphere. To prevent unedifying conduct on the part of rival friars, the Church had decreed that no order should establish itself within five hundred feet of a house belonging to a different order. When the Jesuits who had broken this law, refused to yield, they were excommunicated by the Vicar-General, and a pleasant procession was arranged by the townsfolk, in which effigies of damned Jesuits were propelled toward their destination by little devils. The Augustinians were popular. But the long arm of Ignatius was extended once more, and the Papal Nuncio intervened in favour of the Jesuits. Before many years the Jesuits won from the Pope a declaration that the law did not apply to them, and they might build where they pleased. They prospered, and were hated.

An incident of the same significance occurred at Alcalà. The college obtained many pupils, though little wealth, and the Jesuit fathers began to be very active. In 1551 they were surprised to hear that the Archbishop of Toledo had suspended the whole of them from priestly functions for daring to hear confessions without his authorisation. The Jesuits produced their privileges, and persuaded the Governor of Toledo, and even the Royal Council, to explain to the prelate that the Pope had exempted them from the jurisdiction of bishops. He refused to recognise such extraordinary privileges, and maintained the suspension. Ignatius then laid the matter before the Pope, and the Archbishop was directed from Rome to withdraw his opposition.

When we turn to Portugal we find an interesting illustration of the early effect of great prosperity on the Society. On the throne at the time was John III. from whose reign all historians date the downfall of what had become one of the most brilliant and wealthy Powers in Europe. Blind to the gross administrative corruption in his kingdom, and to the decay of the stirring patriotism which had borne the Portuguese flag over the globe, John was concerned only about the religious needs of his country and his new colonies. He had invited Xavier and Rodriguez in 1540, intending to send them to the Indies, but he was so charmed with them that he wished to keep them in Portugal. Ignatius allowed Rodriguez to remain, and Xavier set out on his historic mission to the far east. In this Ignatius showed his usual discernment: Rodriguez proved as supple and graceful a courtier as Xavier proved a fiery missionary. John then wished to entrust the tutorship of his son to Rodriguez, and Ignatius consented. His own followers were puzzled at times to know which were the dignities that they were forbidden to accept. When John asked for a Jesuit confessor, Rodriguez refused, but Ignatius overruled him. The next step was to set up the Inquisition, through the mediation of Ignatius, and Orlandini admits that when, in 1555, the king wished to make Father Merin, his confessor, head of the Inquisition, Ignatius seriously considered the proposal. He did not refuse, as is sometimes said; the negotiations broke down.

In this genial atmosphere the Society flourished. Its chief college was at Coimbra, the great university centre, where the Jesuits rapidly ran their course. At first they shocked staid Catholics with the excesses of their zeal. A youth in the college confessed to temptations of the flesh, and was ordered to walk the streets at mid-day without a hat or a cloak, holding a skull in his hand. Another student went forth almost naked in a cold wind, begging from door to door; and, finding a crowd of folk dancing and singing in a church, he mounted the pulpit to admonish them, and was dragged out and severely chastised. At nights Father Simon would send out a procession of youths to cry in the ears of indignant sinners or quiet wine-bibbers some such doggerel as: "Hell, hell, hell, for those in grave sin"; or long processions of children with masks and lanterns paraded the streets and squares. We gather that the boys of Coimbra had a pleasant time during these exhibitions. But the college flourished; there were in a few years a hundred and fifty pupils in it, and it supplied large numbers of missionaries.

In 1546 Favre visited Coimbra, and reported to Ignatius that prosperity had flushed the veins of his brothers. Nicolini and other anti-Jesuit writers speak of the college as having become a place of "debauch," but this is not stated in the chronicles. Frivolity and good-living are the only vices charged, whatever we may suspect. The students stooped to writing sonnets, and the King's money provided plenty of good cheer. Ignatius felt that Father Simon had lost his fervour at the court, deposed him from office—he was Provincial (or head of the province)—and ordered him to go either to Brazil or Aragon. The piety of Rodriguez had evidently deteriorated, and he made a struggle to hold his place. He was a handsome and comfortable man, much liked for his liberality. He went to Coimbra, where Ignatius had appointed a new rector, and the liberals tried to induce the court to protect them. The King was alarmed, however, and Father Simon had to submit, and the college to mend its ways. Numbers of students left or were expelled, and for the rest, when the new rector piously walked the streets of Coimbra, laying the bloody lash on his own bare shoulders, they fell to tears and went out in a body scourging themselves under the eyes of the townsfolk. The story ends in Orlandini with Simon Rodriguez submitting in holy joy and kissing the rebuking letters of his General. But when we turn to Sacchini, the Jesuit writes of the next section of the "Historia Societatis Jesu," who does not always carefully notice what his predecessor has said, we learn that Rodriguez smarted for years under the humiliation, and awaited an opportunity to undo it. However, the province returned to piety, and before the death of Ignatius we find the Jesuits capturing, after a long siege, the famous University of Coimbra.

In France the Society wholly failed under Ignatius. He placed students, supported by wealthy patrons, at the University of Paris, and sent fathers after a time to gather their neophytes under one roof. Then the outbreak of war with Spain drove most of them abroad, and even when the war was over the colony made slow progress, amid poverty and hostility. In 1549 Ignatius won the favour of Cardinal Guise de Lorraine and, through him, of the French court. The King issued letters authorising the Jesuits to live and teach at Paris, and Brouet was sent to conciliate the Parisians. Then began a long and famous struggle between the Parlement and University of Paris and the court and Jesuits. Parlement bluntly refused to register the King's letters, and they were of no effect until this powerful legal body had accepted them. Henry ordered his Privy Council to examine the Jesuit Constitutions and approve them; Parlement retorted by inviting the Archbishop, who was very hostile, and the theological faculty of the university to advise it, and the issue was a violent condemnation of the Jesuits in the vein of Melchior Cano. It was said that they admitted all sorts of aspirants to their ranks, and that the extraordinary privileges they professed to have were insulting to the spiritual and temporal authorities and opposed to the interests of the other orders and the university.

In the main, it was undoubtedly the privileges of the Jesuits which made the greater part of Paris and of France hostile to them. Bishops were not to look at them, civic authorities were not to tax them, universities were to be opposed by free classes, and were to respect degrees granted by Jesuits to any whom they thought fit. The hostility was quite natural, and it was fed by indiscretions on the part of the Jesuits. They received a nephew of the Archbishop, against the uncle's will, and they first turned the brain (with their Exercises) of, and then put out of doors, a very learned ornament of the university named Postel. The Archbishop bade them leave Paris, and they remained helpless outside the city, at St. Germain aux Prés, until after the death of Ignatius. He pressed the case at Rome, and doctors of the Sorbonne went there to exchange arguments with Jesuit doctors, but nothing was done until years afterwards.

During the war the Spanish Jesuits had gone from Paris to Louvain and began to teach there. Here again the university scorned and opposed them, and for many years (until they secured the interest of the Archduchess) they made no progress. Ribadeneira, who was in charge, used to break down and retire from the room to weep. In Germany they had a different and more spirited struggle, but they seem to have had little influence in the various conferences and diets at which attempts were still made to reconcile the parties. Favre was at the Diet of Worms in 1540, then at the Ratisbon Conference, where Bobadilla and Le Jay succeeded him. They were restricted to an effort to reform the Catholics themselves, and found it difficult. The letters of these early Jesuits make it quite impossible for any historian to question the appalling corruption of priests, monks, and people in every part of Europe at the time of the Reformation. From Worms Favre wrote to Ignatius that there were not three priests in the city who were not stained by concubinage or crime. At Ratisbon the Catholics threatened to throw Le Jay into the river. "What does it matter to me whether I enter heaven by water or land?" he said. They knew very little German, generally preaching in Latin, and had slight influence for some years.

In time, as they learned German, and confined themselves to the Catholic provinces, their work was more successful. They fastened especially on Cologne, and assailed the Archbishop, a very worldly prelate of the old type, who was annoyed to find these Jesuit wasps buzzing about him, and their house was closed for a time by the authorities. But they had the favour of the Emperor, and the Archbishop was deposed. In 1545 the Council of Trent opened, and Lainez and Salmeron appeared there as the Pope's theologians, together with Peter Canisius (an able German student whom Favre had attracted to the Society) as theologian of the new Archbishop of Cologne. It need only be said of the earlier sittings of the famous Council (in 1545 and 1551) that the Jesuits had little influence, and this they used to oppose any concession to the Protestants and magnify the authority of the Pope. This will be plainer in connection with the later sittings.

The work in Germany was afterwards thwarted by the zeal of the fiery Bobadilla. It had at last come to war with the Protestants, to the satisfaction of the Jesuits, and Bobadilla marched with the troops and was severely wounded at Mühlberg. In 1548, however, Charles published his Interim, or provisional concession of certain Protestant claims (such as the marriage of the clergy) until the Council of the Church should decide the points at issue. It may be recalled that the general Council of Trent was first intended as a common meeting of Protestant and Catholic divines, and the hope of reconciliation was not yet dead. Reconciliation, however, could mean only concession, and the Jesuits were resolutely against concession. Whatever influence they had in Germany, apart from their effort to reform the morality of the Catholics, was reactionary and mischievous in the highest degree. Bobadilla overflowed with wrath at the Interim, and denounced it fiercely by pen and tongue. Charles angrily ordered him to leave the Empire, and he returned to Rome; and it is recorded that Ignatius so warmly resented his "indiscretion" that he refused at first to admit him to the house. Thus did the saint vindicate the majesty of kings, says M. Crétineau-Joly. The outbreak did unquestionably hamper the progress of the Jesuits for a time, but before the death of Ignatius they were firmly established in Vienna, Prague, Cologne, and a few other cities. At Vienna the court demanded that Canisius should accept the office of archbishop, and Ignatius compromised by allowing him to administer the see and refuse its revenue. In the same year a Jesuit was made "Patriarch of Abyssinia." It was just seven years since Ignatius had induced the Pope to decree that no Jesuit should ever accept an ecclesiastical dignity.

Of the foreign missions it is impossible to speak here at any length. In 1540 Francis Xavier had come for his leader's blessing as he started for the Indies. His cassock was worn and patched, and Ignatius took off his own flannel vest and put it on the young priest before dismissing him with the usual: "Go and set the world on fire." It was a different Xavier from the one he had seen, a vain and brilliant teacher, at the University of Paris, and it is well known how he did set the world on fire. He was a handsome, blue-eyed man of thirty-six, and no Portuguese sailor ever fronted the unknown with more courage and heroism than Xavier displayed in his famous travels from India to Japan. After a year's work at Goa, where his first need was to convert the Christians and the Portuguese priests, he went on to Malabar, to the Moluccas, to Malacca, and on to Japan, ending his life, in 1552, in an attempt to reach China. What the result of his mission was it is difficult to estimate soberly. The Jesuit chronicler forgets the confusion of tongues, and makes Xavier leap from land to land, preaching to and converting thousands everywhere, as if they all spoke Portuguese. In Japan he clearly failed, although the Portuguese merchants were greatly anxious for success, and the Japanese, of their own high character and out of respect for the great king (of Portugal), his friend, were extremely polite.

The other foreign missions of the early Jesuits were less irradiated with miracle, or with heroism. Lainez went in the wake of the Spanish troops to Tunis, said mass there, and left no trace behind. Nuñez, the "Patriarch of Abyssinia," went out with two others to take over his diocese, but found a "Patriarch" there already, who made a lively opposition, and the Jesuits had to retire to Goa. Four Jesuits were sent to the Congo. Two died at once, and the other two became so interested in commerce that the king was alarmed. Ignatius recalled and replaced them, but the king expelled the newcomers. In Brazil they made more progress, penetrating the forests and winning the favour of the natives by their medical and other material aid. They tried to save the intended dinners of the cannibals, and, when they failed, sprinkled the poor men with holy water; but the cannibals found that it made them less succulent and forbade the practice. They did useful work in Brazil, and laid the foundation of a great mission.

Such were the labours of the first Jesuits during the generalship of Ignatius, and it remains only to close the career of their able leader. The varied story of success and failure, the showers of glowing testimonials and bitter diatribes, the heroism of some and the frailty of others, kept him alternately elated or depressed to the end. He must have seen that the first fervour could not be maintained, and that opposition became more serious as the Society grew. It had now nearly a thousand members scattered over the world, and a hundred houses and colleges. The figures are misleading, however, as there were only thirty-five professed fathers and only two professed houses; many of the so-called colleges had no pupils and were little more than names. Ignatius had twice attempted to resign his office in the last few years; and there was much to distress him. He had hardly composed the trouble in Portugal, in 1552, when Lainez gave him anxiety. Lainez, who was made Provincial of Italy when Brouet was sent to Paris, complained that the general was robbing his colleges of their best teachers for the sake of Rome. Ignatius dictated to his secretary an angry letter. "He bids me tell you," says the scribe, "to attend to your own charge ... and you need not give him advice about this until he asks it."

In the next year (1553) he had a grave quarrel with Cardinal Caraffa. The Jesuits of Sicily had admitted a youth against his parents' wishes, and Caraffa, to whom the mother appealed, ordered Ignatius to give up the youth. He appealed to the Pope, and got Caraffa's verdict cancelled. When, two years afterwards, Caraffa became Pope Paul IV., Ignatius remembered his momentary triumph with concern, and there were grave faces in the Jesuit house. Paul III. had died in 1549. His successor Julius III. had been, as the previous record shows, very generous to the Jesuits, though funds had fallen very low in Rome, owing to the Reformation, and Ignatius had great work to keep alive the German college he had founded. Julius died in 1555, and it is said by the Jesuit writers that five cardinals voted for Ignatius himself at the next conclave. Marcellus, the next Pope, lived less than a month, and then Caraffa occupied the see. To Caraffa the Spaniards were "barbarians," and the Jesuits were Spaniards. But he postponed the struggle which he was to have with the Society, and received Ignatius courteously.

Work, austerity, and anxiety had at length seriously impaired the strong frame of Ignatius, and he began to prepare for the end. It is marvellous how he lived to see his sixty-fifth year, and continued to control the mighty struggle of his Society against its various enemies. With the opening of 1556, however, he retired to a great extent from the labours of his office, and spent his days chiefly in prayer. He died in the early morning of 31st July 1556, and the struggle for the succession began.

FOOTNOTES:

[ [2] See Ribadeneira's Historia Ecclesiastica del Scisma del Reyno de Inglaterra (1588), L. ii. ch. xxii.

[CHAPTER III]

EARLY STORMS

For the events of the next ten years, which will be narrated in this chapter, we still rely almost entirely on Jesuit writers. The statement may sound like an insinuation of dishonesty, but it is merely a reminder that our authorities are panegyrists rather than historians. Their purpose was wholly different from that of the modern historian, and their selection and treatment of documents correspondingly differed. It would be ingenuous to imagine that they loaded the scales of good and evil, success and failure, with impartial hand. Here and there, however, some scandal was so widely known in their day, and so eagerly pressed by their opponents, that it were wiser to put a bold gloss upon it than to ignore it, and thus we of the later date can just discern the human form under the thick veil of panegyric. It becomes more and more apparent after the death of Ignatius. Father Sacchini, who takes up the pen laid down by Orlandini, is just as loyal to his order, but it becomes more frequently necessary to excuse and explain, and at times he candidly censures. The Society is shaken by "very fierce storms," and one of these breaks upon it in his earliest pages.

The Constitutions provided that at the death of a General there should be a Vicar-General appointed, and he should proceed to summon the leading fathers of every province for the election. Now, Ignatius had appointed a Vicar to assist him in his last years, and it was generally felt that this Father Natalis would be Vicar-General and control the election. Natalis was in Spain, however, and Lainez, although very ill, was in Rome. We remember Lainez as the learned and masterful Castilian who had once provoked Ignatius to use very plain speech. There were only five fathers at Rome, including Lainez, who were entitled to vote for the Vicar-General, and Lainez helped to simplify the issue by casting a blank vote, like Ignatius, or "leaving the matter to God." He was appointed, and he fixed the more important election for November. For this he had to summon the Provincials, Assistants, and two Prefects from each of the twelve provinces of the Society. One imagines a large and varied body, but in point of fact there were only about twenty voters; those in Brazil and the Indies could not be expected, while the "province of Ethiopia" (or Abyssinia) existed only on paper. It happened, moreover, that as the Pope was at war with Spain, the Spanish fathers could not come, and Lainez dare not proceed without them. They were of opinion that Natalis ought to have been recognised as Vicar-General.

Thus the election had to be postponed for two years, and Lainez continued, on the strength of four votes, to act as General. The remarkable events of those two years are of great importance in studying the character of the early Society. Two very serious conflicts arose, one between the Jesuits themselves, and one with the Pope, and it is in such conflicts that the real character appears. Crétineau-Joly suppresses the one altogether and grossly mis-states the other; he is not only less candid, but far less truthful, even than the original Jesuit authorities. If we wish to form a just estimate of the early Jesuits, not merely to admire the many virtues they possessed, we must consider these conflicts with care, as they are recorded by Sacchini in the "Historia Societatis."

Lainez at once presented himself, as temporary head of the Society, to the Pope, and prepared for a struggle. Ranke's fine picture of Caraffa, who had now become Paul IV., will be remembered. A dark and stormy Neapolitan, an ardent Italian patriot, he would, as he sat over his fiery southern wine, express the fiercest disdain of the Spaniards, and trust to see them swept out of the Italian peninsula. He had disliked Ignatius and, Sacchini says, spoken slightingly of him after his death. On the other hand, he was a deeply religious man and sincere reformer, and he recognised that there was precious stuff, from the Church's point of view, in this new Society. Should he fuse it with the Theatines, or merely clip its outrageous privileges, and bring it nearer the common level of the religious orders? He was known to hesitate between the two policies, and Lainez was determined to resist both, implacably, and teach the papacy the real value of the famous fourth vow. And Lainez was a cold, resolute, clear-headed man of forty-five: Caraffa a nervous and impetuous old man of eighty. The conflict was postponed, however, until the Society had a properly constituted authority. Paul was content to warn Lainez that the Jesuits must be careful of their ways, and to remind him that what a Pope had given a Pope might take away.

A few months later the domestic conflict opened. The spirited Bobadilla protested that Diego Lainez had usurped authority over the Society; the proper thing to do in these unforeseen circumstances was to divide the leadership between the five survivors of the ten original Jesuits. Rodriguez, who still smarted under his humiliation, Sacchini says, was persuaded to take this view; Cogordan a "stiff-necked" brother whom Lainez had ventured to correct, joined them; and even the meek and gentle Brouet was drawn into the revolt. For many months the austere silence of the Roman house was enlivened with the singular quarrel. The rebels wrote lengthy indictments of Lainez and secretly circulated them among the brethren; and somehow, says the historian, copies of their libelli always reached the hands of Lainez, while he himself wrote nothing. Then Cogordan told two cardinals, who were to tell the Pope, that Lainez proposed to hold the election in Spain, so that they might pass their Constitutions without the Pope's interference. The idea was certainly entertained, and we can easily believe that Lainez favoured it. Paul angrily ordered that no Jesuit was to quit Rome, and closed his door against Lainez. A union of this powerful and casuistic body with the King of Spain was one of the last things Paul wished to see; and he looked forward to the passing of their Constitutions as his opportunity to clip their wings. At last Lainez severed Rodriguez and Brouet from the rebels, and Bobadilla made a direct application to the Pope for his share in the administration of the Society. To the scandal or the entertainment of Rome, Cardinal Carpi was appointed to arbitrate on the domestic quarrels of the children of St. Ignatius. His decision—that Lainez should remain Vicar-General, but consult the older fathers—did not put an end to the unseemly quarrelling, and Lainez in turn appealed to the Pope, secured the appointment of another cardinal, and silenced the rebels. We can imagine the feelings of Paul IV. When a cardinal told him that Lainez had charged Bobadilla with an honourable mission at Foligno, and had sentenced the wicked Cogordan to say one Pater and Ave, he crossed himself: as a Neapolitan does when the spirit of evil is about. He was astonished at the obstinacy of the rebels, says Sacchini; but there are those who fancy that what really impressed him was the astuteness of Lainez. He was to have more painful experience of it anon.

While the leaders quarrelled for the mantle of the master at Rome, there was grave trouble in the provinces. In that year (1557) John III. died in Portugal, many valuable workers were lost, and the judgment of the University of Paris and the scalding indictments of Melchior Cano were translated into every tongue in Europe. There was no possibility under Paul IV. of countering these things by conversation at the Vatican. It was imperative to hold the election as soon as possible and return to the field. The end of the war came in 1558, and by May the twenty voters were assembled in the Roman house. They were to elect a general and endorse the Constitutions, now completed by Lainez.

There was friction at first because Lainez issued to the fathers certain orders which aimed at preventing canvassing, but in July they proceeded to the election. To their dismay Cardinal Pacheco entered the room, on the election day, and said that the Pope had sent him to preside. He genially assured them, however, that he would not interfere, and they cast their votes. Lainez was elected by thirteen votes out of twenty. They then held a number of sittings on the Constitutions, and prepared for a struggle with the Pope. This struggle is not without some humour when we reflect that the Society of Jesus was, so to say, the Pope's private regiment, the one order that made a special vow of obedience to him, the most exaggerated champion in Christendom of his authority. It was the first occasion on which the Vatican was to realise that it might count on the abject obedience of the Jesuits as long as the Jesuits dictated its decrees. Lainez and his colleagues were determined by every means in their power to thwart the will of Paul IV. and suffer no interference with their own will. They quietly endorsed their Constitutions, and prepared to go to their provinces. It is impossible to find what precise order the Pope had given them to alter their Constitutions, but he had certainly done so in some form, and his anger broke out stormily. He sent a cardinal to say that they must reconsider the question of chanting in choir, as other religious bodies did, and of appointing a general only for a term of three years.

