246 



CAUSES OF THIS CONDUCT TO THE ORDER. 



blow ; but the trimming Charles banished the intellectual Jesuit 

 whilst he saved and screened the lazy monk. 



The pretext of Charles III. for his outrageous conduct was 

 found in an insurrection which occurred on the evening of Palm 

 Sunday, 1766, and gave up the capital of Spain, for forty- eight 

 hours, to a lawless mob. It was doubtless the result of a precon- 

 certed plan to get rid of an obnoxious minister ; and, as soon as it 

 was known that this personage had been exiled, the rioters in- 

 stantly surrendered their arms, made friends with the soldiers, and 

 departed to their homes. In fact, it was a political intrigue, which 

 the king and his minister charged on some of the Spanish grandees 

 and on the Jesuits. But as the former were too powerful to be 

 assailed by the king, his wrath was vented on the Fathers of the 

 Order of Jesus, whose lives, at this time, were not only innocent 

 but meritorious. 



" Some years preceding, on a charge as destitute of foundation, 

 they had been expelled from Portugal. In 1764, their inveterate 

 foe, the Duke de Choiseul, minister of Louis XV., had driven them 

 from France ; and, in Spain, their possessions were regarded with an 

 avaricious eye by some of the needy courtiers. To effect their down- 

 fall, the French minister eagerly joined with the advocates of plun- 

 der ; and intrigues were adopted which must cover their authors 

 with everlasting infamy. Not only was the public alarm carefully 

 excited by a report of pretended plots, and the public indignation, 

 by slanderous representations of their persons and principles ; but, 

 in the name of the chiefs of the order, letters were forged, which 

 involved the most monstrous doctrines and the most criminal de- 

 signs. A pretended circular from the general of the order, at 

 Rome, to the provincial, calling on him to join with the insurgents; 

 the deposition of perjured witnesses to prove that the recent com- 

 motion was chiefly the work of the body, deeply alarmed Charles, 

 and drew him into the views of