The Jesuits were "surprised," but obedient. They "reconsidered" the points, and drew up a report to the effect that they were unanimously opposed to change. Lainez and Salmeron were directed to wait on the Pope and present this report, and some brave language—such language as a Pope rarely heard, and must have been amazed to hear from a Jesuit, if it were really spoken—is put into the mouth of Lainez at the audience by Sacchini. The historian admits, however, that they did not present the report. Paul sternly told them that they were "contumacious," indeed not far removed from heresy (which was true), and he cut short their defence with a peremptory command to do as they were bidden. With an eye on the gray hairs of the octogenarian Pope they retired to mend their rules and order the chanting of the office. It now appeared that of their hundred establishments only two were "houses," and they contented themselves with ordering that vespers should be chanted in these houses—until Paul IV. died. They had secretly asked the opinion of a learned cardinal on the value of the Pope's command. Cardinal Puteo was not merely an expert on such matters; he was Dean of the Rota, and in a position to dissolve the Pope's order, as he eventually did. He told them that it was a "simple command," and that, as the decree of his predecessor, excusing them from choir, was not expressly abrogated, it would come into force again at the death of Paul IV. With this assurance they meekly submitted to the Pope, and scattered to their respective missions.

I have narrated this curious story at some length, relying entirely on the Jesuit Sacchini, because it is of extreme significance for one who would judge the character and history of the Society. Catholic historians, who suppress it entirely or give a very misleading version of it, are clearly of opinion that the mere record of the facts will disturb their readers, while anti-Catholic writers enlarge on it with pleasure. Those who desire to have an intelligent and just estimate of the Jesuits can neither ignore nor misinterpret such facts. That Lainez was personally ambitious, that his eagerness for power had not entirely the unselfish character of such ambition as we may recognise in Ignatius, can hardly be doubted. But Brouet and Salmeron shared and supported his conduct, and in those two, at least, one is disposed to see the first spirit of the Regiment of Jesus in its original purity. The clue to the seeming inconsistency or hypocrisy of such men defying or evading the Pope's commands I have already indicated. The Society of Jesus had consecrated diplomacy to the service of God. If a Pope would strip their order of those distinctions and privileges which, in their conviction, peculiarly fitted it to carry on the holy war, he was not acting as the Vicar of Christ, and his commands must be evaded. It did not occur to them that this was, in the end, the Protestant principle of private judgment, against which they thundered the doctrine of papal authority. They were the children of Ignatius, who had always felt that his private judgment was the judgment of God. So Jesuitism moved slowly toward its inevitable goal.

One other incident at Rome may be recorded before we distribute the events of the next seven years in their national departments. A little more than a year after the election, on 18th August 1559, Paul IV. died. How the Romans, stung by the misery they had suffered during his war with Spain and the brutalities of his Inquisition, burst into the streets with wild rejoicing, and attacked the palace of the Inquisitors, and how the new Pope surrendered the criminal nephews of his predecessor, including a cardinal of the Church, to the scaffold, must be read in general history. The fact that the Jesuits were called to sustain Cardinal Caraffa in his last hours is of no significance. It is more pertinent to tell that Lainez returned to the learned Cardinal Puteo, and the odious command of Paul IV. was declared to have died with him.

It is said that Lainez himself was proposed for the papacy after the death of Paul IV. The conclave of cardinals on such an occasion is, as is known, as isolated as a jury-room, but a cardinal might summon his confessor, and it is not only stated by Sacchini, but confirmed by Cardinal Otho years afterwards, that Lainez was called in by Otho and told that his name would be proposed. We have no just ground to doubt this statement, but we have very good reason to refuse to regard it as a serious proposal. The papal election of 1559 lasted three months, and was marked by a bitter struggle of France, Spain, and Italy. It engrossed the attention of Europe, yet not a single Roman ambassador or prelate of the time mentions the name of Lainez. Even the words used by Cardinal Otho years afterwards are known to us only in a Jesuit version.

Cardinal Medici, who now became Pius IV., proved to be one of the most generous patrons of the Society. Although he was a Pope of the cultured and liberal type, and would have little personal inclination to favour them, he seems to have concluded that the Jesuits were the most formidable champions of his authority, and he gave them many privileges. It was he who, in 1561, gave them permission to build within the sphere of other orders, and to grant academic degrees in their colleges, and he directed his local representatives everywhere to protect and aid them. With such an auxiliary the vigorous and gifted general was enabled to conduct the affairs of his Society with a success which will appear as we review its life in the various provinces. Only one further personal detail need be added in regard to Lainez. Although the orders of Caraffa had been declared void, he professed a scruple when he had held the generalship for three years, and proposed to resign. In view of his behaviour at the election one is not disposed to look for sincerity in this scruple, nor does the issue suggest it. His confessor told him that he must consult his councillors (or assistants). They resisted his proposal, but he still affected qualms, and sent a circular letter to all the professed fathers, in which he purported to place before them, for their guidance, all the pros and cons of his design. The letter is, however, a transparent plea for power. The electors unanimously insisted that he should retain office, and he returned to his task with firmer authority.

The British Isles still remained a dark and almost inaccessible territory on the Jesuit map, but Englishmen, flying from the penal laws of Elizabeth, began to enter the Society on the continent, and one or two secret missions were sent out. Thomas King was sent from Louvain to England, but he died in the following year (1565), and is merely stated to have made a few converts. Another refugee in Belgium, an Irishman named David Woulfe, had been sent in 1560 to his native land with the position of Nuncio. He was so effectively disguised that in France he was arrested as a Lutheran. His early reports represent him as an austere spectator of the general corruption of the Irish clergy, monks, and people. He speaks of giving absolution, in one year, to a thousand penitents who had contracted "incestuous marriages," and describes the people coming to his retreat in their shirts and bare feet. Father Woulfe seems to have caught the taint, however, as he was some years later ignominiously expelled from the Society. William Good, a Somersetshire man, and "Edmund the Irishman," joined him in 1564, distributing to the peasantry the dispensations and indulgences which England proscribed, to the grave inconvenience of the papal treasury.

The mission to Scotland was not less adventurous. It was the year 1562, when Mary Queen of Scots had returned from France, full of sad foreboding, to the land of John Knox. Nicholas Gouda was sent from Louvain, in the secret character of Nuncio, to console and assist her, and two Scottish students, Hay and Crichton, accompanied him. They were dressed as gentlemen of quality, who would see the world. Unfortunately, Crichton betrayed the secret to an acquaintance at Leith, and the fiery cross passed from pulpit to pulpit in the city of Edinburgh. Gouda sent Crichton back to Louvain and went on himself to Edinburgh. After many fruitless attempts to see Mary, he was at last admitted one night, by a postern gate, to the presence of the beautiful and distracted young queen, but there was nothing to be done. He asked that the bishops might be assembled somewhere to meet him, and it appeared that there was only one bishop, on one of the islands, who would venture to receive him, if he were well disguised. It seems that the least remarkable dress to don on visiting his lordship was that of a money-lender, and Father Nicholas, so habited, traversed wild and stern Caledonia. The rumour of his presence got about, and the Covenanters kept watch at Edinburgh for his return. A French merchant coming in from Aberdeen was sorely beaten by them before he could prove his identity. But two of the faithful met Gouda outside Edinburgh, and they sailed, with a small band of Scottish aspirants, for Belgium.

In Italy the story is one of much progress and bitter hostility. By 1561 there were two hundred and sixty Jesuits (in the broadest sense of the word) in Rome, of whom a hundred and ninety were students in the Roman college. They were prospering in the sunshine of the Pope's favour. Elsewhere in Italy, however, they received hard blows. No less than four serious storms broke on the Society in various parts of Italy in the year 1561.

First it was reported from the Valtellina that the fathers had been expelled, and forbidden the whole territory of the Grisons, on the ground that they had shown an undue eagerness in securing an old man's money. Next there was trouble in Montepulciano. The good fathers had, Sacchini says, induced so large a proportion of the women of Montepulciano to lead proper lives that the men were infuriated. They bribed a loose woman to attempt to seduce one of the Jesuits, and they engaged a man to dress as a Jesuit and let himself be seen coming from a disorderly house. The Montepulciano version of the matter is, of course, that one Jesuit accosted a woman and another was seen leaving an unbecoming house. To make matters worse, a woman accused the Jesuit rector, Father Gambar, of intimacy with her sister. It was an act of jealousy, as the two sisters had competed for the rector's smiles; it is, however, admitted that Father Gambar had been "indiscreet" in his letters to the lady, which were made public. The civic authorities took the darker view, and requested the removal of Gambar. When Lainez refused, the townsfolk threatened to talk to the rector themselves, and he fled. Lainez held that he was innocent, but expelled him from the Society for running away without permission. He sent some of the older Jesuits to restore order in Montepulciano, but it was no use. The citizens withdrew the pension they had hitherto given the Jesuits, for teaching, and refused to give them alms or house. Lainez fought, with his ablest men and subsidies from Rome, for a year or two, but he was beaten and forced to dissolve the college.

Then Venice reported difficulties. The new Archbishop, Trevisani, detested the Jesuits, and assured his friends that the chiappini ("humbugs," to translate it politely) would not remain long in Venice under his rule. Incidents multiplied, and in 1561 the Senate fell to discussing the fathers and did not spare them. The gist of the charge was that they were foreigners meddling with the affairs of Venice; they confessed all the noble ladies of Venice, called on them in their homes, and through them learned the official secrets. The debate ended with words, though the Doge summoned Father Palmio and warned him to be prudent; and the men of Venice, quoting Montepulciano, used a little domestic authority to keep their wives away from Jesuit confessionals.

From Naples, in the same year, came news of hostility and obloquy. Salmeron had been recalled from Naples to Rome, and offensive observers began to form theories of the recall. When the legend had grown to its full proportions, it ran that Father Salmeron had extorted four thousand pounds from a dying woman, before he would absolve her, and had, when the Pope heard and asked an explanation, fled to Geneva and turned Protestant. The boys sang ballads in the street about Father Salmeron and his four thousand pounds, and the college had troubled experiences. Why Salmeron was not sent down to refute the legend, and whether there really was some little difficulty about a sum of money, we cannot say. But the incident shows that Catholic Naples was largely hostile to the Jesuits. The Pope had to intervene and use the authority of the Viceroy.

A few years later a more serious storm broke out in the north. In all these cases of charges against the early Jesuits it is extremely difficult to ascertain the truth; the case is always stated for us by the defence. It happens that in the case of the trouble at Milan in 1563 we have one independent document, and I state the facts a little more fully. It matters little whether the various Jesuits were guilty or not in these local disturbances, and most people will conclude, roughly, that they were probably not all immaculate and impeccable. But it is worth while ascertaining if all this violent hostility to the Jesuits, among Catholic peoples, is really founded on disappointed vice or idle calumny, and we may take the Milan affair as a type.

The famous Cardinal-Archbishop of Milan, Carolo Borromeo, was a nephew of the Pope. He received his position in 1560, at the early age of twenty-two, and was soon under the influence of the Jesuits. It was reported to the Pope that Charles was giving large sums of money to the Jesuits, and seemed to have an idea of joining the Society. Then the young archbishop's Jesuit confessor, Father Ribera, was accused of unnatural vice with a page in the establishment of Donna Virginia, Charles's sister-in-law. Sacchini says that Charles investigated the charge and found it false, and that a bishop who insisted on it (and accused other Jesuits besides Ribera) was brought before Cardinal Savelli at Rome, produced his witnesses—a number of discharged or former students at the Jesuit college—and was himself punished for libel. It is added that Charles continued to entrust his seminary to the Jesuits, and would not have done so if they were guilty. Ribera, it is acknowledged, was sent to the Indies by Lainez, but only because the Pope disliked his influence on Charles.

The Jesuit case is, as usual, plausible, but does not satisfy a close inquirer. To send a distinguished and fashionable Jesuit to the Indies because he is making his penitent more pious than the Pope likes, especially at a time when he is charged with vice, is hardly the kind of action we should expect in so prudent a man as Lainez. It was a very drastic measure to put five thousand miles between Ribera and his saintly penitent. As to Cardinal Savelli's inquiry, we can quite believe that the Pope would be willing to draw a veil over a scandal, which might ruin the Society in Italy, once Lainez had sent the chief culprit on the foreign missions; Cardinal Savelli was, moreover, the patron and protector of the Jesuits, and he seems to have dismissed the witnesses unheard on the ground that they were expelled or seceding students of the Society. We can further understand that Charles might remain friendly with the Jesuits if he believed that one man only was guilty, and that man was punished; but we shall see in the next chapter that the relations of Charles and the Jesuits were disturbed, and that in 1578 they made an extraordinarily insolent attack on the cardinal in his own city.

But the chief point is that an almost contemporary writer, Caspar Schoppe, maintains on the highest authority that the Jesuit schools at Milan were deeply tainted with vice. Schoppe is an ardent anti-Jesuit, and must be read with discretion when his authority is remote. In this case he calls God to witness that Cardinal Frederic Borromeo, the nephew and successor of Charles, said in his (Schoppe's) presence that he had himself found the Jesuit college at Braida so corrupt that he would not suffer any Jesuit to come near him, would not allow any student of his seminary to approach a Jesuit teacher, and would, if he had the power, forbid any Jesuit to teach.[3] Crétineau-Joly replies that Schoppe is evidently lying, since the known date of his birth makes it impossible that he should ever have conversed with Charles Borromeo. This confusion of Frederic and Charles is originally due to Quesnel, who makes that mistake in quoting Schoppe, but it is very singular that the French apologist for the Jesuits should not know that Schoppe spoke of Frederic Borromeo, not Charles, as is pointed out in later editions of Quesnel. It is still more singular that Crétineau-Joly assures his readers (who are not likely to make an arduous search for Schoppe's ancient work) that the statement is made "sous forme dubitative," when he must know that it is the most solemn and emphatic statement in Schoppe's book. The impartial student must conclude that there is grave evidence against the Milan Jesuits, and that hostility to the Jesuits had at times a more respectable ground than they are willing to admit.

The Pope did not stint his patronage of the Society on account of these accusations. When the Cardinal-Protector of the Society died in 1564, Pius IV. undertook that office himself, as if to intimidate its critics; though the critics were not in the least intimidated. Shortly afterwards he appointed a commission of cardinals and prelates to consider the establishment of a seminary at Rome, and they recommended that the Jesuits should have charge of it. The proposal inflamed the Roman critics of the Society, and Montepulciano and Milan and all the other scandals were fiercely discussed. The Pope held firm, however, and the struggle had not ended when Lainez died.

In Spain and Portugal the Society continued to make material progress and, in the same proportion, morally to deteriorate. Favoured by the genial clime of the Peninsula, the Society ran quickly through its normal course of development and bore precocious fruit. The college at Coimbra had, as we have seen, needed purification even under Ignatius. It now prospered again, and maintained about a hundred and fifty novices and priests. But the most notable feature of the Portuguese province was the early interference of the Jesuits in politics. The primitive design of avoiding politics and forbidding Jesuits to frequent the courts of princes had first been set aside by Ignatius himself, and was quite inconsistent with the general idea of obtaining the favour of the rich and powerful. In Portugal the court was now dominated by Jesuits; Father Miguel de Torres was confessor of the Queen-Regent Catherine, Father Gonzales da Camara confessor of the young King Sebastian, and Father Leo Henriquez confessor of Cardinal Dom Henry, the King's grand-uncle. It may be read in any history of Portugal how the Cardinal began, at the instigation and with the assistance of the Jesuits, to intrigue for the Regency, and in 1562 forced Catherine to abdicate. In a letter, dated 8th June 1571, which Catherine afterwards wrote to General Borgia, we are plainly informed of the intrigues of the confessors. "Everyone knows," says the Queen, "that the evils which afflict this kingdom are caused by some of your fathers, who are so misguided as to advise the King, my grandson, to displace me and expel me from my State." She had dismissed her confessor Torres, who advised her to submit to the intrigues of her brother and Father Gonzales, but after a five years' struggle she was forced to retire from Spain. Father Gonzales then became the most powerful man in Portugal, and made his brother Prime Minister, until, as we shall see, Sebastian became old enough to put an end to their intrigues.

In Spain the Society was less prosperous. The historic struggle at Alcalà had ended in the capture of the university by the Jesuits, but at Seville, Valladolid, and other towns there was persistent opposition, and at Grenada a dangerous agitation arose because a Jesuit confessor compelled a penitent to name her accomplice in vice. Borgia himself had many enemies at court, and the opposition to him culminated at length in an attack which compelled him to fly to Portugal. Two works of piety which he had written in earlier years were denounced to the Inquisition and condemned. It is said by the Jesuits that the suspected passages in his books were interpolated by the man who published them, and the point is of little interest. Borgia did not remain to face the questions of the Inquisitors, and the King became so angry with him that, when he was invited by Lainez to the metropolitan house at Rome, the Spanish fathers warned Lainez that if any dignity were conferred on Borgia it would be deeply resented at the court.

This trouble had hardly ended in the disgrace and flight of Borgia when a very grave domestic quarrel arose in the Castilian province. Lainez had sent Father Natalis from Rome to inspect the province, and the Castilian Provincial, Father Araoz (nephew of Ignatius), discovered that Natalis had secret instructions to destroy his position at court. Araoz, the oldest Jesuit in Spain, and a favourite at court, had won a position of comfort and power which was certainly not consistent with the personal ideal of the Society. When, however, they endeavoured to dislodge him, he took a drastic revenge on the Roman authorities. Natalis was collecting and sending to Rome a good deal of money, when an instruction was suddenly issued from the court pointing out that it was against the laws of the kingdom to send money abroad or send men to study in other countries. This order was openly attributed by the Jesuits to the influence of Father Araoz. An angry quarrel ensued, and one of the friends of Araoz produced the secret instructions which Lainez had given to Natalis and some father had stolen. We need not enlarge on this quarrel. It is more interesting to note that the Jesuits urged that their action in sending money to Rome did not come under the royal order since the Church has no frontiers. For some years the affairs of the Society in Spain remained in a very troubled condition, in spite of their great prosperity.

In France we naturally find the sternest struggle of the decade, as the large Protestant population was supported by the majority of the Catholics in opposition to the Jesuits. The early effort to woo Paris by austerity of life and humble care of the sick had wholly failed. The Archbishop, the university, and the lawyers of the Parlement had observed that these humble ministers had the most formidable privileges in their reserved baggage, and they had put the Jesuits out of the gates. They remained in the meadows of St. Germain for five or six years, and then, in 1560, Lainez ordered a fresh campaign. His representative at Paris was the astute intriguer, Father Cogordan, who had given Lainez painful proof of his ability at Rome. France was on the eve of a terrible struggle of Catholics and Huguenots, and Cogordan had little difficulty in persuading the Queen that the Jesuits were the appointed force for checking Protestantism. The Parlement was ordered to register the letters of Henry II., authorising the Jesuits. The courageous lawyers refused once more, and the whole of the faculties of the university joined in an emphatic condemnation of the Jesuits and their privileges.

The next move of the Jesuits is noteworthy. Cogordan was instructed to reply that the Jesuits would sacrifice, in France, any privileges which were opposed to the laws of the country or the rights of the French Church. Their opponents were quite aware that the sacrifice was insincere and temporary, but the manœuvre greatly weakened the position of the Archbishop. As a last resource he stipulated that they should also abandon the name "Society of Jesus," which many Catholics considered offensively arrogant, and again Cogordan assented. The Parlement, however, still refused to register the royal letters, and threw the decision upon a Council which was to be held at Poissy, where Catholics and Huguenots were to meet in a dialectical tourney.

Francis II. had died at the close of 1560, and Catherine de Medici, the virtual ruler, was entirely won to the Jesuit view. But the Huguenots, led by the Prince de Condé and Admiral de Coligny, were so powerful that sober Catholic opinion favoured concession to them in the interest of peace: a policy which the Jesuits ruthlessly opposed wherever the Catholics were still in the majority. The Colloquy at Poissy was, therefore, doubly interesting to the Jesuits, and Lainez went in person, in the train of the Pope's legate, Cardinal d'Este, to secure their aims; he was to obtain the recognition of the Society and to prevent the reconciliation of Catholics and Huguenots. Unhappily he succeeded in both designs. The Colloquy opened in July, when a small group of the abler Huguenot divines confronted six cardinals and forty bishops and archbishops, under the eyes of the King and Queen. When, after a few sittings, it was seen that concessions must be made to the heretics, Lainez delivered a fiery and eloquent discourse against this proposed sacrilege. Catherine de Medici trembled, and would attend no more sittings. The Colloquy ended in a futile wrangle of Lainez and the Huguenots, and France, thanks very largely to Lainez, went on her way toward St. Bartholomew.

The sincerity of Lainez in this fanatical gospel of intolerance cannot be doubted, but it is in piquant contrast to the second part of his mission, in which he equally succeeded. He brought with him testimonials to the work done by his Society in a hundred places, confirmed the promise that they would lay aside their privileges and their very name (until it was safe to resume them), and thus secured the right of entry into Paris for this nameless body of priests. This was done, of course, by quiet activity among the prelates, without any public discussion. Lainez remained several months in France, strengthening the new foundation and—at the very time when he was urging Condé, in a friendly correspondence, to induce the Protestants to join in the Council of Trent—using the whole of his great influence over the Queen and court to prevent any concession of churches or other normal rights to the Huguenots. As a result of his success, the Jesuits moved into Paris and took possession of the hotel which the Bishop of Clermont had bequeathed them some years before. We can hardly suppose that they were following the advice of the sagacious Lainez when they inscribed over the door the words "College of the Society of the Name of Jesus." This flippant evasion of their promise to abandon their name did not tend to conciliate Parisians. When they succeeded in a short time, with their free classes and ablest teachers, in drawing some hundreds of youths from the university, they became bolder and announced that the "Clermont College" was incorporated with the university. The rector, Marchand, indignantly challenged their claim, and they produced letters of incorporation which they had secretly obtained from his predecessor two years before. They could not insist on the validity of this irregular diploma, and the close of the generalship of Lainez saw them once more in a position of grave insecurity and unpopularity.

A somewhat similar struggle was taking place in Belgium. The university and civic authorities at Louvain resisted them, and their college remained so poor that we find its rector complaining to Rome of the burden of supporting Father Ribadeneira, who, as we have previously seen, had been sent to further Jesuit interests at the court of Philip in Belgium. Even when Margaret of Austria, whom they easily secured, bade the States of Brabant admit the Jesuits, they refused, and they yielded only to the direct intervention of Philip in 1564.

On the other hand, the able and devoted Jesuit Canisius was laying the foundation of his Society very firmly in the Catholic provinces of Germany. Canisius is the greatest figure in the second decade of the Society's life, and seems to have been a more deeply religious and conscientious man than Lainez. He maintained to the end the more austere standard of life, travelling afoot from city to city, from Rhineland to Poland and Austria, and inaugurating everywhere the effective system of education which Ranke has declared superior to that of the Reformers. The University of Dillingen was entrusted to the Jesuits, the frontiers of the Society were extended to Poland in 1554, and the laity were identified with its interests in the Catholic cities by being drafted into the numerous sodalities or confraternities which the Jesuits controlled. The historian can dwell with more sympathy on their generally enlightened struggle with Protestantism and with Catholic corruption in Germany, where heresy provided them with a bracing atmosphere and a healthy incentive to work. Even here, however, we find them at times stooping to tactics which we cannot admire, and the next chapter will introduce them to us in some singular adventures. Their conduct in Bavaria, especially, does not invite close scrutiny. Albert V. was heavily burdened with debt, and it is something more than a coincidence that, the moment he admitted the Jesuits, the Vatican made him a large grant out of ecclesiastical funds; it is even clearer that the Jesuits were chiefly responsible for the persecution of Protestants which followed their settlement in Bavaria.

Lainez had made a tour of these provinces after establishing his Society in France. From Paris he had passed to Belgium, where the Duchess of Parma was ruling in the name of her brother. Margaret had heard Lainez preach at Rome, and he easily secured her interest for his struggling brethren in Flanders. He then went on to Trent, where, in 1562, the Council resumed its sittings. There was no longer the least hope of persuading the Reformers to attend, and it now remained for the Church to decide what modifications it would adopt in order to meet the Protestant indictment. The northern monarchs, confronted with the task of reconciling large Catholic and Protestant populations, were disposed to make concessions, and their clergy were at least eager to check the arrogant claims and moderate the extravagance of the papal court. This policy was opposed by Italy, Spain, and the Papacy, and the Jesuits were the most violent partisans of the ultramontane attitude. It would, perhaps, be an error to ascribe to Lainez a preponderant rôle in the unhappy councils that were adopted at Trent, but whatever influence his learning and eloquence gave him was used for the purpose of magnifying the papal authority. Even the wealth and luxury of the Roman court, which had been so largely responsible for the schism, found in him an eloquent defender. He was able to return to Rome with an assurance that the Catholic States made no concession, while the northern prelates had to retire to their seats with grave foreboding of bloody struggle.

Of the Jesuit missions beyond the seas during this decade little need be said. In India alone some material progress was made, and it was largely due to tactics which promised no permanent result. Writers like Crétineau-Joly deliberately omit the most significant details in regard to these early missions, and give a most misleading impression that tens of thousands of natives were gathered into the fold by the spiritual teaching; and exalted labours of the missionaries. The early Jesuits themselves are more candid. They tell, for instance, how in 1559 they made a descent, with an accompanying troop of soldiers, on an island whose inhabitants had long resisted baptism. The natives were held up by the troops, and their leaders were put in irons and told that they were to be deported. In the circumstances they professed themselves eager to be baptized, and the sacred rite and a good dinner were at once bestowed on five hundred "converts." The Portuguese authority was the chief agency on which the missionaries relied. The most tempting privileges were granted to converts; the administrative offices which the Hindoo clergy had exercised for ages were transferred to the Jesuits; and in 1557 even the tribunal of the Inquisition was set up by them in India.

In other lands the missionary record was singularly barren during the decade. In Brazil the fathers still wandered in the forests, slowly winning the confidence and allegiance of the natives by medical and other humane services. Abyssinia was once more invaded, and some of the fathers entered the Congo, but both missions were destroyed after a few years. In Egypt an attempt was made to induce the Copts to recognise the authority of the Pope. Rich presents were made to the Patriarch, and the Papacy was flattered for a time by reports of success; but the adventure ended in the painful and ignominious flight of the missionaries from the country. The Japanese missions also were almost destroyed in the course of the decade, and two ingenious attempts to enter China proved unsuccessful. In 1556 Father Melchior Nuñez was permitted to reach Canton, but his very diplomatic account of his object did not convince the mandarins and he was politely expelled. In 1563 a further attempt was made. The mandarins were informed that an embassy had arrived from Europe with valuable presents for the Emperor. The cautious mandarins asked to see its credentials, and, when they were told that these had been accidentally destroyed on the voyage, they again amiably conducted their visitors to the frontier. There were three Jesuits, in disguise, among the "envoys," and it is clear that the whole expedition was a fraudulent attempt of the merchants and missionaries from Goa to break the reserve of the Chinese.

Such were the fortunes of the Society of Jesus during the decade which closed with the death of Lainez in 1565. The hundred establishments which Ignatius had bequeathed to him in 1556 had now increased to a hundred and fifty; the thousand subjects had become three thousand. From Portugal to Poland the Jesuits were the most ardent soldiers in the war against the advancing heretics, and there was hardly a Catholic court in Europe that did not welcome the children of Ignatius and bow in secret to their advice. Yet a keen observer like Lainez must have perceived that this prosperity was less solid than it appeared, and his last years were saddened by announcements of hostility and defeat. In France and Belgium the gain was wholly disproportionate to the exacting struggle they had maintained; in Portugal the material success and political action were lowering the ideal of the Society; in Spain the Catholic monarch, the Inquisition, and the higher clergy were hostile; and England kept its doors sternly closed against the Jesuits. The future was still uncertain, and another Caraffa might at any time accede to the papal chair. With a last glance at the ex-Duke of Gandia, as if to intimate that Borgia was the fittest to take up the burden he laid down, the second General of the Society, able, energetic, and high-minded to the last, sank wearily to his rest.

FOOTNOTES:

[ [3] Relatio ad Reges, by Alphonsus de Vargas (Caspar Schoppe), 1636, p. 40.

[CHAPTER IV]

GENERAL FRANCIS BORGIA

The election which followed the death of Lainez was not marred by any of the painful incidents which we frequently find on such occasions in the Jesuit chronicles. When the leading fathers of the Society reached Rome in the early summer, to compare their stories of warfare in every clime of Europe and consult about the future of their great organisation, there was one amongst them who had so natural a pre-eminence that his election was assured. This was Francis Borgia, ex-Duke of Gandia and Viceroy of Catalonia. There were in the distinguished gathering many of far greater ability and service—indeed, there was probably none of less ability than Borgia—but his high birth, his friendship with half the kings of Europe, his venerable person and austere life marked him clearly for the supreme command. Philip of Spain had outgrown his hostility, and, at the death of Lainez, Borgia was appointed Vicar-General. So plain was the intention of the electors that he sincerely begged them not to impose on him so heavy a responsibility. They disregarded his protest, and on 2nd July he became General of the Society.

He was then a feeble and venerable man of sixty-five, worn with austerity, profoundly sincere and religious. In his person he singularly illustrated the change that had come over Catholicism. The name of Borgia at once suggests the groves of pleasure or the chambers of crime out of which the Papacy had been startled by the voice of Luther: his father had been a son of Pope Alexander VI., his mother an illegitimate daughter of the Archbishop of Saragossa, who in turn had been a natural son of Ferdinand V. But with his hair-shirts, his bloody scourges, and his long fasts, Francis belonged to the new age, and seemed to have taken on himself the expiation of the scarlet sins of the Borgias. He had been Viceroy of Catalonia from 1539 to 1543, and had then suffered for some years a mild and obscure disgrace. During this enforced retirement to his duchy he had met, and fallen under the charm of, Peter Favre, and he was, as we saw, secretly admitted to the Society. Although he had been driven from Spain only a few years before, the Pope had restored his prestige, and his election was acclaimed throughout the Society and the Church.

We may, perhaps, see a reflection of his religious spirit, as well as an indication that grave abuses had crept into the Society, in the long series of decrees which the Congregation proceeded to pass. No Jesuit was henceforward to live at a royal court—at least, "not for more than two or three months": Jesuit communities were not to own and manage large farms, and sell their produce in the public markets; lawsuits on behalf of legacies were to be avoided; salaries for teaching were to be abandoned when a teacher joined the Society. These and other commands give us an authoritative assurance that there was much disorder. Even in the Congregation the liberals or casuists were represented. When, in the discussion of the impropriety of going to law to secure legacies, one of the sterner brethren quoted the Sermon on the Mount, another plausibly argued that it was wrong to yield to worldlings funds which might be used in the service of God. The Puritans won, and their decrees went forth; but the farms were not abandoned, as we shall see, nor the lawyers impoverished.

In view of the despotic power which a General had, it may seem strange that the electors should venture to entrust the office to a man of such mediocre ability as Borgia. We must remember that the General had a council of four able assistants, and it could safely be trusted that the humility of Borgia would leave the power in their hands. Nor was it long before their statesmanship was put to a severe test. Their princely benefactor, Pius IV., died before the end of 1565, and a Dominican monk, Pius V., occupied the chair. He was a personal friend of Borgia, but he belonged to a rival order, and Rome was greatly agitated by the hope that he would strip the Society of its excessive privileges. To the relief and delight of the Jesuits, Pius V. took the earliest opportunity to show his friendliness. As he drove in solemn procession past their church, he summoned the General to his carriage, and talked affectionately with him for a quarter of an hour under the eyes of his officers. When he went on to nominate Jesuits for certain important offices, it seemed that they had found another protector.

In 1567, however, they were dismayed to receive an amiable, but firm, suggestion from Pius to chant in choir, as other religious bodies did, and abandon the "simple" or temporary vows which enabled them to keep priests in the Society for years without being solemnly pledged to it.[ [4] A commission of cardinals was at the time engaged in discussing the reform of the monastic world, and the Jesuits submitted to it a lengthy and skilful memoir in defence of their institutions. Ought not a regiment of light horse, ready to fly at a moment's notice to any part of the Pope's dominions, to have special characters? Would those hundreds of men who had joined the Society in its actual form not have ground to complain if it were made more onerous? Would the benefactors who had built their homes and chapels be indifferent to the changes? Nay, what would the heretics say when the decisions of a whole series of Popes, to say nothing of the revelations made to Ignatius, were ruled improper? These ingenious considerations were then orally impressed on the Pope by Borgia and Polanco, and they flattered themselves that they had once more evaded the commands which it was their chief business to see respected by the rest of Christendom. The Pope had agreed to postpone the question of choir until his new edition of the Breviary was published, and he did not seem to insist on the reform of the vows. A few months later, however, they heard that the Pope was about to decree that in future no member of a religious body should be admitted to the priesthood until he had taken his final vows.

The details of the struggle need not be repeated here, but we must assuredly see a significance in these repeated conflicts with the Pope. In the whole history of the monastic orders of the Catholic Church there is no example of persistent opposition to, or determined evasion of, the commands of the Pope to compare for a moment with this behaviour of the men who took a special vow to obey him. Moreover, the Jesuit writers of the time frankly confess that they resisted the Pope's wish in their own interest. If the solemn vows were to be taken in a youth's early twenties, they would have to examine much more closely the characters of aspirants to the Society, and their numbers would shrink. It was one of the most constant charges against them in every country, that in the admission of novices they sacrificed spiritual quality to quantity or social distinction; and certainly the number of priests who abandoned, or were expelled from, the Society was large. Pius V. knew this, and, to their great mortification, insisted on the reform of their system. They sullenly abandoned one of the most characteristic of their institutions—until Pius V. should go the way of his predecessors. There was much rejoicing in Rome, and it was rumoured that this was only the beginning of reform; but Pius hastened to reassure Borgia and his colleagues.

In 1571, Borgia was requested by the Pope to undertake an important mission. The steady advance of the Turks upon a divided Christendom alarmed the Pope, and he wished to unite the Catholic monarchs for the purpose of defence. His nephew, Cardinal Alessandrini, was to visit the courts of Spain, Portugal, and France, and Borgia was invited to accompany him. He was now advanced in years and tormented with gout, but he accepted the mission, and we may make our survey of the provinces of the Society by following his travels.

Spain endeavoured by an honourable reception to atone for the disgrace it had formerly put upon him. The King promised his aid against the Turk: the Inquisition permitted the publication of Borgia's books: the Jesuits everywhere took courage at sight of their venerable leader and the honour paid him. The Spanish province had continued, since the death of Lainez, to have a very chequered record. The father of the province, Araoz, had resisted every effort of the Roman authorities to dislodge him from his comfortable nest at the court, and his conduct had alienated many from the Society. On the other hand, the devoted exertions of the Jesuits during the epidemics of 1565, 1568, and 1571, had won back much of the early respect for them, and many new missions had been established. Most of the countries of Europe were repeatedly ravaged by pestilence during that decade, and the Jesuits distinguished themselves everywhere by the bravery with which they exposed, and frequently lost, their lives in the service of the sick. Yet there was a persistent feeling in Spain that they were over-eager to secure legacies, and nearly every year witnessed a violent outbreak of hostility to them.

A typical instance is found in the Jesuit chronicles in the earlier part of the year of Borgia's visit. The Jesuits of Alcalà had received into their ranks a youth named Francesco d'España, the son of a wealthy and distinguished lady of Madrid, who strongly opposed his entrance into the Society. He had the disposal of a large fortune, of which he was heir. The mother appealed to the Royal Council, at the head of which was Cardinal Spinosa, and the Jesuits were ordered to restore the youth. In the meantime, they had secretly sent the youth to their house at Madrid,—to be prepared to give evidence, Crétineau-Joly audaciously says,—and when the Vicar of the Archbishop of Toledo came to their house at Alcalà to enforce the order, they would tell him only that d'España was not there. A very lively dispute followed. The angry prelate roundly abused the Jesuits, who flourished their privileges in his face; and some zealous brother rang the bell of the college to summon the students to the defence of their rector. When at length the Vicar threatened to have the Jesuit Provincial dragged to prison, and the students drew their knives to protect him, the rector promised to produce d'España within twenty-four hours. He was summoned, and his mother tried to persuade him to return, or at least to leave his fortune to his family instead of leaving it to the Jesuits. He refused, until the Provincial, foreseeing a great outburst of indignation, advised him to relinquish his fortune. The feeling engendered by such incidents was not removed by the visit of Borgia. In the following year, 1572, the civic authorities of Madrid appealed to the Royal Council to close the Jesuit school, on the ground that the lessons were merely "bait" for young men of wealthy families.

In Portugal, Borgia found the remarkable spectacle of one of his subjects virtually ruling the kingdom. Portugal had fallen lamentably from its earlier greatness. The vast frame of its Empire was undiminished, but the spirit necessary to sustain it had died, and it was doomed to decay. No serious historian questions that the Jesuits had, at least by setting up the Inquisition and pursuing the Jews and Moors, greatly accelerated its fall, and under the rule of Father Gonzales da Camara and his brother, in the name of the young King, the temporal interests of Portugal steadily declined. A stern French critic of the Jesuits, Pasquier, says that he was told by the Marquis de Pisani, the French ambassador at the Spanish court, that the Jesuits were bent on obtaining control of the kingdom of Portugal. Their apologists invite us to be amused at this incredible fiction of the anti-Jesuit, yet it is hardly more than a strong expression of the historical facts. Pasquier expressly says that the Jesuits meant to rule, not without a king, but through a king of their own choice, and they had done this for ten years when Borgia came to visit them. They had, as we saw, helped to replace Catherine by Cardinal Henry, and they had in 1568 displaced the Cardinal by declaring Sebastian of age (in his sixteenth year).

That they promoted the interests of the Society in Portugal and its colonies need hardly be said, but there is ample evidence that they had a larger influence. The King's mother wished him to marry the daughter of the Emperor Maximilian, but papal policy preferred a marriage with the sister of the French King; and we have a letter from Borgia to Gonzales, as confessor of Sebastian, enjoining him to promote the French marriage. Even Borgia could overlook the decrees of his Society at times, or convert temporal matters into spiritual. We may, however, regard it as a strained and fanciful conjecture of certain critics that the Portuguese fathers tried to deter Sebastian from marriage, and pressed him to undertake his fatal mission to Africa, in order that the crown might fall into their hands. But this belongs to a later date. Father Gonzales was still the virtual head of the State when Borgia visited Portugal, and the Society flourished there and in the Indies. Although Borgia had lately received an angry protest from Catherine against the interference of the fathers in political matters, he left Gonzales at the court.

Alessandrini and Borgia next went to France; and when we reflect that the historic massacre of the Huguenots occurred a few months afterwards, we feel that it is important to study the visit and the position of the Jesuits with some care. Let us first see how the Society had fared in its ceaseless struggle with its opponents at Paris.

In 1565 a fresh attack had been made on the Jesuit college, and a fruitless appeal against it was made to the Royal Senate. The Jesuits then arraigned the University, which refused to recognise their college, before the Parliament, and a fresh opportunity was offered to the Parisian lawyers to draw up their scathing indictments of the Society. In the meantime, Father Possevin, rector of the college they had recently opened at Lyons, was sent to see the young King and Catherine de Medici at Bayonne, and induce them to throw their power and command into the legal scale. The conference at Bayonne, at which Possevin assisted in some measure, is of grave importance in the history of Europe. On the pretext of making Charles acquainted with his kingdom, Catherine was bringing him into the neighbourhood of other Catholic princes and conferring with them. At Bayonne she met the wife of Philip of Spain, and in the Queen's suite was the grim Duke of Alva. We can only conjecture what was discussed at this conference, but no one doubts that the chief subject was the growth of Protestantism in Catholic lands. Protestant historians frequently suggest that the St. Bartholomew massacre was actually projected at Bayonne, but we are hardly justified in thinking that there was anything more than a general discussion of the brutal policy which was afterwards adopted by Alva in the Netherlands and Catherine in France. In any case, it is most unlikely that Possevin had any share in these secret counsels. He was a new man, hardly known to the court in 1565. He discussed the affairs of his Society with the Spanish Queen, and revealed to her the smuggling of Protestant books into her country; and he returned to Paris with letters, commending the suit of the Paris college, from Catherine, Charles, and the Cardinal de Bourbon.

When the President of the Parlement found these weighty and irregular documents thrown into the scale, he temporised. The suit was suspended; the Jesuits were provisionally allowed to teach. In the following year, however, the University appealed to the Constable of France, complaining that the professors were unable to keep discipline, as a pupil went to the Jesuits the moment he was reprimanded. Then two singular discoveries were made by the Jesuits, and they had the effect of disarming many of their patriotic opponents. In 1567, Father Oliver Manares, the Provincial, informed the court and the civic authorities of Paris that the Huguenots had concerted a plot to sack and burn the city; he had learned it from a Polish noble, who was visiting Paris and had been warned to leave in time. [5] Paris flew to arms and scared the supposed plotters; it was also grateful to Father Manares, and incensed against the Huguenots. In the same year, Father Auger was fortunate enough to discover a similar plot at Lyons. There is evidence of a conspiracy at Lyons, but the historian must regard the "discovery" of Manares with grave suspicion. The effect of the discoveries was that the grateful King at once ordered that all opposition to the Jesuits must cease, and all legacies to the Society must be valid in law; and that the Catholics were soon ranged against the Huguenots in open field. The ablest of the Jesuits, Auger and Possevin, ardently stimulated the Catholics, accompanied the troops, and were even seen in the thick of the battles.

A peace was arranged in 1570, to the disappointment of the Jesuits; and the country still enjoyed this precarious peace when Alessandrini and Borgia reached the court, at Blois, in the first month of 1572. In regard to the discussions which took place we know only that France declared itself unable to join in the crusade against the Turk, and Charles's sister, Mary of Valois, was promised to Henri de Béarn instead of to Sebastian of Spain, as the Pope wished. Alessandrini and Borgia went back to Rome, to announce their failure to the dying Pope. And on 24th August of that year took place the horrible massacre which lays an eternal stain on the memory of Catherine de Medici. We have, fortunately, neither to linger over the revolting details of that outrage, nor to enter the larger controversy as to the responsibility for it. [6] The general feeling of historians is that the massacre was deliberately planned by Catherine; and, since the Jesuits had influence with Catherine, we have to consider whether they may have been implicated in the barbaric slaughter.

Since General Borgia conferred with her at Blois some months before the massacre, it has been thought by many that he was initiated. A careful consideration of the character of Borgia disposes one to acquit him confidently of this suspicion; it seems incredible that he should approve, or that Catherine should expect him to approve, so inhuman a measure. It is a common mistake to suppose that there was a fixed type of Jesuit, and that almost any member of the Society may be regarded as a man who would sanction criminal means for the attainment of a good end. Our narrative has already shown us that Jesuits differed considerably in character, and that individual features were not, as is sometimes thought, obliterated by the impression of a corporate stamp. Borgia was cruel only to himself, and he does not seem to have been much of a casuist.

The real question is how far such men as Auger, Possevin, and Manares were responsible for that general mood and temper of Catherine which culminated in the Bartholomew massacre. It does not seem probable that any of them were actually initiated to the plot. They were not the keepers of the royal conscience in France at that time, and were not at all constantly consulted by Catherine. But since the days when, at and after the colloquy at Poissy, Lainez had sternly forbidden her to grant an elementary freedom of worship to the Huguenots, they had impelled her toward that harsh and intolerant policy which at length took this criminal form in her diseased mind. Their intellectual campaign against the Huguenots was a failure. They made few converts from it, and they urged coercion to prevent it from spreading. Then, when the Huguenots stirred under this unjust treatment, they were very zealous in warning the court of "plots." It seems to me a grave circumstance that in 1567, Father Manares "discovered" on the part of the Huguenots of Paris a design not unlike that which the Catholics afterwards perpetrated against them; it is probable that this was the germ of Catherine's bloody enterprise. Whether she ever discussed her plan with any of the leading Jesuits we have no evidence whatever to determine. At a later date, when their house is raided and their preachers are bolder, we shall find the Jesuits of Paris expressly advocating crime in the interest of religion. At this stage we can only say that they pressed a policy of violence and injustice, and Catherine's crime, in which they acquiesced, was an extreme deduction from it.

Simultaneously with the trouble in France, Alva was engaged in "pacifying" the Netherlands. Here the Jesuits had miscalculated the strength of the Catholics, and, in encouraging the policy of violent repression, led to their own undoing. Only the favour of princes had secured some shelter for them in Belgium, and their houses now disappeared in the flames of the civil war. Their college at Douai had been interdicted by the university authorities in 1567, but relieved by papal authority. As the Spaniards proceeded, however, in the drastic and bloody policy which the Jesuits were known to favour, the crowds stormed their residences, and by 1570 they were almost driven from the country. They returned in the wake of Alva, but there was bitter hostility to them, and they were generally accused of rebuilding their house at Antwerp out of the loot of Flemish towns. Father Sacchini is moved to lament the perversity of men who could entertain such a suspicion, though, as their sardonic critic Steinmetz observes, "it would have been better to supply the place of this moral maxim by stating whence the funds were obtained for building or beautifying the house at Antwerp."

When we pass to Germany we naturally find that the Jesuits are apostles of toleration, charity, and calm intellectual discussion of differences of creed in the north, fanatical intolerantists in the south, and advocates of every conceivable compromise between the two extremes in the intervening or mixed States. Canisius still maintained his great work and his austere standard. Appointed Legate of the Pope in 1565 he traversed the whole of Germany on foot, and strengthened the loyalty of the Catholic rulers to the Council of Trent. In the following year we find him, at the Diet of Augsburg, helping to unite Protestants and Catholics against the Turk. Many new colleges were founded by him, including three in Poland, before the death of Borgia. On the other hand, grave reports had to be sent to Rome from the more Catholic and prosperous centres. The University of Dillingen, which the Jesuits controlled, was found in 1567 to be permeated with heresy, and a rigorous scrutiny ended in some of the Jesuits (including an English refugee, Edward Thorn) going over to the Protestants. In 1570 the Jesuit rector of Prague College became a Protestant and married. In Bavaria the cry was raised that they mutilated boys in their colleges. A most extraordinary trial resulted in their acquittal, but there was a deep and widespread prejudice against them. In the same year, 1565, they were fiercely assailed in Austria. Their college at Vienna was raided by an angry mob; and the nobles, who had been convoked by Maximilian, refused to give their aid in the campaign against the Turk unless the Emperor expelled the Jesuits.

In Italy the chronicles of the Society tell of slow advance chequered by fits of hostility. By the year 1567 the Roman college had more than a thousand pupils, but the provinces were beginning to murmur at the burden of supporting this establishment, and the next congregation would restrict its growth. In Genoa, Siena, and other cities, the fathers struggled with poverty; in one place a college had to abandon the struggle and die. In most parts, however, the Society flourished and adapted its work to the circumstances. At Palermo we hear, in 1567, of a weird pageant, known as "The Triumph of Death," arranged by the Jesuits. Sack-clothed men bearing candles, a huge figure of Christ in a coffin, and two hundred flagellants, stimulated to their ghastly exercise by a troop of choristers dressed as hermits, went before a car containing a monstrous skeleton, higher than the roofs of the houses, with a mighty scythe in its hand. In the north the appeal was to princes. Borromeo still favoured the Society at Milan, while at Ferrara and Florence the Jesuits directed the consciences of princesses. The daughters of the Emperor who had married the Duke of Ferrara and Francis de Medici insisted on retaining their Jesuit confessors; and, when Borgia would refuse permission, the confessors themselves pleaded that the fair ladies could not possibly be abandoned to strange influences. Borgia reluctantly consented. He saw, and regretted, that one of the sternest rules of the Society was being sacrificed to expediency, but his counsellors seemed to have overruled him. Ignatius had sanctioned the first royal confessor: now there were four.

From his survey of the provinces, in which he saw much to distress his austere feelings, Borgia returned, exhausted, to Rome. He died a few weeks afterwards (1st October 1572), and Polanco, one of the ablest administrators at the Roman centre, was appointed Vicar-General. He fixed the election for April, and in the early spring the most famous officers of the army began to come in from their remote battlefields. Auger was occupied in so congenial a task in France that he would not come to Rome; he was with the Catholic troops besieging the Huguenots in La Rochelle. But there was an impressive gathering of the veterans of the Society. Salmeron and Bobadilla were still there to tell the story of their humble beginning on the flanks of Montmartre thirty years before; Ribadeneira, Miguel de Torres, Canisius, Possevin, Manares, Leo Henriquez, Miron, Polanco, and other fathers, before whom kings would bow, came in from the frontiers to the eternal city, as the commanders of legions had done before them. And of this brilliant group one of the lowest in ability and distinction, Father Everard Mercurian, was chosen to be General.

The new Pope, Gregory XIII., had intervened. "How many Spanish Generals have you had?" he asked, when the older Jesuits came to greet him. All three had been Spaniards. "How many votes have the Spaniards amongst you?" he then asked. Quite enough to elect a Spaniard once more, as they were bent on doing; and the man on whom they had fixed their thoughts was the gifted and energetic Polanco. But Polanco was descended from converted Jews, a class disliked by high-born Spaniards, and Kings Philip and Sebastian had written to ask the Pope to prevent him from being elected. The fathers respectfully protested that the Pope, who was Protector of their Society, ought not to coerce their decisions. "Are there no able men amongst you except Spaniards?" he went on; and he suggested Everard Mercurian. Gregory knew that the blind obedience of the Jesuits to the Pope was not of the kind which hastens to carry out the slightest wish of the ruler, and on the morning of the election he sent a cardinal to tell them that they must not elect a Spaniard. They still expostulated; but Gregory insisted, and Mercurian, a mild and mediocre old man, was made General. Being a Belgian, he was at least a subject of Spain; and he was sixty-eight years old.

Then the conscript fathers assembled, day after day, to discuss the mass of secret reports from every centre, and pass those instructive decrees—forty-eight were issued on this occasion—which tell us so plainly the decay of the original spirit. Ignatius had taught them to seek power and wealth for God: it had proved a dangerous lesson. The Congregation dispersed in June, and Mercurian entered upon his seven years' generalship. The real control was openly entrusted to Father Palmio, the Italian assistant, until Father Manares ousted him, and secured the chief place and the hope of succession. There was, at this, some unedifying language; we shall see presently that Manares, at least, undoubtedly sought the generalship. But the various provinces were now under the command of such able men that the progress of the Society was not retarded. Let us glance at the more significant happenings in the provinces, and then sum up the work of the Society in its first four decades.

In the case of Spain we need note only that the Pope's interference in the election was bitterly resented, and a feeling spread among the fathers which we shall find breaking into the most singular expression under the rule of Acquaviva. In spite of the stern design of Ignatius and the emphatic rule of the Society that the Jesuit was to benumb every patriotic fibre in his heart, and know himself only as a citizen of the city of God, the Spaniards cherished their national pride in an alarming degree. Under the ambitious and masterful Philip II., who dreamed of world-empire and was willing to include the Jesuits in his diplomatic corps, they prospered and were the most important body in the Society. They were annoyed that the generalship passed out of their hands, and they began to meditate secession from the Roman authorities. When the papal Nuncio died at Madrid in 1577 a memoir written in this sense was found amongst his papers. We shall see later how the feeling developed, and how the war with Rome brought into notice the degenerate character of the Spanish province.

Italian affairs in that decade are chiefly remarkable for a violent quarrel with St. Charles Borromeo at Milan. He had continued for some years to patronise and employ them. Father Adorno remained his confessor; and in 1572 he gave them the Abbey of Braida for a college, and in 1573 entrusted to them the College of Nobles at Milan. They were already in charge of the seminary of the diocese, and the trouble seems to have begun with the transfer of this institution to the Oblates (a religious body founded by Charles) in 1577. Crétineau-Joly explains that the Jesuits were now controlling so many institutions in Milan that they were overworked, and they begged to be relieved of the seminary. He appeals to Giussano, the saint's biographer; but Giussano merely says that Charles "gave the seminary to the Oblates, with the consent of the Jesuits," which is a polite way of saying that they were dismissed. We shall see, in fact, that Charles was convinced that the Jesuits were in a lax and degenerate condition.

In the following year, 1578, the cardinal quarrelled with the Governor of Milan, and the Jesuits divided in allegiance. Adorno and a few others were faithful to Charles, but a courtly and fashionable Jesuit preacher, who was appointed to preach the Lent, attacked and ridiculed the cardinal-archbishop from one of the chief pulpits of his own city, before a crowded audience of wealthy Milanese. This preacher, Mazzarino, uncle of the famous minister, was the confessor and friend of the governor. Charles protested against the unseemly attack, but the Jesuit provincial appointed Mazzarino again to preach the Lent in 1579, and he attacked Charles more virulently than ever. All the less austere ladies of Milan, for whom he made smooth the paths of rectitude, flocked to his chapel, and listened with pleasure to his ridicule of the ascetic prescriptions of their saintly archbishop. Charles drew the attention of the Provincial to the fact that Mazzarino was preaching moral principles of scandalous laxity, and his attacks on the chief clerical authority were very injurious. The Provincial would not chide Mazzarino, and Charles appealed to the General. The only reply of the General was, at the request of a certain countess, to direct Mazzarino to preach all the year round. Charles threatened to suspend the preacher, and he was defied from the pulpit; he threatened to bring his principles to the notice of the Inquisition, and the Jesuits sent a courier to Rome to defend their preacher. Then Charles instructed his Roman agent, Spetiano, to lay the case before the papal court, and Mazzarino was recalled by his General and suspended from preaching for two years by an ecclesiastical tribunal.

This quarrel is of interest for two reasons. In the first place, it illustrates the value of Crétineau-Joly's history of the Jesuits. The French writer ignores the attack in 1577, and says that, as soon as Mazzarino began to misbehave, "the Milan fathers hastened to disapprove of the imprudent orator," and the General recalled him. It is, of course, true that Charles's confessor, Adorno, "disapproved" of his brother Jesuit, but the Mazzarino faction retorted that he was jealous, because Mazzarino had larger audiences for his sermons; and Crétineau-Joly suppresses the fact that the Provincial, and for a time the General, defiantly supported Mazzarino. We know this from Borromeo's letters to his agent. [7] The further interest of the quarrel, which is entirely suppressed by the French historian, is that in these letters Charles passes very severe strictures on the Jesuits as a body. Instead of finding fault with one man only, Mazzarino, he found fault with all except one, his confessor, to whom he remained attached. "I confess," he writes to Spetiano, "that for some time I have felt the Society to be in grave danger of decadence unless a prompt remedy be applied." The Jesuits, he explains, admit clever youths without regard to their character, and they grant extravagant liberties to their literary colleagues. They are inflated by the favour of the nobility and the crowds of wealthy women who flock to lax moralists like Mazzarino. We may also recall here the grave statement of Charles's nephew and successor, Archbishop Frederic Borromeo, who was educated by the Jesuits: a statement repeated, in the most solemn terms, by a writer to whom he made it.

I have enlarged on this quarrel because we have here the rare advantage of an impartial and unimpeachable witness, and we see how serious a ground there is at times, when independent evidence can be found, for reading Jesuit and pro-Jesuit writers with caution. We must not, however, pass to the opposite extreme and conclude that the Italian Jesuits generally were the favourites of ladies who appreciated indulgence in their confessors and preachers. This is the only serious scandal of the Italian province under Mercurian.

In France, as in Spain, the story is one of preparation for the stirring events of the next chapter. The hostile Archbishop of Paris died, and Pierre de Gondi, who succeeded him, was an Italian of the Medici suite, and favourable to the Jesuits. Charles IX. gave place to Henry II., and the new king chose Auger for his confessor, and gave the Jesuits everything they cared to ask. There was now no question of suppressing their name and privileges in France. A third powerful patron was the Cardinal de Bourbon, who obtained for them a "house of the professed" at Paris, and tried to force the university to incorporate their college. The Parlement and University still made every effort to check their triumphant advance, but they now began to send pupils of their own to graduate in the university and weaken its opposition. Their college in Lorraine was erected into a university, and royal pupils sat at their feet. When the famous Catholic League was formed they flung themselves into its work with great ardour, and we shall see the terrible issue in the next chapter.

Two incidents in the permanent quarrel with the Paris University should be noticed. One of the Jesuits, Maldonat, shocked the professors of the Sorbonne by teaching that the immaculate conception of Mary was a matter of free opinion, [8] and Rome upheld the Jesuit. More interesting is a memoir which the doctors of the Sorbonne submitted to the papal court when, in 1575, Cardinal de Bourbon was trying to secure the incorporation of the Jesuit college. Amongst heavy charges of avarice and of seizing the property of other religious bodies, we find the quaint accusation that the Jesuits taught that souls were delivered from purgatory after ten years of suffering. The point seems academic to the layman, and very consoling to the faithful. What it really meant, in practice, was that the Jesuits claimed that they might, after ten years, divert to other purposes the large funds bequeathed to them to say masses for the dead.

In Belgium the record was still one of trouble and vicissitude. They had, when Alva had "pacified" the province, opened a number of houses, which the townsfolk (as at Antwerp and Liège) threatened to burn. Then, when Don John, Philip's half-brother, was defeated in 1578, the Jesuits refused to take the oath imposed by the States and were expelled from Antwerp and other centres. They began to recover to some extent under the Duke of Parma, but had to witness the secession of the northern provinces and the formation of a new Protestant power, Holland, which was destined to give them trouble. At Louvain they maintained a struggle with the university similar to that at Paris. They at last tripped up the celebrated Michel de Bay (Baius), rector of the university, and sent their brilliant young theologian, Bellarmine, who was then only thirty years old, to enter into a prolonged duel with him. When, at last, they induced Rome to take a serious view of the errors of Baius, and Father Toledo was sent by the Pope to secure his submission, they began to rise from the lowly position in which the university had kept them.

The Catholics of Austria and Southern Germany continued to oppose and intimidate them in spite of the devoted exertions of Canisius. They were fiercely assailed at Gratz, Prague, Innsprück, and Vienna. The Emperor Maximilian was even induced to forbid their Vienna college to grant degrees or compete in lectures with the university, though the Jesuits soon got the restriction removed. It appears that they announced lectures on the same subjects and at the same hours as those of the university, and, as always, charged no fees. This was one of the chief grievances of the universities, especially as the Jesuits palpably trusted to obtain control of the universities themselves. Another grievance, which we have noticed in the Parisian indictment, is that they somehow acquired the property of older religious orders. One of many instances of this occurs in the present period. They opened a college at Freiburg, and were invited to work in the Swiss cantons. For the beginning of their mission the Pope assigned them the revenues of the abbey of Marsens, and Canisius soon had a centre for attacking Calvinism in Switzerland. The Polish colleges continued to flourish, as we shall presently realise, under King Stephen Bathori.

The most interesting adventure under the rule of Mercurian is the attempt to penetrate Sweden. The principles of the Reformation had been cordially received in Sweden, and it seemed to King John III. that peace could be secured only by some kind of compromise between the old faith and the new. John was, however, married to the sister of the Queen of Poland, and the Jesuits, who were sternly forbidden to enter the kingdom, saw in this a means of outwitting the vigilant Protestants. The combination of women and Jesuits was the supreme agency in checking the progress of the Reformation in Europe.

In 1574 an envoy came to Stockholm to convey the compliments of Anne of Poland to her sister Catherine. One could not close the gates against an envoy, though it was known that the fine clothes of the ambassador were a thin disguise of the Polish Jesuit Father Warsevicz, and the secret instructions of the envoy were to correct the liberalism of John and offer him an alliance with Spain. John knew theology and wrangled with the envoy for a week in the palace. The mission was fruitless, and in 1576 John was persuaded to countenance an even more romantic adventure. A young Norwegian presented himself to the Protestant clergy of Stockholm, and said that, having spent some years at southern universities, he would like a place as professor in the new college they were forming. He begged that they would recommend him to the king, and they did, so that he secured the appointment. It was the Jesuit Father Nicolai, who had, as John knew, been sent from Rome with instructions to perpetrate this amazing fraud. Nicolai must certainly have lied to the Protestant authorities about his beliefs, in order to obtain a place as teacher of theology in a Protestant college. When we reflect that he acted on instructions from Rome, and that no Jesuit or pro-Jesuit writer seems to see anything reprehensible in his conduct, we feel that Jesuit diplomacy had already reached a stage which it would be impolite to characterise in plain English.

Nicolai seems to have held his chair of Lutheran theology for a considerable time. There were those who scented heresy in his lectures, but they were promptly expelled, and Nicolai even became rector of the college. One would give much to have to-day a copy of the Lutheran-Jesuit's lectures. The masterful Possevin was next dispatched, in the quality of Legate, with the Irish Jesuit, William Good, for companion. He was to prevent a union of Sweden and Holland, and to correct the king's errors. Possevin went first to Prague, where he induced the widow of Maximilian to name him her ambassador to Sweden, and then, dressed for the part, with a sword dangling at his side, he boldly entered Stockholm, where Professor Nicolai was still teaching Lutheran theology in his subtle way. The counter-Reformation had different methods from those of Luther. John was willing to return to the faith and enter the Spanish alliance, if Rome would grant the marriage of priests, the mass in Swedish, and other claims of the Reformers. Possevin hastened to Rome, leaving his sword by the way, and stormily pressed the commission of cardinals to grant these concessions. It is (apart from certain remarkable indulgences later on the foreign missions) the only occasion on which a Jesuit pleaded for compromise, but Possevin was ambitious. Failing to obtain the concessions, Possevin hurried to the Duke of Bavaria, the Emperor, and the King of Poland, in order that he might at least be able to offer to John the material alliances he had promised him, if he would break with England and Holland. But he had little to offer, and the Protestants were now alarmed; and Possevin, Good, Warsevicz, and Professor Nicolai were politely ushered from the country.

Of the foreign missions which will enrage us more fully when the Jesuits are firmly established, a few words must suffice. In India the use of the civil power to support their preaching continued to augment the number, and restrain the quality, of the converts. The Japanese mission made slow progress, and was extinguished in some of the large towns. The gates of China were politely opened to admit a Portuguese legation (containing disguised Jesuits), but, after an interview at Canton, politely closed again by the wary mandarins. The settlement in Brazil was deeply injured by the diseases which European Christians brought to South America, terrifying the natives; and a serious loss was sustained in 1570, when a ship conveying forty Jesuits to Brazil was captured by "Huguenot pirates." They were all slain. Florida, Mexico, and Peru were visited for the first time in this decade, and a few fathers laid the foundations of new missions. On the whole, the missionary record under Borgia and Mercurian does not fulfil the earlier promise.

Mercurian died in the summer of 1580, just forty years after the establishment of the Society. Assuredly a remarkable advance had been made in those four decades. The ten Jesuits had become a formidable army of 5000 socii (including novices and lay-brothers), fighting heresy in the boudoirs of queens and the market-places of Germany, educating hundreds of thousands of youths, all over Europe, in a fanatical zeal for the papacy, extending its influence through the laity by means of sodalities and confraternities, pouring out a vast literature, from the blistering pamphlet to the ponderous folio volume, relating to the great religious controversy, wearing the garb of the beggar or the silk of the noble as occasion needed, speaking a hundred tongues, and sending scores of men yearly to lands whence they would never return and where fever or the axe awaited them. They were the backbone of the counter-Reformation, formidable alike by the simple and austere devotion of some, the brilliance and learning of others, and the unscrupulousness of yet others in the service of the Church. And every man, and every movement of every man, was registered in that central bureau at Rome, where four sagacious heads directed the strategy and tactics of this planet-scattered regiment.

Our survey of the growth and evolutions of this spiritual army warns us to avoid generalisations. It is not true that from the start the Jesuits were avaricious, ambitious, and unscrupulous: it is not true that they maintained their spirit untainted for half a century, and then degenerated. No epithet will apply to them as a body, except that they differed, corporately, from all other religious bodies in the diplomatic nature of their action. Every variety of man was found in their ranks: the austere flagellant and the genial courtier, the man who served the poor because they were poor, and the man who served them in order to edify the rich; the man who flung himself with a smile into the arms of death, and the man who loved disguises and the adventurous evasion of death, the saint and the sinner, the peasant, the noble, and the scholar. No uniform stamp effaced their individual characters. The weak or sensual or casuistic degenerated in the first decade: the strong maintained their idealism to the last. But that original tendency to consecrate worldly devices to a high end, to regard the effectiveness rather than the intrinsic propriety of means, to seek wealth and power because they procured speedier success, was running its inevitable course, and from the recommendation of lying in the cause of Christ we shall soon see some of them go on to the condonation of vice and the counsel of crime.

FOOTNOTES:

[ [4] I have previously explained the distinction between simple and solemn vows, and the advantage which the Jesuits had in confining the latter to a chosen few of their body. See p. 30. These "simple" vows are now admitted in other orders, but they were for centuries peculiar to the Jesuits, and were very distasteful to the older orders.

[ [5] It will appear later that Manares was a man of robust conscience, and later incurred the censure of his brethren for improper conduct.

[ [6] I may draw attention to a curious illustration of the difficulty of reaching a verdict on the St. Bartholomew massacre. In the same volume of the Cambridge Modern History we are told (p. 20) that "Gregory XIII. is said to have expressed dismay," and (p. 285) that he heard the news with "triumphant acclamation." There is surely no serious doubt that the second statement is correct.

[ [7] See a selection in the Annales de la Société des soi-disans Jésuites (1764), vol. i. pp. 132-159.

[ [8] It did not become a dogma of the Church until 1854.

[CHAPTER V]

PROGRESS AND DECAY UNDER ACQUAVIVA

The older of the fathers who obeyed the summons to a new election, and converged upon the Eternal City, must have wondered whether it would pass without a fresh exhibition of the very human passions which the occasion so frequently revealed amongst them. Father Oliver Manares had been appointed Vicar-General, and had announced the election for the spring of 1581. We remember Manares as the fortunate discoverer of Huguenot plots at Paris, and then as successfully ousting Father Palmio from the position of chief assistant to Mercurian. He had made his way to the steps of the throne, and the more religious brethren were now startled to find him shamelessly canvassing for votes, in spite of the stern prohibition in their Constitutions. Four of the older fathers were at once appointed to investigate the charge against him. Bobadilla, impetuous and masterful still in his old age, was one of the four, but he expressed his resentment of the charge against his friend so strongly before the inquiry opened that they had, with great difficulty, to remove him from the commission; and, when the commissioners found Manares guilty, he made very sore trouble in the house. In the end Manares was persuaded to forego his right of nomination, and Father Acquaviva was elected.

Claude Acquaviva was one of the youngest of the electors. Though strenuous work had already begun to whiten his dark southern hair, he was only thirty-seven years old; but he was distinguished for his high birth, his great ability, his integrity, and a happy combination of resolution and cold equanimity that recalled Lainez. He was a son of the Neapolitan Duke of Atri, and was destined to rule the Society during thirty-four years of that dangerous period when its desire for wealth and power, in the service of God, led it into the dark ways of political intrigue and the accumulation of earthly treasure. We shall now find the seeds of decay spreading over larger areas and germinating rapidly. We shall witness a singular eruption of the worldly spirit in the Spanish peninsula, and the development of the political Jesuit as he is known in the history of England, which I reserve for a special chapter, and of France.

The first few years of the generalship of Acquaviva were peaceful. A friendly Pope, Gregory XIII., occupied the Roman see, and the Society increased in numbers and prestige. The Gesù, the famous metropolitan church of the Jesuits, was opened by the Pope in 1583; the Gregorian calendar was very largely framed by one of their members, the learned Clavius of Bavaria. But Gregory died in 1585, and Acquaviva prepared for a struggle with the papacy. The stern, despotic Sixtus V. had now received the tiara, and all Rome expected him to clip the wings of the soaring Society. Acquaviva thought it would be prudent to disarm the Pope and disavow the thirst for power. He offered to resign control of the Roman seminary. Sixtus refused the offer, and awaited his opportunity; and in the following year, 1586, the flash and roar of the gathering clouds in Spain led him to intervene.

The Spanish fathers had, as I said, looked upon the generalship almost as an hereditary right, and had resented the election of Mercurian and Acquaviva. But this feeling is so wholly opposed to the religious ideal of the Society that we at once suspect a serious decay of the character of the Spanish Jesuits, and we find some remarkable evidence of it. The official history of the Society in Spain does not attempt to conceal that under Borgia and Mercurian there had been widespread decadence, [9] and I have shown how this was due to material prosperity and the lack of serious work and heretical neighbours. We have, however, a more singular and ample account of this decadence. One of the most brilliant of the Spanish Jesuits, Mariana, the famous advocate of regicide, was moved to discredit the Roman authorities by showing the corruption into which they had allowed his own province to fall, and his Tratado del Govierno de la Compañia de Jesus gives us a very candid picture of the Spanish houses. The work was, naturally, not published by Mariana. Like so many documents in the Society, it was intended for private circulation in manuscript, but it was found amongst his papers by a bishop whom the king appointed to examine them, and the only ground for the claim of certain Jesuits that it is partly spurious is that they dislike its revelations. The decrees of the Society itself confirm the substance of its charges, and the temper and spirit of the book are quite in keeping with its Jesuit authorship.

It complains, chiefly, of the low state of culture and the great comfort of life among the Spanish fathers. Of the 540 Jesuits in Spain 230 are lay-brothers: a circumstance that must be borne in mind when we read that there are so many thousand members of the Society. The lay-brother is merely a servant of the priests, and the enormous proportion of these lay-brothers in Spain means that the fathers own large farms and vineyards, sell the produce in the markets (as we learn from the decrees of the Society), and live cheerfully on the income. Mariana does not speak openly of vice—a sufficient proof that the book was not written, even in part, by an anti-Jesuit—but he says that the "enjoyments" of his colleagues are "excessive and scandalous." They further add materially to their incomes by managing the affairs of their penitents; in Valladolid alone there are twelve of these steward chaplains. They dress in expensive cloth, travel in carriages or on mules, and overrun their ample incomes. The whole province is loaded with debt, yet at Mariana's own house at Toledo the expenditure per head is about £50 a year: a very comfortable sum for the time and place, for a community pledged to poverty. Discipline is thwarted by favouritism and flattery, and the constant spying and reporting cause bitter quarrels in the houses.

This grave account of the Spanish province—sober and convincing, yet grave in contrast with the primitive life and the high profession—is written solely for the purpose of showing that a distant authority cannot maintain discipline, and the Spanish Jesuits must have local autonomy and less despotic rulers—home-rule and democracy, in a word. This is the note of the remarkable struggle which now opens between the Spaniards and the Italians. Acquaviva wanted to maintain the stern Ignatian ideal of destroying nationality, and to keep Jesuits as much as possible away from their native countries; but he made the mistake of removing old and long-settled fathers and substituting for them young men who shared his own ideas, and, in spite of his ideal, he favoured the Italians.

In 1586 one of the chief Spanish malcontents, Father Hernandez, applied to Acquaviva for permission to quit the Society. When Acquaviva refused, Hernandez gave notice to the Inquisition that the General would not let him leave the Society lest he should betray a certain secret which the Jesuits were hiding from the Inquisitors. We have seen how little the Inquisitors and leading prelates of Spain loved the Jesuits. They at once forced Hernandez to tell the secret. One of the Jesuits, it seems, had seduced a lady-penitent—a crime from which only the Inquisition could absolve—yet the Provincial Marcenius had absolved him and transferred him to another town. A great sensation was caused when the Inquisitors at once put the Provincial, the Rector of Salamanca, and two other Jesuits, in their prison, and demanded copies of the Constitutions, Privileges, and other documents of the Society. To the delight of Spain and the dismay of Acquaviva, they were going to make a general inquiry into the character and life of this semi-secret Society.

Acquaviva adroitly suggested to the Pope that this was one of those occasions, which he loved, of asserting his supreme authority, and set Sixtus and the Spaniards at loggerheads. The Pope instructed his Nuncio at Madrid to intervene, and Acquaviva sent a Jesuit to win Philip II. Philip, however, was quite willing to see the Society reformed, and the Inquisitors went on to arrest other Jesuits and demand further documents. The insurgent Spaniards were now openly demanding that they should have a local commissary, independent of Acquaviva, and the General was, as quickly as possible, removing fathers from Spain and filling their places with foreigners. The Inquisition decreed that no Jesuit was to leave Spain. Nothing so fiercely awakened the energy of Sixtus V. as a quarrel with local prelates, and he now angrily threatened to depose the cardinal at the head of the Inquisition if the whole case were not at once remitted to him. So the Jesuits were released and the documents sent to Rome, in 1588. We, of course, hear no more of the wicked confessor from that time, but Acquaviva had not counted on this scrutiny of the documents of the Society by the keen eye of Sixtus V., and he dreaded the outcome. "Company of Jesus!" Sixtus used to mutter, as he meditatively stroked his long white beard; "Who are these men whom we must not name without bowing our heads?" [10] He at once issued two preliminary decrees. The first forbade the Jesuits to receive illegitimate sons; their own rule forbade this, and the decree only confirms the charge that the Jesuits looked mainly to wealth or ability in admitting novices. The second decree reserved to the general or to a provincial congregation the right to admit novices. Acquaviva opposed this, and it was modified—and would die at the death of Sixtus V.

Meanwhile the struggle was renewed in Spain. One of the French Jesuits whom Acquaviva had put in place of a rebel proved worse than his predecessor. He asked the opinion of the Inquisition on a letter written by Ignatius himself on obedience, and it was promptly condemned. Acquaviva again had the case transferred and re-tried at Rome, and, although Sixtus spoke some plain unofficial language about the letter, the Roman Inquisition absolved it, and the audacious Father Vincent ended in a papal prison for going on to question the Pope's authority. At the same time an imprudent step on the part of the Society's critics united the Spanish Jesuits with their General and put an end for a time to the struggle. The King appointed a bishop to inquire into the state of all the religious orders in Spain and deal with their irregularities. Neither the local Jesuits nor the General wanted a "royal visitator" peeping into their wine-cellars, and Acquaviva again appealed to the Pope: not forgetting to remind Sixtus, who supremely abhorred clerical "bastards," that this Bishop of Carthagena fell into that category. At the same time he sent to Madrid the English Jesuit, Father Parsons, who was then, as we shall see, helping Philip to annex England to the Spanish crown. He was allowed to choose his own "visitator," and the Spanish fathers were sufficiently absorbed in this new infliction for the next year or two.

Sixtus had meantime brooded over the singular mass of Jesuit documents submitted to him, and in 1590 he intimated that he was going to make a drastic and comprehensive reform. The name of the Society must be changed; the date of taking the vows and the classification of the members of the Society must be altered; the regulations in regard to "fraternal correction" (the euphemism in the Jesuit rules for spying and tale-bearing) and obedience must be modified; and the directions which virtually compelled novices to leave their property to the Society, while nominally advising them to leave it to the poor, must be abolished. Acquaviva entered upon this desperate struggle—there never was the slightest question of Jesuits yielding to Popes on any point—with that cold and dogged resolution which alone could thwart the fiery energy of Sixtus V. At first he tried long and respectful argument with the Pope, and induced the Emperor, the King of Poland, and the Duke of Bavaria to pray that there should be no alteration in the character of the Society. Sixtus smiled grimly, and ordered Cardinal Caraffa to proceed with the revision of their Constitutions. They then fastened on the cardinal, and Sixtus was infuriated to find that Caraffa made no progress. He knew that they were hoping to see him die before he could formulate his reforms, and he entrusted the work to four theologians, whose sentiments he knew. They drew up a formidable indictment of the Constitutions, but it had to pass the Sacred College—and Acquaviva took care that it did not pass.

We need not enter into all the details of this fourth attempt in half a century to evade the most positive and sincere commands of the Pope. It was a race with death, and the most determined and unscrupulous efforts were made by the Jesuits to prevent the Pope from reaching his goal before death overtook him. Sixtus had to punish one Jesuit for making a very pointed eulogy of Cardinal Cajetan, his rival and enemy, and to arrest another for regretting in public that they had not a Gregory on the throne in such troubled times. The dying despot fiercely concentrated his sinking energy on his last task. When Bellarmine's new book De Summi Pontificis Potestate appeared, he put it on the Index, although he liked Bellarmine, and the book really magnified the papal power so much that it was afterwards condemned as seditious at Paris. As the cardinals still thwarted him, he sent a stern personal order to Acquaviva to change the name of his Society. He was not far from death, but the General was told that there could be no more shiftiness; he might, however, ask for the change instead of having it imposed on him. He signed the petition and the Pope drew up his decree. He died before he could publish it.

There is no serious ground for the faint rumour that the Jesuits poisoned Sixtus V. His death was foreseen by everybody, and the Jesuits knew from experience that his decree would die with him. But Roman gossip found the coincidence too romantic to let it pass. Acquaviva had ordered a novena (nine days of prayer) to be said for Sixtus in the Jesuit houses when his illness was announced. The bell was ringing for Vespers on the ninth day when the aged Pope passed away; and for many a year afterwards it was a grim, half-serious joke of the Romans to wonder, when they heard the Jesuit Vesper-bell, whether it rang out the life of another Pope.

After the two-week rule of Urban VII., Gregory XIV. came to the throne and restored the tranquillity of Acquaviva and his colleagues. The title of their Society was solemnly confirmed, and the subsidies of their colleges were again granted. But Gregory had a brief reign, his successor passed even more quickly from the papal throne, and at the beginning of 1592 Clement VIII. succeeded to the tiara. It was generally believed that Clement disliked Acquaviva, and the rebels in Spain returned to the attack upon him. Spain and Portugal, which were still united under the Spanish crown, were equally united in the opposition to the Roman authorities. During the years of friction with Sixtus V. the Spanish fathers Acosta and Carillo and the Portuguese fathers Goelho and Carvalho had maintained and led the agitation against Acquaviva, and it was known that they had the support of abler men like Mariana and the sympathy of the most distinguished and powerful Jesuit at Rome, Toledo, who was made a cardinal by Clement. Acquaviva had not relaxed in his measures against this powerful coalition. He won at least the silence of Toledo; he flattered and tried to disarm Acosta, who was too great a favourite of Philip to be punished; he expelled some of the less influential leaders from the Society, and brought others to Rome. Now, at the last moment, the accession of Clement seemed to have wrested the victory from his hands, and the Spaniards took courage.

Acosta rejected the General's blandishments and persuaded Philip to send him to Rome with a request that the new Pope would summon a General Congregation of the Society and remove Acquaviva from Rome during its sittings. There was at the time a quarrel between the Dukes of Parma and Mantua, and Clement gracefully deputed Acquaviva to go to the north and reconcile them. He dare not refuse the insidious appointment, but he left behind him a trusted secretary, and it was not long before he learned that Clement was about to summon a General Congregation, to which Acquaviva was strongly opposed. He reported that his mission was futile and hopeless; Clement, still gracefully, advised him to be patient, and the strong man had to remain inactive in the north while the Spaniards carried their point. He returned to find Acosta at Rome and a General Congregation—"for the purpose of strengthening the Society and reducing certain provinces to tranquillity"—announced for November. In other words, it was to be a trial of strength between Acosta and Acquaviva, between Spain and Italy, and each party prepared strenuously for the tug of war; while Rome frivolously applauded the rival children of Ignatius and the Pope smilingly blessed the arena.

Just at that time Toledo received the red hat, and the Spaniards begged the Pope to name "a cardinal" (Toledo) to preside at the Congregation. He refused; but Acquaviva was defeated in turn when he tried to expel Acosta from the professed house and have him excluded from the forthcoming Congregation. Not only Rome, but the Jesuits scattered over Europe, now joined in the feverish struggle. Memorials praying for the reform of the Society and the restriction of the General's power began to reach the Pope from provincial Jesuits; counter-memorials followed from the partisans of Acquaviva. In fine, Acquaviva triumphed, with certain concessions. The privileges of the Society which offended the Spanish Inquisition were to be abandoned in the Peninsula; and Acquaviva was to change his Assistants, and hold a Congregation, every six years (a command which, of course, "died with the Pope"). There was the customary review of the state of the Society and passing of admirable decrees, and the fathers returned to their provinces. Acquaviva then made a final and drastic clearance of the rebels, and many were expelled. They were still powerful enough to induce the Pope to nominate Acquaviva archbishop of his native city, but he eluded even this plot. They then persuaded the Pope that it was expedient for Acquaviva to visit Spain and see the province with his own eyes. The General clearly believed, and it is probable enough, that something like incarceration awaited him in Spain, and he made a desperate struggle to evade the Pope's order. He was saved by the death of the Pope, in 1605, and for several years afterwards we still find him struggling with the rebellious Spaniards.

This remarkable conflict, within the Society and with the Pope, which I take chiefly from the Jesuit Jouvency, the continuer of the official "Historia Societatis," well illustrates how dim the apostolic fire had become in one of the largest provinces of the Society; how its flame was choked and corrupted by material prosperity. When we turn to France and to England we have an equally valuable illustration of the way in which the command to seek power, for the glory of God, evolves what is known as the political Jesuit. There is no intrinsic reason that I can see why a priest should not seek political influence on behalf of religious interests. Assuredly in the sixteenth century there was no clean division of the religious and political spheres. But the complaint against the Jesuits is that their authorities ostentatiously forbid political action, yet permit and encourage their subjects secretly to pursue it, and even in ways that are unworthy of religious ideals; that, in short, the Jesuit approaches the field under the white flag of political neutrality, employs weapons which are condemned in civilised warfare, and then denies that he interfered. In reviewing forty years of their life in France we have an excellent opportunity of examining this charge.

When we last turned away from France, the Catholic League was just beginning to arouse passion in the country and the Jesuits were taking an active part in its work. The historical situation may be recalled in a few words. The children of that abominable type of feminine politician, Catherine de Medici, were perishing ingloriously. Henry III. still feebly occupied the throne, but it was a question how long he would, under the guidance of his Jesuit confessor Auger, continue to entertain Paris with his alternating fits of debauch and melodramatic penitence; and the legitimate heir to the throne was Henry of Navarre, a Protestant. The Catholics were naturally alarmed and formed the League to "protect their interests"; its specific aim was, as every man in France knew, to secure the throne for the Catholic Henry of Guise.

Here was a situation entirely to the taste of the more ardent and adventurous of the Jesuits, and (apart from the inevitable few who favoured Philip of Spain) they marched valiantly under the banners of the League, and fluttered about the Catholic courts of Europe in the interest of Guise. The Provincial, Claude Matthieu, earned the name of the "Courier of the League" from his many journeys in support of it. Father Henri Sammier traversed Italy and Spain, and penetrated Germany and England, to further its aim. He had a large wardrobe of disguises, which he wore with the grace of an actor, and he is said by the contemporary lawyer Pasquier to have been as familiar with dice and cards as with his breviary. Edmund Hay, the Scottish Jesuit and tender champion of Mary Stuart, lent his fervent aid to the cause. Father Auger, however, was not an ardent Leaguer, and he made an effort to silence his younger colleagues. He had persuaded Henry III. to join the League, lest the League should not be inclined to wait for the young king's natural death, but he rightly distrusted Guise. It must not be supposed that he cherished a more austere standard of Jesuit duty than the others, since his royal penitent was notorious for his licentious conduct, his morbid love of jewels and of feminine clothes, and the utter degradation of his real gifts. The fact is that he saw political rivals in Matthieu and Sammier, with their zeal for Guise, and Parsons and others, with their attachment to Philip of Spain. He complained to Acquaviva, and the General, feeling that such political work should not be done openly but through laymen controlled by the Jesuits, supported him. After a prolonged struggle Acquaviva deposed Matthieu and removed him to Italy, transferred the gifted Sammier and his wardrobe to Belgium, and then turned on Auger himself. After another severe struggle he dislodged Auger from the court. Jesuits are sometimes very lively "corpses" when their superiors wish to move them.

This, however, was in the main a personal quarrel. Odon Pigenat, the new Provincial, and a score of other fathers were ardent Leaguers. The Jesuit house at Paris was still used for the secret meetings of the League, and the "Committee of Catholic Safety" was inspired by Pigenat. The French apologist does not question their enthusiastic share in the League's work, and no one questions that the aim of the League was to prevent the accession of the legitimate heir to the throne. Indeed, at the next dramatic turn of French affairs all this was made plain to everybody.

In 1588 Guise was invited to Paris and acclaimed there with such wild rejoicing that Henry III. fled to Blois, and shortly afterwards Guise and his cardinal-brother were invited to Blois and foully murdered there by Henry. The League now shook its banners in the breeze, and Henry was execrated from a hundred pulpits. When he went on to defy the Pope and form an alliance with Henry of Navarre, who advanced rapidly on Paris, Catholic feeling rose to a fanatical pitch, and Henry III. in turn was assassinated by the Dominican monk Jacques Clément. The Jesuits were assuredly not the only preachers to applaud this murder, but they were amongst the first to perceive, and the loudest to declare, that if a king may be dispatched by private hand for a crime, he may certainly be removed when he meditates the far graver misdeed of plunging a nation into heresy. Father Commolet, the superior of the Jesuit house at Paris and a distinguished preacher, called from his pulpit for "a second Ehud" to remove Henry of Navarre. Father Mariana, who shortly afterwards wrote his famous De Rege, hailed the assassin as "the eternal glory of France" and spoke of this "memorable spectacle, calculated to teach princes that godless enterprises do not go unpunished."

It has been said on behalf of the Jesuits that even their old enemy the Sorbonne joined in the general rejoicing over the assassination of Henry III., but those who make the point forget or ignore that for several years past the Jesuits had been sending pupils to the university in order gradually to permeate its faculties. It was no longer the distinct anti-Jesuit body which we have met in earlier years. Nor is there any need to discuss the abstract question whether the Jesuits taught tyrannicide. Crétineau-Joly himself quotes fourteen Jesuit theologians of the time who permitted the assassination of kings, to say nothing of more or less obscure writers, and we may be sure that the politicians of the Society were not more scrupulous than their theologians on the point. The well-known work of Mariana to which I have referred, De Rege et Regis Institutione (1599), was authorised for publication by the Jesuit authorities, and it was not until the assassination of Henry IV. in 1610 that Acquaviva, anxious to save the French Jesuits from expulsion, forbade his subjects to teach the dangerous doctrine. Even then he wrote at first to the French Jesuits alone, and it was only when the cry of indignation was echoed in other countries that he made the order general. In fine, his general order was so ambiguous that even a less supple politician than a Jesuit could find his way through it. It condemned the doctrine that "any person, on any pretext whatever, may kill kings and princes"; which leaves it open to the casuist to conclude that certain persons may do it for certain reasons.[11]

Henry of Navarre invested Paris, and it is not questioned that the Jesuits were amongst the most ardent advocates of resistance to him. In the later trial before Parlement, which we shall consider, they admitted that the crown-jewels were deposited in their house during the siege, and that the chiefs of the League met there. A curious incident of the siege is worth quoting. Food became painfully scarce, and half-famished citizens struggled over the possession of cats and rats, but the inmates of the religious houses remained sleek and comfortable. The civic authorities ordered an inspection of their houses, and it is admitted by their apologist that the Jesuits tried to obtain exemption from this search. When the authorities insisted, a rich store of food was found in their house. Their fervour in the popular cause, however, was enough to outweigh this unpleasant discovery, and they continued to thunder against the heretic. The Duke of Mayenne was now the Catholic candidate for the throne, though a considerable number of the Jesuits now looked to Philip of Spain. He was to be, as in England, the "protector of the faith"—until it was safe for him to annex the country to his swollen dominions. Sixtus V., however, by no means shared this Jesuit and Spanish ideal of making Philip the head of a vast world-power, and he began to negotiate with Henry, whose forces were gaining ground. Then Sixtus died, and the accession of a pro-Spanish Pope gave fresh energy to the League. But Paris was weary of the siege, and, when Henry prudently announced that he was about to make a serious study of the evidences for the Catholic faith, the opposition collapsed. The Jesuits were amongst the last in Paris to fan the dying embers of the League, and when at length, in March 1594, Henry entered Paris and received the crown, they (with the Capuchins and Carthusians) refused to submit until the Pope had absolved him.

But they very soon parted company with the less nimble-witted Capuchins and the cloistered Carthusians, and the next page of their story in France is not without humour. Henry's politic scrutiny of the Catholic creed had, of course, led to his "conversion," but the Pope had a sufficient decency of feeling to distrust so opportune and profitable a change of creed, and he coldly rebuffed the genial monarch. When Henry sent the Duke de Nevers to Rome to plead his cause with the Pope, Clement ordered the Jesuit Possevin to intercept him in Italy and say that the Pope refused to see him. We remember Possevin as the ingenious and accommodating Legate to the Swedes, and we shall see other proofs of his diplomatic ability. With an audacity which must almost be without parallel in the chronicle of papal diplomacy he did the exact opposite of what the Pope had commanded; he encouraged de Nevers to see the Pope, and then fled before the stormy anger of Clement and the Spaniards. It was the first service rendered to Henry by a Jesuit, and was quickly followed by other useful services. They had perceived the strength of Henry and reversed their policy. The Jesuit-Cardinal Toledo, although a Spaniard, intervened in Henry's favour, and the head of the Jesuit house at Paris, Commolet—the preacher who had urged the assassination of Henry—came to Rome to say that he and his colleagues were now convinced of the King's sincerity and begged the Pope to yield.

This change of front was opportune. Although the hostility of the university to the Jesuits had been enfeebled by the penetration of Jesuit pupils into the theological faculty, it still, as a body, hated the Society, and its leaders felt that they might take some advantage of the stubborn resistance to Henry. In April the university begged the Parlement to expel the Jesuits from the kingdom. Another great debate, in which the anti-Jesuit lawyers of Paris battered the Society and flung at it all the charges that could be found in Europe, entertained the sympathetic citizens. Arnauld, who was now in the field, estimated the total yearly income of the Jesuits at more than two million livres; he said that in France alone they had, in a few years, secured an income of two hundred thousand livres a year, and he eloquently denounced their interference in politics. The Jesuits made the remarkable defence that they had only mingled in the League in order to moderate its ardour, that they had no unpatriotic attachment to Spain, and that they would scrupulously avoid politics for the future. Henry permitted them to remain. A short time before (August 1593) Barrière had attempted to assassinate him, and, as Barrière had had a Jesuit confessor, it was suggested that the Jesuits had inspired him. Henry said that, on the contrary, it was the Jesuits who had warned him of the plot. A fuller knowledge of this warning would be extremely interesting, but we have no evidence of it beyond Henry's blunt declaration at a later date. The Jesuits were to remain, to avoid politics, and, as Henry had previously decreed, to destroy all literature concerning the League and the past turbulence.

On 27th December of that year, 1594, Jean Chastel attempted to assassinate Henry, and a furious storm burst upon the Jesuits. Two undisputed facts stand out clearly from the prolonged controversy that followed this attempt; Chastel had been educated at the Jesuit college before going to the university (he was nineteen years old), and he had conferred with his former professor, Father Guéret, a few days before the attempt. This is by no means satisfactory evidence of the complicity of the Jesuits, but another piece of evidence, of a very inflammatory nature, was put before the court. The authorities had raided the Jesuit college and found in the rector's room a quantity of the League literature which Henry had rigorously commanded to be destroyed. In particular, there were papers in the writing of the rector, Father Guignard, which cast the most violent abuse on Henry and demanded his death. They had been written five years before, but the retention of them was considered a very serious sign of the hidden feeling of the Jesuits. We may admit that the court still went beyond the evidence in condemning the Jesuits. Guignard was executed, Guéret tortured, and all members of the Society were ordered to quit France within three days. On 8th January thirty-seven Jesuits set out sadly for Lorraine, and from the proceeds of their confiscated property a large stone pyramid, bearing the sentence against the "pernicious sect," was erected at Paris.

This sudden fall from their proud position was the price of political action, but Henry was not in a position, and indeed not of a character, to sustain the sentence, and the Jesuits at once began to struggle for recall. Within ten years the hated pyramid was demolished, and the Jesuits had regained their prestige. They had never entirely quitted France. Some put off their cassocks and became, in appearance, "lay" teachers of the young; some were sheltered by the local Parlements. The formal reconciliation of Henry with the Papacy followed, and the Pope urged him to recall the Jesuits. He pleaded again when he had negotiated for Henry a peace with Philip of Spain, but the Parlement stoutly maintained its decree, and Henry advised them to wait. Then the Pope obliged Henry by annulling his marriage, and the watchful Acquaviva stood again in the shadow of the papal throne. Father Maggio was sent, in the suite of the Archbishop of Arles, to win the King. They knew Henry, and shrewdly chose an envoy who could adopt the broad wit which Henry loved as easily as Possevin or Parsons could wear a sword, or Ricci a pigtail. "Sire," said Maggio to the bluff King, when the affair dragged, "you are slower than women, for they bear their fruit only nine months." "Quite true, Father Maggio," said Henry, "but kings are not delivered as easily as women." It was the way to win Henry IV., and he was won, but public feeling was still too hostile to the Jesuits. In 1603 their opportunity came. The Huguenots had been so imprudent as to abuse the Pope, and the Jesuits must be restored for the Pope's consolation; also, there was a new queen, Marie de Medici, and an amiable Father Coton winning influence over her. And at the beginning of 1604 the Parlement sullenly registered the decree for the readmission of the Jesuits, and the fathers all swore a sonorous oath of loyalty to the King "without mental reservation," as the decree ran; no other body of men ever needed to be insulted with such a clause.

The remaining years, down to the assassination of Henry in 1610, mark the rapid recovery of the Society. Father Coton was royal preacher and confessor, and obtained such influence that, when the King was deaf to their prayers or protests, men said that Henry "had cotton in his ears"; and the fusillade of pamphlets and counter-pamphlets—witty, fierce, and gross on both sides—again enlivened Paris. They raised more houses than they had ever had before, and got admission into Protestant Béarn and the Canadian mission. There was hardly a more generous benefactor to the Society in Europe than Henry, though we may take the word of Richelieu that he distrusted them, as a body, and acted from policy. At length Henry betrayed the real shallowness of their influence on him, and began to prepare for war with Spain; and on 14th May 1610 he fell by the hand of a Catholic fanatic.

The question whether the Jesuits were implicated in the crime of Ravaillac is one of the hundred almost insoluble problems of their history. On this occasion, indeed, it is exceptionally difficult to reach a confident verdict, because an entirely pro-Spanish and pro-Jesuit régime was set up by the death of Henry, and inconvenient testimony could easily be suppressed. It seems to me that a consideration of great importance is generally overlooked in the discussion of these problems. When the evidence is scanty or obscure, we give the Jesuits "the benefit of the doubt," as if we were arraigning them for something they regarded as a crime. This is a false attitude, of which they take full advantage. Crétineau-Joly quotes a dozen distinguished theologians of the time who taught that it was just and proper to remove a monarch whose rule was gravely injurious, and hardly a single eminent theologian who taught the contrary. We have merely to suppose that the Jesuit fathers were divided in anything like the same proportion, and we see at once that there must have been—and we know that there were—numbers of Jesuits in every province who would regard the assassination of a king who threatened the faith in his country as a quite moral and meritorious deed. Mariana's claim that Jacques Clément, the murderer of Henry III., was "the eternal glory of France" was echoed by thousands of his colleagues. It seems to me very material to bear this in mind in all these cases of assassination. The attitude of their apologists is singular: they admit that the Jesuits as a body regarded the assassination of kings who menaced the faith as a just and proper action, yet are remarkably eager to prove that the Jesuits never acted on their belief. On Jesuit principles the murder of Henry IV. was not a crime.

We must, on the other hand, say that the evidence of Jesuit complicity with Ravaillac is unsatisfactory, in spite of Michelet's spirited reliance on it. A certain Mme d'Escoman asserted that she overheard the Duke d'Épernon telling the plot to Henry's former lover, the Marquise de Verneuil, and that she revealed it to the Jesuit superior in good time to warn Henry; a soldier named Dujardin then told that he had seen Ravaillac in the service of Épernon at Naples, and that the Jesuits of that city had urged him (Dujardin) to enter the plot. Both these witnesses were of low moral character, and had a prospect of gaining by their revelations; we must therefore refrain from basing a verdict on their evidence. A recent French student of the subject [12] has concluded that Épernon and others were really plotting to take the life of Henry, but that Ravaillac committed the crime on his own initiative, and that the Jesuits were not in either plot, though it may be true that Mme d'Escoman warned them of Épernon's plot. This ingenious, but not wholly convincing, suggestion explains how Ravaillac could, with his dying breath and under threat of damnation, swear that he had no accomplices, but it really leaves open the question of the guilt of the Jesuits. The witnesses are of too low a character for us to decide whether they tell the truth or no. It is suspicious that Father Coton visited Ravaillac in jail and warned him "not to bring trouble on good people" by his statements, as we know on the high authority of d'Estoile.

These witnesses only came forward with their stories at a later date, but Paris had already turned with fierce indignation upon the Society. Although the doctrine of tyrannicide may have been taught before the Society was established, it was chiefly through the more explicit and general teaching of the Jesuits that it became a popular conviction among the general body of the faithful and began to inflame the brains of fanatics. Mariana's book was burned by order of the Parlement, in spite of the effort of the Jesuits to save it; they did succeed in getting a reference to the Jesuit character of the author suppressed in the indictment, and in preventing the works of Bellarmine, Becanus, and others of their theologians from being condemned. They had the zealous protection of Marie de Medici, and the hostility to them had to expend itself in a shower of witty and virulent pamphlets. Father Coton, especially, was violently assailed. The indulgence with which he had regarded the notorious amours of his royal penitent was said to be quite natural in a man who had tender relations of his own. The Jesuits continued to advance in spite of this hostility. Father de Suffren guided the conscience of Mary herself; Father Coton and Father Marguestana directed her son (Louis XIII.) and her daughter in the ways of virtue and political ignorance. There we may leave the Jesuits of France until Richelieu comes to disturb their mischievous pro-Spanish policy.

When we pass to the Netherlands we have again to consider a grave accusation of complicity in a design to assassinate. The Netherlands were now formally divided into Catholic Belgium and Protestant Holland, and the Dutch were eager to prevent the hated Jesuits from entering the country. A few succeeded in crossing the frontier and ministering, in disguise, to the remaining Catholics. The kind of activity they pursued will be understood when we have followed the similar labours of the Jesuits in England. In 1598, however, a Belgian was arrested at Leyden for a design on the life of Maurice of Nassau, and there is the customary controversy in regard to the complicity of the Jesuits.

Peter Panne was a cooper of Ypres, a restless and, apparently, a rather disreputable character. His method of seeking the life of the Dutch prince was singularly futile, and he made a lengthy and circumstantial "confession," in which he accused the Jesuits of Douai of egging him to commit the murder. The assassin of William of Orange in 1568 had accused a Jesuit confessor, and it was natural that the Dutch should again expect to hear of Jesuit complicity. His story was therefore implicitly believed in Holland, and wherever the Jesuits were detested; and the laws against them were made more stringent. In the following year, however, Father Coster undertook the defence of his colleagues, and their apologists maintain that he has completely demolished the charge. [13] To the impartial student the case is one of mere affirmation and denial, without very safe ground for judgment. Coster relies upon a number of reports issued by small legal and civic authorities in Belgium, who, at the request of the Jesuits, examined many witnesses, including Panne's wife and others named by him. These witnesses flatly denied the story told by Panne of his and their movements, and the unofficial judges then drew up statements to the effect that the Jesuits were innocent. At first sight it would seem that we ought at once to prefer the testimony of these numerous witnesses to that of Panne; but when we reflect on the Jesuit doctrine of mental reservation, we must admit that the word of these witnesses, provided by the Jesuits, is not to be taken at its superficial value. According to the Jesuit theologians, witnesses might give absolutely false answers, and confirm them by the most sacred oaths, to judges or others, if they felt that the inquirer had no right to learn the truth from them. In the case of Panne's wife, for instance, the Jesuit would most certainly decide that she would be justified in denying, on oath, that she had ever spoken to her husband about the projected murder, even if it were true that, as Panne said, she urged him to do it. In the next chapter we shall find the English Father Gerard acting on this well-known Jesuit principle. We cannot, therefore, attach any importance to these denials. And when Father Coster goes on to prove, or assert, that Panne was a doubtful Catholic and an unscrupulous fellow, he seems to overreach himself. Why should such a man seek to do the work of a Catholic fanatic at the risk of his life? Clearly, only because some one offered him payment. Either the gravest legal tribunal in Holland paid him to lie, or else his story gives the only plausible explanation of his conduct. It is more natural to suppose that the Jesuits acted on their known principles of regicide and mental reservation than that the Dutch acted in the most flagrant violation of their principles; and the mere fact of an indifferent Catholic risking his life to kill an heretical prince suggests this view.

In Belgium the Jesuits recovered all the ground they had lost in the religious wars, and at length secured an unassailable legal existence. At this period we are at every step observing the collusion of the Jesuits with Philip II. of Spain, and we have still to see how they helped him in his effort to annex England. He was not ungrateful, and he definitely overrode the prejudice of the Flemings and legally established the Jesuits in Belgium (1584). They at once became so bold that we find the Governor of Luxemburg levying taxes on the citizens for the erection of Jesuit houses: a project which caused such an outbreak of anger that they had to retreat from the province. The University of Louvain continued to disdain and assail them, but their great victory in securing the condemnation of the Chancellor of the University, Michel de Bay, had given them much prestige. Baius endeavoured to recover by denouncing to Rome their theologian Lessius; but his attempt failed, and the Jesuits renewed their effort to capture or displace the university. [14]

The record of the Germanic provinces is chiefly remarkable for the extension into Poland and an attempt to penetrate Russia. The Jesuits had entered Poland under Stephen Bathori, and made such progress in twenty years that men spoke bitterly of their "fortified palaces," and saw with regret that nearly the whole education of the nobility was in their hands. In one college (Pultusk) they boasted that they had four hundred youths of noble birth. In 1581 the Poles were bringing to a victorious close their long war with Russia, and the Tsar appealed for the mediation of the Pope. It was an auspicious opportunity for re-opening the question of the union of the Latin and Greek Churches, and the adventurous Father Possevin (the former Legate to Sweden) was sent as Legate. He learned on the way from Bathori that the Poles would drive a hard bargain, and felt that this strengthened his position with regard to Russia. He was received with great honour in Russia, and the Tsar gave many privileges to Catholics, but the war concluded at length without a word of union. It is clear that he then used his influence to induce the Russians to yield, so that his Society might at least have the gratitude of the Poles. He remained for a long time at Moscow, but made no progress, and the Pope recalled him to crush heresy in Transylvania. He was afterwards mediator between Germany and Poland. Possevin had considerable diplomatic ability, though he was apt to love melodramatic situations, like so many of the political Jesuits. Acquaviva at last resented his flagrant political activity, and compelled him to settle as a teacher at Padua.

Stephen Bathori was succeeded in 1586 by a pupil of the Jesuits, Sigismund III., and their power became greater than ever, and provoked a strong reaction. Their conduct in Transylvania, where most of the nobles were still Protestant, caused them to be expelled from that province by the Diet, and many nobles of the Polish Diet endeavoured to have them expelled from the whole kingdom. They were bitterly accused of intriguing to get possession of the property of Protestants, and even of rival religious orders. At Dantzic they were compelled to return the property of a community of nuns. The nobles chiefly resented their interference in politics and control of education, and penned some fiery indictments of what they called their "machinations." An edict of the Diet for the year 1607 is not flattering to them.

In the same period they overran the Catholic cantons of Switzerland, Bohemia, Baden, and most of the south-German States. Throughout the whole Germanic world their procedure was of much the same character. A few worthy and powerful men like Canisius would secure the opening of the doors to the Society, and a host of less religious fathers would then intrigue for funds to build colleges and educate the young, and organise the Catholic laity in enthusiastic confraternities or sodalities. Partly by these methods, but very largely by their great skill in securing the ear of princes, they not only greatly strengthened the surviving Catholic populations, but they undoubtedly regained much territory from the Reformers. They opposed a positive and unvarying creed to the conflicting doctrines of the Protestants, and the religious life they themselves exhibited had none of the grossness which had done so much to provoke the Reformation. Here and there, however, they clearly resorted to unworthy means to secure property or influence, and were heatedly assailed. A very curious series of outbreaks against them occurred in 1584. They boasted of the share their Father Clavius had had in the reform of the calendar; but, when it came to the time of Carnival and Lent, and later of Christmas, the distracted citizens were sometimes defrauded of their traditional pleasures by the alteration of the calendar, and took their revenge on the windows of the Jesuits.

The only notable experience of the Society in Italy was the expulsion of the fathers from Venice. A feeling of irritation against them had lingered in the Republic since their inauspicious entry under Ignatius, and of late years the French and Spanish strictures on them had found very ominous echoes in Venice. In the early years of the seventeenth century this feeling was inflamed by the attitude of the Jesuits in siding with the Pope against the civic authorities. The secular authorities had been so indignant at the discovery of certain brutal crimes committed by some of the clergy that, in spite of ecclesiastical privileges, they proceeded against the criminals. The quarrel with Rome which followed ended in the Pope placing Venice under an interdict, and the great body of the clergy of Venice patriotically ignored the interdict and continued to minister to the citizens. The Jesuits were in a painful dilemma. They made a futile attempt to evade it by closing their public churches, but keeping their houses open, and the Council banished them from the city. A crowd of citizens assembled on the banks of the canal when the gondolas, bearing the condemned fathers, left the city, and they do not attempt to represent it as a crowd weeping for their departure. "Ande in mal' hora" was the scornful reply made to one of their number who appealed to the people. Their very valuable property was confiscated, and they would not re-enter Venice for half a century.

We might admire the Jesuits at least for their courageous adherence to their own principles in these experiences of the year 1606, and we cannot regard it as other than natural that they should attempt to drag the rest of the clergy into sharing their attitude. But the indictment of them which the Venetian Senate made after their departure goes further than this. They were accused of grave intrigue in the quarrel between Rome and the Republic, and it was said that they abused their position as confessors to the noble ladies of Venice to learn the secrets of the Senate and frustrate its aims. Venice, it will be remembered, took a particular pride in the secrecy of its political life, and it especially distrusted so notoriously pro-Spanish a body as the Jesuits. These charges we cannot, of course, control, but they are consonant with the ordinary action of the Society. It was decreed that they be banished for ever; that if ever the question of recalling them were raised, this indictment must be read again in the Council of Ten, and that any citizen who held communication with the Jesuits should be sent to the galleys. The question of recalling them was, of course, raised at once. Henry IV. was induced to plead their cause at Venice, while Spain used all its power to prevent a reconciliation of the Papacy and the Republic except on condition that the Society be restored. So convinced were the Venetians of the anti-patriotic action of the Jesuits that they peremptorily refused to yield, and Acquaviva had to resign himself to defeat.

At Rome a more prolonged and more academic quarrel had nourished the feeling against the Society. The subject-matter of this controversy is of interest only to theologians, and the whole struggle must be dismissed in a few words. In brief, a Jesuit theologian of Portugal, named Molina, had in 1588 published a work (Liberi arbitrii cum gratiæ donis concordia), in which he had made novel efforts to illumine the mystery of the consistency of human freedom with the action of grace, and the way in which God may have a foreknowledge of events which may or may not take place. When Crétineau-Joly observes that Molina "talked as if he had been admitted to the counsels of the Most High," we can understand the indignation of rival theologians of the time. A Dominican theologian, named Bañez, had a different theory of these abstruse matters, and there was soon a fierce quarrel between the two orders. When the Spanish Inquisition refused to condemn Molina, the Dominicans carried the quarrel to Rome, where it enlivened and heated the chambers of the Vatican and the religious houses for more than twenty years. A commission appointed by the Pope condemned the teaching of Molina as "a dangerous novelty," the Jesuits induced the Pope to suspend sentence, and even profane ambassadors were drawn into the sacred arena. Spain threw its influence against Molina: France, naturally, supported him. It was not until 1607 that Paul V. judiciously decided that either opinion might be held with a safe conscience; and when it proved profoundly unsatisfactory to both parties to find that their rivals were permitted to live, the Pope had, in 1611, to impose silence on the disputants. The struggle still lingers in the remote and innocuous volumes of dogmatic theology which the rival orders occasionally publish.

In fine, we must glance at the progress of the foreign missions under Acquaviva. The Japanese mission now reached its highest prosperity and entered upon the days of persecution. In 1565 there were ten Jesuit missionaries in Japan, but thirteen more were added to these in 1577, and the work proceeded rapidly. The fathers took no money from the converts, building their churches on funds they received from Europe; in fact, we find them, as elsewhere, adopting very novel and somewhat dubious devices to extend their work and enlarge the figures of conversions which it was important to send to Europe. They received into the Society a wealthy Portuguese merchant named Almeida, and then directed him to remain in his warehouses and ply his lucrative trade in Japan, until a few years before his death, in the interest of the Society. The detail is recorded without a blush by their official historians. The chief strength of their Japanese mission lay in the Portuguese commerce with Japan. This commerce was profitable to the country, and its rulers saw little harm in purchasing it by allowing the Portuguese to preach their strange gospel to the natives.

Yet no one can read the records of the Japanese mission without realising that the success of this early Christian mission was singularly sincere and solid, and presents a most remarkable and inexplicable contrast to the experience of our own time. By the year 1580 the Jesuits announced that they had made 100,000 converts; by the year 1593 they represent this number as doubled. We may assume that a large number of very imperfectly converted Japanese help to round these generous figures, but the extraordinary number of native Christians whom we shall presently find ready to endure suffering and death for their faith must convince every candid student that the early missionaries had sincerely converted an astonishing proportion of the nation. The success is the more strange when we reflect that the Jesuits were not men of what is usually understood to be an "apostolic" character. Not only had they members of their Society making money as merchants, but they induced Philip of Spain to send out his subsidy to them in the form of fifty large bales of silk every year, and they secured the sale of these to their highest advantage. Even less edifying is the fact that in 1585 they induced the Pope to decree that no other priests than Jesuits should be allowed to enter Japan.

Two years later the clouds began, as if in punishment, to overcast their prosperity. Taicosama had usurped the chief throne of Japan in 1583, and, as the Catholic generals in the army had made no defence of their legitimate monarch, he continued for some years to favour the Church. The displacement of the native faith, however, led him to reflect that it might entail political displacements, and he is said to have seized the opportunity, when certain Christian girls refused the honour of being added to the lengthy list of his concubines, to suppress the mission. The Jesuits were to leave his kingdom within twenty days, or die; and he burned nearly a third of their 240 chapels. The Provincial Valignani returned from Italy to find his mission on the brink of destruction. He had taken a few noble Japanese youths to Europe, and was bringing them back to tell their fellows of the grandeur of Rome and Spain. As a Jesuit he was forbidden to enter the kingdom. With remarkable ease he transformed himself into an ambassador of the Viceroy of India, and was borne in a superb litter to the presence of Taicosama, on whom he showered presents and compliments. The Jesuits were allowed to remain in the country, though still forbidden to practise their religion, and the hundred priests had for some time to be content with stealthy and nocturnal ministration to their converts.

At length Taicosama turned upon them with fury, and the great persecution began. Kaempfer says that the Jesuits excited the anger of the nobles by an insolent refusal to pay them the customary respect; but a more substantial grievance came to the ears of the monarch. In 1596 a Japanese was examining a map of the earth on which the vast possessions of Spain were shown. He asked a Spanish pilot how his master had obtained this enormous territory, and the man imprudently replied that Philip first sent missionaries into a country to prepare it for subjection, then armies. The remark was reported to the Emperor, and he fell upon the missionaries with a just charge that they had violated his prohibition of the practice of the Christian cult. A number of Jesuits and Franciscans were crucified, and thousands—the Jesuits say 20,000—of the native Christians testified to the sincerity of their belief by embracing martyrdom. The death of Taicosama in the following year, 1598, put a stop to the persecution, and it is claimed that 70,000 converts were made in the next two or three years. The Protestant Dutch traders were, however, now displacing the Portuguese and Spanish, and repeating to the Japanese those dark opinions of the political intrigues of the Jesuits which were current in their own land. Once more the decree of extermination went forth, and by the year of the death of Acquaviva the mission was nearly extinct. Its second recovery and final destruction will occupy us later.

The rule of Acquaviva was also memorable for the beginning of the Chinese mission. The repeated failures to gain admission drove the Jesuits to fresh expedients, and a few of their more learned members applied themselves to a thorough study of Chinese culture and religion. The first and most distinguished of these was Father Ricci, whom we find living in Chao Hing, and astonishing the local mandarins with his learning, in 1583. We are not accurately informed how Ricci obtained admission, but we have seen, and shall see, that a Jesuit was prepared to make any profession whatever in order to enter a forbidden land. He seems to have concealed his religion, and posed as a lay scholar, until he was sufficiently advanced in the confidence of a few to entrust his ideas to them. He dressed as a Chinese scholar, and had (after 1587) two disguised lay-brothers in his house, which was transferred to Chao Chu. The mob, discovering his aims, attacked the house; but Ricci's able command of Western learning and appliances had greatly impressed Chinese scholars, and he made steady, if slow, progress. In the year 1600 he was invited to visit the Emperor at Peking, and shrewdly took with him a collection of telescopes, clocks, and other wonders of the West. He was allowed to live at Peking and enjoy the favour of the Emperor, and other priests quietly entered China and helped to found the mission. At one time its promise was nearly destroyed by a quarrel of the rival missionaries,—Jesuit, Franciscan, and secular,—but Ricci tactfully averted the persecution which their mutual charges brought on them. He died in 1610, and was honoured with a magnificent funeral at Peking. Numerically, there were as yet few converts. Ricci was not the kind of man to rush into the street with a crucifix and proclaim that the deities of China were false gods. It is only at a later date that we shall find a large and important mission in China.

The rest of the missionary field reported almost uniform progress under the vigorous rule of Acquaviva. Canada was opened by the French troops, and several Jesuits began to work among the Indians. Mexico proved, they reported, an easy ground; they claimed that half the population was Christian by 1608. The Brazilian mission now had a hundred and fifty priests extending its flourishing work, and the first excursions were made into Paraguay (1586) and Chili (1593). In 1604, fifty-six fathers were sent into Peru. In the East, the Hindu mission continued to spread on the lines we have already described, and Abyssinia at last consented to admit the Jesuits. It will be convenient to defer until the next chapter a closer consideration of these missions.

This survey of the fortunes of the Society under the thirty-five years' rule of Acquaviva is a sufficient testimony to the ability of that gifted leader. When he died, on 31st January 1615, the 5000 members of the Society who had greeted his election had become 13,000, and 550 Jesuit establishments were scattered over the globe, from Peking to the slopes of the Andes. In view of the methods of the Society—the direct and at times indelicate seeking of money and the favour of the powerful—this growth cannot be regarded as singular. The Society had adopted new and very effective devices to increase their influence and membership; it is not as if other religious bodies had used the same means, and been less successful. And it is now clear that the distinctive general principles of the Society were rapidly assuming a complexion which the impatient feeling of its critics has expressed in the maxim that "the end justifies the means." This will be even more apparent when we consider, in more detail, the activity of the Jesuits in England.

I have as yet made no mention of the "Regulation of Studies" (Ratio Studiorum), which some regard as one of Acquaviva's most significant services to the Society. I am unable to see this significance in the treatise which (with later modifications) Acquaviva presented for the acceptance of the General Congregation in 1599. It is rather a disciplinary measure than an educational code, and no improvement of Jesuit culture followed its promulgation. It attempted to impose a uniform course of two years in rhetoric and humanities (with fragmentary or expurgated editions of the classics), three years in philosophy (including mathematics), and four years in theology, on all the students of the Society. It also imposed the use of Latin in conversation except during the hour of recreation and on holidays. This scheme never was, and is not now, rigidly followed, and where it is followed the gain is disciplinary rather than cultural. We shall see better, when we come to examine Jesuit scholarship, the grave defects of the Jesuit education from a general pedagogical point of view. Its aim was narrow and specific,—the production of sound theologians,—and it would be a mistake to judge it at all from the wider educational point of view, were it not for the light and superficial praise it sometimes receives.

FOOTNOTES:

[ [9] See Father Astrain's Historia de la Compañia de Jesus en España, vol. ii. chap. iii., chap. v. and elsewhere.

[ [10] It was, and still is in Catholic countries, a custom to incline the head at the mention of the name Jesus.

[ [11] See Count Hoensbroech's Fourteen Years a Jesuit (1911), ii. 334.

[ [12] Jules Loiseleur, Ravaillac et ses complices, 1873.

[ [13] I have consulted the Latin translation, by another Jesuit, of Coster's work, Sica tragica Comiti Mauritio a Jesuitis ... intentata (1599).

[ [14] When I studied at Louvain University in 1893, I found the struggle just as it had been three hundred years before. The Jesuits still sought in vain to capture the university, and were detested as cordially as ever.

[CHAPTER VI]

THE EARLY JESUITS IN ENGLAND

The first attempts of the Jesuits to carry their war against Protestantism into the British Isles have been noticed, at their various dates, in previous chapters. We remember the brave and futile journey of Brouet and Salmeron in 1541; the labours of David Woulfe, of unhappy memory, in Ireland in 1560; the fruitless adventures of Gouda among the Scottish Calvinists in 1562; and the obscure apostolate of Father King in England in 1564. Three years after the last date, Father Edmund Hay had made an equally unprofitable expedition to Scotland. He and Thomas Darbyshire, a nephew of Bishop Bonner, had been directed to accompany a Nuncio on a fresh attempt to advise and confirm Queen Mary. The Nuncio had prudently remained in Paris, and sent Father Hay, an adventurous young Scot who loved disguises and the inspiring chances of politics, to explore the kingdom. He spent two months in hiding at Edinburgh in the early part of 1567, and returned to say that there was no hope of success. At last, in 1580, a very able and remarkable English Jesuit, Father Robert Parsons, opened that stirring chapter of Jesuit history which closes with the Gunpowder Plot.

Since the beginning of the Reformation in England a number of Catholic students had gone abroad, and many of them had entered the Jesuit novitiate in Belgium, Germany, and Italy. Father More has preserved in his Historia missionis Anglicanæ (1660) the names of about thirty Englishmen who figure in the chronicles of one or other province down to the year 1580. Of these the most important were Robert Parsons and Edmund Campion, who opened the mission of 1580. Parson, a Somersetshire man of the yeoman class, had been a fellow of Balliol, where he had attracted some attention by his ability, his religious vacillations, and his disagreeable temper. He was compelled to resign and go abroad in 1573. Some (Camden and others) say that he was expelled for dishonest conduct, others that he was a martyr to religious conviction; but Father Taunton concludes, in his excellent study of Parsons, that he left "on account of perpetual disagreements with his fellows." [15] At Louvain he met Father William Good, who induced him to go through the exercises, and he entered the Society at Rome in 1575. He was ordained priest, and made English confessor at St. Peter's in 1578. Edmund Campion, who was the son of a London bookseller and a brilliant Fellow of St. John's (Oxford), had meantime joined the Society and was at Prague. He had known Parsons at Oxford, and they corresponded when they both became Jesuits.

The peculiar circumstances which led to their mission, and had a most important bearing on its history, must next be told. A wealthy English priest, Dr. (afterwards Cardinal) Allen, had founded a college at Douai for supplying England with clergy to support the old faith. It was transferred to Rheims in 1578; and, as the free lodging and education which it offered to young refugees soon caused it to be overcrowded, a second college was opened at Rome and generously supported by the Pope. The Jesuit fathers lectured at this college. The rector, Dr. Clenock, was an injudicious Welshman, and the national prejudices of the English and Welsh students, who were a very turbulent lot, led to prolonged and most violent quarrels, which ended in the whole body of the young apostles marching out of the college. They demanded that the management of the college should be given to the Jesuits, and it is quite clear that the Jesuits encouraged their revolt. After a few months they found that the Jesuits also were unsuitable masters, and the trouble broke out afresh. It was then that Robert Parsons began his famous diplomatic career. He suggested that the Jesuits should co-operate with the secular priests on the English mission. General Mercurian and his counsellors demurred at first; there was no bishop in England to control the clergy, and they foresaw quarrels. The difficulty was removed by making the aged Bishop of St. Asaph ordinary for the whole of England, and inducing him to join the mission; and in April 1580, Parsons and Campion (who was summoned from Prague) set out on foot, with nine secular priests and a Jesuit lay-brother, Ralph Emerson, for Rheims.

It is disputed at what precise stage Parsons began to be a politician, but he was little known to the Papacy in 1580, and was certainly not admitted to its secret counsels. He learned at Rheims, however, that a mission of by no means a pacific character had at the same time been sent to Ireland, and we know that a third mission, also of a political nature, was sent to Scotland, to prepare the way for a French invasion. The English authorities would naturally conclude that the mission to England was a part of this political conspiracy against Elizabeth. They had spies all over Europe, and long before the apostles reached Rheims a pen-portrait of each of them was being studied and distributed to the pursuivants at Westminster. There had as yet been little enforcement of the penal laws, in spite of the Pope's unhappy interference with the loyalty of English Catholics. It was well known that mass was said in more than one house in London, and that many a quiet manor-house sheltered nuns and priests, but there was little disposition to persecute on account of belief, and as yet little inclination of the Catholics to active disloyalty. To admit Jesuits was a different matter. What did even the Catholics of France and Spain say of them? And when this coming of the Jesuits coincided with a political activity of Guise and the Papacy against the English throne, it was inevitable that the authorities should decide to be vigilant and stringent. The missionaries were not deterred; they left their aged bishop behind, and made their way, in separate parties, to the coast. At St. Omer's Parsons and Campion learned that their names and descriptions were known in London, and officers were on the watch for them, but the spirit of romance and devotion urged them on, and they planned their campaign.

It is an amusing and characteristic picture which Parsons draws of his journey to London. He was a big, burly man of thirty-four, and wore the uniform of an officer returning from the wars in the Low Countries. The befeathered hat and gold-laced coat and military swagger fitted him so nicely that the officers not only passed him, but got a horse for "the captain" and promised to pay every attention to his friend the jewel-merchant (Campion), who was to follow him in a few days. By the end of June they were together in the house that had been taken for them in Chancery Lane. At Rome, Parsons had met an enthusiastic and wealthy young Englishman named George Gilbert, and, instead of making a Jesuit of him, had sent him on in advance to prepare the way for them. He had boldly taken rooms for them under the nose of the chief official charged to arrest them—who was probably searching for them in the warrens by the river or the villages beyond the gates—and had formed a secret association of Catholics throughout the country to help them in their travels. The news soon spread through the Catholic world that two Jesuits were in England, and the secular priests, whom they met and endeavoured to conciliate, urged them to return to the Continent. It is difficult to look back and not see that they would best have served the cause of Catholicism in England by quitting it at once; the few thousand converts they made, or waverers whom they strengthened, were a small service in comparison with the fierce hostility they brought on the faithful, the political conspiracies in which they involved them, and the bitter dissensions they caused amongst the clergy. But for the coming of the Jesuits and the plots of foreign Catholics, Catholicism might have lived on in England as a considerable sect, overlooked by the authorities, until the Pope's blunder was forgotten and the penal spirit abandoned.

Yet we must respect the two Jesuits—to omit the humbler services of Emerson—for refusing to save their lives by an immediate flight, and no historian, whatever his religious views, can read that first chapter of their story in England without sympathy and admiration. Each was provided by Gilbert with two horses and two suits and a servant, and they bade farewell to each other and set out to make their way, separately, through the legions of spies and officers. When they entered a county, the secret members of the association would send warning to the scattered Catholics along the route, and it would be given out that an acquaintance was expected. Toward evening the Jesuit, in some strange disguise, would ride into the courtyard and receive, under the eyes of the servants, the common civilities which one owed to a passing acquaintance; but when the inner chamber was reached, and the door closed, master and mistress would fall on their knees and kiss the hand of the traveller, and the broad-brimmed hat would be removed to disclose the face of the priest invoking a blessing on the persecuted faithful. Then Catholic neighbours might come, and confessions be heard, and the evening would be spent in sober discussion of the awful catastrophe that had befallen their Church. In the early morning a chalice and an altar-stone and vestments would be found among the luggage of the supposed soldier or merchant, and the little group would gather in a guarded chamber for mass. Possibly in the midst of the ceremony the sentinel would whisper that the pursuivants were upon them, and some stolid Catholic servant would hold the men at the door until priests and vestments were safely lodged in the pit which had been dug beneath the floor or the secret chamber cut out of the solid wall. When mass was over, the disguised Jesuit would, as a rule, give a last blessing and take to the road again, dining at inns where he might see on the wall a description of himself and an intimation that the Government wanted to hang, draw, and quarter him. Parsons carried his bluff so far as to tear down one of these bills, and ask the landlord what he meant by confronting an honest traveller with reminders of that villainous Jesuit.

The two met again at Uxbridge in October, when Elizabeth had issued a third proclamation against them, and the search was being pressed vigorously. Campion returned to the provinces, and Parsons decided to remain in or near London. He had a bold design of setting up a press and stealthily issuing Catholic books, but it is reasonable to believe that he was now becoming convinced that only a large political action could save the faith in England. He saw much of the Spanish ambassador, Mendoza, even living in the embassy as a servant for a time; and from his conversations with Mendoza we may confidently date that idea of a Spanish invasion of England which was to dominate the remainder of his unfortunate life and cause incalculable mischief. Not only the general rule of his Society, but a most explicit command laid on him by Mercurian when he left Rome, forbade him to meddle with politics, yet he gradually became wholly absorbed in a political and treacherous project, and we may safely date its birth about this time.

Somewhere out of London—at East Ham, Simpson conjectures—he set up his press, and infuriated the Council by disseminating books which their advisers pronounced to have been printed in England. Hundreds of arrests were made, the rack was busy at the Tower, and the laws were made more drastic; yet the "howling wolf" (Parsons) and the "wandering vagrant" (Campion), as they were described in a debate in Parliament, continued to evade the zealous officers. Two other Jesuits, Cottam and Bosgrave, who attempted to join them, were arrested at once and put in the Tower; while the Irish Jesuit, O'Donnell, was hanged, drawn, and quartered at Cork.

In the early part of 1581 Fathers Holt and Heywood penetrated the Protestant defences and joined Parsons. He sent Holt on to Scotland, to further the political scheme he now cherished, and later had Father Crichton sent on direct to Edinburgh from Rouen. A genial page of Mr. Andrew Lang's History of Scotland (ii. 282) tells how these Jesuits "let the pigs run through the job" in Scotland. The romance of hiding in Holyrood and assisting the great enterprise of the invasion of England seems to have exalted them, and they gave Mary, whom they would rescue, a very poor opinion of their qualities as diplomatists. They made airy promises of armies, to be provided by some foreign power, until at last even Mendoza begged them to confine themselves to the saving of souls and leave State affairs to statesmen. Father Hay, another Scottish Jesuit who joined them, advocated the assassination of the leading Protestant nobles. These Jesuits returned in the course of time to the Continent; Father Ogilvie, in 1615, was the only Catholic who was executed on the ground of religion in Scotland after a formal trial.

To return to England, Parsons found in the early spring of 1581 that his lodging in East Ham was suspected, and he moved the press to Dame Stonor's park near Henley, where Campion came to control the printing of his Ten Reasons: a Latin work, not hampered by modesty, which greatly stirred the Protestant divines of the time. Gilbert, who was now under surveillance and had lost most of his property in the cause, was sent to Rome to report that 20,000 Catholics had been added to the list of the faithful in a year—a quite incredible number, as only 50,000 recusants were known to the Council in the whole of England. On 11th July the two comrades parted, for the last time; Campion was caught at Lyford in Berkshire about a week afterwards. He had imprudently returned to a house at which he had ministered, and the officers closed round it. For a day and a night Campion lay hidden in the "priest's hole," but the officers at last discovered him, and sent him to London, conspicuously labelled "Campion the seditious Jesuit." We will not linger over the racking, the thrusting of spikes between his fingers and nails, and the other horrible devices by which the Council sought to extract a betrayal of others; though we might remind those who, like Crétineau-Joly, speak of these things as the hideous inventions of Protestant hatred, that these appalling instruments were, on the contrary, already stained with Protestant blood. Campion's great courage wavered under the long and terrible strain, and he supplied a few names of Catholic houses, to the great scandal of the faithful at the time; but he expiated his momentary weakness, on 1st December, by meeting with great bravery the ghastly death of a "traitor" at Tyburn. One of the two secular priests who were condemned to die with him, Father Briant, was admitted by him to the Society the night before the execution, and died a Jesuit. Father Cottam was executed in the following May (1582).

Parsons left Henley, where his press was discovered a month later, and went into Sussex. The secular clergy were now so eager to get the Jesuits out of England that some of them threatened to betray him, and he went to France in March. Probably the feeling that he could promote his political scheme more effectively on the Continent had more to do with his flight than the fear of death or the pressure of the secular clergy. He remained at Rouen, smuggling English books from there into England and doing all that he could to press the Scottish enterprise. It was from Rouen that he sent Crichton into Scotland, and he was in constant correspondence with Mendoza and the Duke of Guise, who would help in the enterprise. Crichton presently returned to tell of the large and imprudent offers of help he had made to Lennox in Scotland, and they decided to make an effort to get armies for the rescue of Mary Stuart. Crichton was sent to Rome, and Parsons went to Madrid.

The chief interest of the work of the English Jesuits remains with the indefatigable Parsons on the Continent during the next five years, and a few words will suffice to tell the story of his colleagues in England. Besides two secular priests, Metham and Pound, who were admitted to the Society in prison, and Emerson, who was in prison (and remained there for twenty years), Heywood was now the only Jesuit in England; Holt had been captured in Scotland, and sent back to the Continent. Heywood caused a great deal of irritation by his masterful ways, and the secular priests indignantly describe him as driving in a luxurious coach, like a baron, and living so comfortably that he contracted gout. He was recalled to the Continent, but was captured and kept in the Clink until 1585, when he was banished. His place as Vice-Prefect of the mission—Parsons was Prefect—was taken by Father Weston, a new arrival, whose powers in expelling demons were so singular and spectacular that he used to take possessed persons about with him in his stealthy visits to the Catholic gentry, and give most amazing displays—until it was discovered that the "mediums" were frauds. It had paid them, apparently, to swallow nauseous drugs and allow themselves to be mauled by Father Weston. He was captured and lodged in Wisbeach Castle in 1587, but Fathers Garnet and Southwell had then arrived, as we shall see presently. We must follow the feverish political activity of Parsons, which culminates in the sending of the Armada.

From Paris Parsons had made a swift journey, on horseback, to Madrid, where he greatly impressed Philip II. By this time, at least, Parsons deliberately advocated the transfer of the English crown to Philip, and was therefore a traitor to his country and to the rules of his Society. He obtained from Philip a large sum of money for James of Scotland, a pension for the seminary at Rheims, and a promise that Spanish influence would support his claim of a red hat for Allen: he was anxious to remove Allen from the colleges he had founded, so that the Jesuits could control the supply of priests to England. A severe illness kept him for some months in Spain, but he was back at Paris in May 1583. During the summer he was in close correspondence with Guise and d'Alencon, who were now advocating and plotting the assassination of Elizabeth as the simplest solution of the situation. In August Parsons went to Rome, to excuse his activity, which scandalised the Parisian Jesuits, and to induce the Pope to subsidise the Scottish expedition and remove Allen to a loftier sphere. He returned in the autumn, having secured a bishopric for Allen and another pension for the college at Rheims. In spite of the protests of the French Jesuits he continued to pursue his plots. The French dukes withdrew from the enterprise, and the Spanish King was now quite willing to move, if the Pope would be generous with funds. Gregory died in the spring of 1585, and Parsons and Allen went to Rome to win the new Pope, Sixtus V.

There is at this date, and during the next few years, no room for doubt about the aim of Parsons. We have it repeatedly in his own words that he worked to seat Philip on the throne of England, and he shrewdly advised Philip to conceal his intention, from the English Catholics, Scotland, France, and the Papacy, until his expedition was successful. The death of Mary Stuart did not disturb him, and he gradually discarded the idea of attacking through Scotland. Philip was to make a direct attack, and the English Catholics were to be instructed to look to Philip, not as a future king, but as restorer of the faith. All the world knows the result. The great Armada (with several Jesuits on board) sank to the bottom of the Channel, and Parsons had the mortification of learning that even Catholics had loyally taken arms to repel the Spaniard. There ended the second phase of his remarkable career, and we may return to England.

In July 1586 Henry Garnet and R. Southwell landed on the Norfolk coast, as Dr. Jessopp so finely tells, and resumed the work which I have previously described. Garnet was, if somewhat less boisterous and masterful, the new Parsons; Southwell, a retiring and amiable man, the new Campion. As Weston was arrested in 1587, Garnet became Vice-Prefect. In the following year John Gerard and Edward Oldcorne joined them, and the story of adventurous ministration went on. On one occasion the four Jesuits were nearly caught in a batch, saying mass in a Catholic house; and in 1594 Garnet was caught and imprisoned for three years. He escaped from the Tower, with outside assistance, in 1597, and returned to work. Southwell was betrayed by a Catholic lady in 1592, and, after three years in the Tower, was executed at Tyburn in 1595. In the same year Henry Walpole was arrested on arrival, and executed at York. Father Greenway was the only other Jesuit to enter the country before 1600, and we must leave these fathers pursuing their adventurous work and consider the growing quarrel of the Jesuits and the secular clergy.

That long and interesting story must be told very briefly here. Wisbeach Castle had been chosen as a prison for captured priests, and when Weston arrived there in 1587, he very plainly tried to assume a leadership. As his various suggestions were rejected, he made a party among the priest-prisoners, got himself appointed director of it, and initiated a bitter and prolonged feud which spread far beyond the walls of Wisbeach. To the secular priests' charges of arrogance and ambition, the Jesuit writers retort that even in jail the English priests were so prone to drunkenness, gambling, and immorality that Father Weston was forced to live apart with the more virtuous. A profane historian must not attempt to judge between them. It is enough that, especially in the years 1595-1597, reports of violent quarrels reached Rome; and these coincided with complaints from Belgium of the behaviour of Father Holt (who had been sent as agent of Philip II. to Brussels and was denounced to the authorities for his violent political partisanship), and another rebellion of the students of the Roman college. Not only did these complain of their Jesuit masters, but they occasionally fell into the hands of the papal police in wine-shops and other improper places, and were found to be a very poor and undisciplined body of youths. Mr. Law insists that the Jesuits kept the English priests at a low level of culture in order to control or overshadow them the more easily.

Parsons was now recalled from Spain and political intrigue to deal with this new menace. He had spent several years in Spain, founding new English colleges (at Valladolid, Seville, and Madrid) under his own control and working out his learned theory that the crown of England belonged of strict right to Spain. He failed to induce Philip to send a second Armada, and now devoted himself to proving that the Infanta was the heir to the crown of England. That is the idea of the book, A Conference on the Succession, which he published, anonymously, in 1594: a year after the fifth General Congregation of his Society had once more sternly decreed that no Jesuit must meddle with politics.

In 1597 he reached Rome and quickly pacified the students of the college. Some of them, it seems, thought that he ought to be made a cardinal for his great services, and he hastened, with tearful eyes, to ask the Pope to spare him that dignity; and we will trust that he was relieved when the Pope coldly observed that he had not had the least idea of imposing it on him. They then turned to the great question of Wisbeach, and the settlement of it doubly interests us; partly because a Jesuit supremacy in Wisbeach might be a good precedent for the time when a Catholic monarch succeeded Elizabeth, and partly because it throws a very singular light on Jesuit procedure.

The Jesuits submitted that the clerical prisoners in England desired some kind of canonical leader. Clement VIII., who had, like his great predecessor Sixtus V., had some alarming experience of the state of the Jesuits (as we shall see later), required proof of this. They brought before him certain English priests, friendly to themselves, who assured the Pope that there was no discord in their ranks in England; the largeness of their "mental reservation" may be judged from the fact that a later inquiry showed that 343 out of the 400 priests in England were against the Jesuit proposal. The Pope was deceived, and he yielded to Parsons's suggestion to make George Blackwell, a former student under the Jesuits, "Archpriest" of the English clergy. Blackwell went to England to exercise this newly invented authority, and Parsons returned to his plots. He had then several secretaries to conduct his enormous correspondence, and he was so sure of a Catholic succession to the throne that he marked out various houses in London for use as Jesuit colleges.

After a time there came to Rome some of the English clergy, saying that they had received the Archpriest with amazement, and begging the Pope to withdraw him. The Pope was not in Rome, and Parsons took care that they should not reach him. He induced the papal authorities to arrest them, as rebels, and lodge them in the college controlled by the Jesuits; and when they persisted in appealing to a Roman tribunal, he secured the dismissal of the appeal. Later, a fresh batch of appellants came to Rome, and Parsons knew that their evidence would be very damning. Not only had the Jesuits, who controlled the moneys gathered for the support of the imprisoned priests, attempted to use this power to subdue them, but when the Pope had ordered that no more pamphlets should be written on the subject, Blackwell had refrained from publishing the decree until Parsons had time to issue one; and this one mendaciously purported to have been written by some "priests united in due subordination to the Archpriest." The secular priests had appealed to Elizabeth, and she had actually heard and set four of them at liberty, in order that they might plead their cause at Rome. They now had the support of the French embassy, and, in spite of all the libels which Parsons circulated concerning them and the English clergy generally, they won a partial victory. Blackwell was to remain Archpriest, but he was not to consult the Jesuits.

From this domestic but instructive feud we return to the action of the Jesuits in England. Under ten different names Garnet had continued, amid a hundred adventures, to elude his pursuers, and his colleagues were only a little less active. We cannot, however, do more here than attempt to trace their share in the political scheming which culminated in the Gunpowder Plot. The Jesuits in England carried out the suggestion of Parsons that, instead of putting their faith in the eventual accession and conversion of James of Scotland, they should teach the Catholics to look to Philip. In December 1601 we find Garnet meeting Catesby, Tresham, and Winter in the house of Anne Vaux at Enfield Chase, and discussing the question of a mission to Spain. The issue of it was that Winter and Father Greenway went to Madrid, and obtained a large sum of money from Philip III. It was intended for the relief of the poor Catholics, Garnet afterwards said: in which case we do not very well understand why he "misliked" the expedition, as he says.

Elizabeth died on 24th March 1603, and James Stuart peacefully acceded to the throne. We need not stop to consider the shifts by which Parsons now sought the favour of James; he had, he boldly and untruthfully said, abandoned the idea of a Spanish succession at the death of Philip II. in 1598. James was not to be deceived, and, in his negotiations with Rome, made a point of having the Jesuits excluded. The conflicting counsels in regard to the Catholics ended, as is known, in a decision to tolerate lay Catholics, but not priests, and the bitter agitation began which led up to the famous plot. Catesby and Winter conceived the horrible idea of blowing up the Parliament House when the King, the Royal Family, and the Lords and Commons were assembled in it for the opening of Parliament. Guy Fawkes, Thomas Percy, and J. Wright were admitted to the secret, and in March 1604 they met and swore to accomplish the plot. In an adjoining room a priest said mass for them, and Fawkes and Winter afterwards said that this priest was Father Gerard; Gerard, however, denied this, and the point is not important, since it is not at all probable that Gerard was ever admitted to the secret, and no priest knew of the plot until long afterwards. Gerard's idea was that toleration could be bought, but he failed even to find the money. For more than a year and a half the conspirators brooded over their ghastly scheme, and made preparations for carrying it out; and on 5th November 1605 Fawkes was arrested in the cellar beneath the House beside a mass of powder.

It is agreed that no Jesuit inspired this plot; the point we have to determine is whether the Jesuits were aware of the plot and acquiesced in it by their silence. The whole subject has been fully and repeatedly discussed, and I propose to rely almost entirely on the "Declarations" which Father Garnet addressed to the authorities during his trial and imprisonment. [16] The living Jesuit, Father Gerard, may express an ingenuous doubt whether there ever was a Gunpowder Plot at all; his predecessor of the seventeenth century, who ought to know, was concerned only to extricate himself, by a series of confessions, evasions, and untruths to which no parallel can be found in the history of martyrs, from the very grave moral and legal charge of having known that this horrible slaughter was contemplated and made no effort to disclose or prevent it.

Garnet confesses that on 9th June 1605 Catesby came to his lodging, at a costermonger's house in Thames Street, and, "finding me alone," asked if, "in case it were lawful to kill a person or persons, it were necessary to regard the innocents who were present." The Jesuit replied that the killing of innocent people in a lawful attack upon others was not immoral; he pointed out that soldiers had often, in besieging a town, to slay the civilian with the soldier. He professes in his declaration that he had no idea that Catesby had in mind an actual plot to be carried out in England. He had written to Parsons a few weeks before that many of the Catholic laymen were "offended with the Jesuits" on the ground that they "hindered forcible enterprises"; and he would have us believe that when one of these laymen, whose character he knew well, finding him alone, puts to him a singularly abstract question of this nature, it does not even occur to him that he has a "forcible enterprise" in mind. When Catesby was leaving, however, he assured Garnet that he would under no circumstances betray that he had consulted the Jesuit. Even then the innocent Jesuit failed to understand, and it was only on reflection, he says, that he thought it possible that Catesby was plotting. He therefore felt it to be his duty to "admonish" Catesby, the next time he met him, that he "must first look to the lawfulness of the act itself, and then he must not have so little regard of innocence that he spare not friends and necessary persons for a Commonwealth, and told him what charge we had of all quietness, and to procure the like in others."

Even if we suppose that this "admonition" was really given to Catesby as he describes it—one hesitates, because Garnet's conduct throughout is a classical example of casuistic perversion of truth—we can readily believe that Catesby took it very lightly, as Garnet says. Even if we could bring ourselves to admit that Garnet at the secret interview saw only an innocent and abstract moral issue, such as might be discussed in an open drawing-room, in Catesby's question, and therefore unwittingly sanctioned a bloody massacre, it is certain that he perceived on reflection that some such massacre was contemplated; yet he can only warn him to have regard for "friends and necessary persons," and feebly remind him of their duty of "quietness." Indeed in July, he confesses, he received "a very earnest letter" from General Acquaviva, who said, on behalf of the Pope, that they were vaguely conscious that something was contemplated by the English Catholics, and that the Pope and Acquaviva himself rigorously forbade any recourse to violence, as it would do more harm than good. He showed this letter to Catesby, because, he says, "I doubted he had some device in his head." Catesby admitted that he had, and offered to tell it to him. He refused to hear it, and merely stipulated that a layman should be sent to the Continent to learn if it were true that the Pope would not disapprove: a mission which, as Garnet knew, had no issue.

This last interview with Catesby occurred in the latter half of July, more than two months before the proposed opening of Parliament (3rd October). By that time, therefore, Garnet was quite aware, without the least reference to the seal of confession, that the Catholic laity contemplated some deed which directly aimed at taking life on so large a scale that the innocent would suffer with the guilty, and it would need very little reflection to foresee that this deed was directed at the court or the Parliament, or both. Further, in order not to be obliged formally to condemn it, he refused, contrary to his plainest duty, to learn the details of it. The clue to his frame of mind seems to be given in his letter to Parsons in May. The laymen were "offended with the Jesuits" because they would not consent to "forcible enterprises"; he would therefore not interfere with their plot. He could, without violation of any sacramental confidence, because Catesby's admission to Father Greenway comes later, have prevented the plot from going any further, but he allowed this vague horror to proceed, and defied the emphatic command of the Pope and his General, in order that the Jesuits might not lose favour with the leading Catholic laymen. It is probable that he also trusted that the outrage would be justified by the result. Whatever his motives, his conduct was shifty, cowardly, and treacherous, and he fitly died the death of a traitor. He admits later in his "Declaration" that he "might have hindered all" by speaking to Catesby. He claims that he pressed the Roman authorities, through Parsons, to send a stronger condemnation of plots; but we have a letter of his to Parsons, dated 4th September, in which he assures Rome that the English Catholics are now quiet and submissive.

It is therefore unnecessary to decide whether he afterwards learned all the details of the plot under the seal of confession, and whether it was morally impossible for him to disclose such a communication. The guilt of Henry Garnet is clear enough, however we decide the further issue. Yet it is of interest, and the further development may be briefly recounted.

A few days after he had seen Catesby, in the latter half of July, Father Greenway came to consult him. He was troubled about a "devise" that Catesby had submitted to him, and he proposed to submit it to his superior "by way of confession." Garnet then learned the details of the plot; he had forbidden Catesby to tell him, but was willing to learn them without Catesby's knowledge. He pronounced the plot "horrible," and said that Greenway must return to Catesby and condemn it. The Pope, he said, would send him to the galleys if such a plot came off. He urged Greenway to dissuade Catesby, and adds: "so we parted, yet with this compact, that if ever I should be called in question for being accessory unto such a horrible action, either by the Pope, or by my superiors beyond, or by the State here, I would have liberty to utter all that passed in this conference." He expected to see Catesby in October—he could undoubtedly have seen him before then—and says: "I assuredly had [if they met] entered into the matter with Mr. Catesby, and perhaps might have hindered all." He undoubtedly could have "hindered all" at any moment by an explicit declaration that the plot was a mortal sin, and by a threat of the Pope's penalties.

An attempt has been made to relieve Garnet of the heavy responsibility which this declaration lays on him by pleading that the Church binds a priest, under the gravest moral obligation, not to communicate anything learned "by way of confession." In the first place, Garnet does not say that Greenway learned the plot in confession. He says that he asked Greenway this, and he does not give his reply. It is, in fact, quite certain from Garnet's own words and conduct, that the communication was not made under the seal of confession at all. If it were, Garnet had no power whatever to speak to Catesby about it, as he says he intended to do: Greenway had no power whatever to permit Garnet to "utter all that passed in this conference" if he were brought to task: and Garnet committed a mortal sin and cowardly sacrilege in eventually revealing that he had heard of the plot from Greenway. There are obscure points about the theological doctrine of the "seal," but these things are not obscure or disputed. Catesby told Greenway in ordinary confidence, as he offered to tell Garnet. Even if it had been otherwise, Garnet's plain duty was to see that his colleague approached Catesby and made it a matter of conscience to abstain from such a design.

It is, in the next place, even clearer that the communication made by Greenway to Garnet did not come under the seal of confession. Garnet plainly intimates that there was no confession at all, and merely hints that it might be regarded as forming part of some future confession. The teaching of moral theologians is clear that a consultation for the sake of direction does not, unless it be intended as "a preparation for confession," come under the seal. [17] Greenway was not a penitent at all, and even a sinner cannot put a confessor under the seal when he chooses; he must confess his sins. In any case, the above considerations apply here also. Garnet would have no right whatever to approach Catesby if he learned the plot in confession; Greenway had no right whatever to name Catesby in a confession; Garnet would have no right to say, in confession, whether he would or would not listen to this "penitent"; and Garnet would most decidedly have no right to claim permission to break the seal if his neck were endangered. To introduce "the seal of confession" is to make Garnet's conduct worse than ever.

It is plain that Garnet and Greenway feared to offend the laity by thwarting them, and it is probable that they thought the slaughter might help their cause. They locked the secret in their hearts, and nervously went about their work. In August Garnet went to the north, and in December, when the conspirators were slain and Greenway and Gerard had fled to the Continent, he sought refuge at Hinlip Castle, near Worcester, with Father Oldcorne. They were betrayed by a Catholic and discovered, after a full week's search of the castle. An astute jailer then tricked Garnet into a conversation with his colleague, and learned that there was one man who could connect him with the plot. In the presence of the rack he then declared that he was permitted to speak in such an emergency, and he related the "conference" with Greenway. He remained shifty and mendacious to the end, using the doctrine of mental reservation with an appalling flippancy. When charged with writing a letter to Greenway, he swore "on his priesthood," and without reservation, that he had not written it; and the Council then showed him the letter, which they had intercepted. He was justly, if barbarously, executed on 3rd May, on the ground of the general knowledge he had of the plot from Catesby himself. Equivocal to the end, he declared to the authorities that he had sinned against God and the king in not revealing the plot; while to the Catholic Anne Vaux he pleaded that "it was not his part to disclose it." He did not represent it as matter heard in confession.

As the innocent and estimable Oldcorne had been executed on 7th April, the Jesuit mission was over for a time, and the hopes of Catholicism blasted. Crétineau-Joly gives an inaccurate list of seven Jesuits who "perished" under Elizabeth, and airily adds "a hundred others." The truth is that from 1580 to 1606 there had only been a score of Jesuits in England, even including the secular priests who were permitted to take the vows in prison in order that their martyrdoms might illumine the chronicle of the Society; that only seven of these, including the seculars I have mentioned, were put to death; and that of the five regularly admitted Jesuits who were put to death, two obtained a remission of punishment by giving information. Yet their story is, on the whole, a story of heroism thwarted by political intrigue.

Two other Jesuits, Hunt and Worthington, had arrived before the plot, and in 1607 others began again to penetrate the defences of the country. The houses of wealthy Catholics were no longer available as they had been, and the life of the missionary was harder than ever; but the colleges on the Continent continued to send their ardent apostles into the field, and by 1615, when Acquaviva died, there are said to have been sixty-eight Jesuits in England. The prestige of Parsons had fallen low, but he remained, intriguing, on the Continent. For some years students had been passing from the Jesuits to the Benedictines, and in 1602, in spite of the opposition of Parsons, the Benedictines obtained from the Pope the right to work in England. Clement VIII. had received so many complaints that he threatened to expel Parsons from Rome, and Parsons, at a hint given him by Acquaviva, went to Naples for the advantage of his health, and remained there until the death of Clement. He returned with the accession of Paul V. in 1605, and continued to fight the secular clergy in regard to the archpriest. The extraordinary course of deception and intrigue which he maintained until his death in 1610 must be read in the spirited narrative of Father Taunton. His death closes the chief interest of the English mission under Acquaviva, and we will return to the struggling apostles at a later stage.

FOOTNOTES:

[15] E.L. Taunton, History of the Jesuits in England (1901): an admirable critical study of Parsons and of the quarrels of the Jesuits with the secular clergy, though not quite a balanced and comprehensive history. R. Simpson's Edmund Campion (1867) is a very fine biography of that high-minded Jesuit; and T. Law has written a learned and exact Historical Sketch of the Conflicts between the Jesuits and Secular Priests (1889). More sympathetic and detailed accounts of the religious work of the English Jesuits are given in Dr. Jessopp's One Generation of a Norfolk House (1879), and Father Morris's Life of Father Gerard (1881). A complete and impartial history of the Jesuits in England, telling with equal candour their heroism and their defects, is desirable. The writings of recent Jesuits are not "history," but very Jesuitical polemic.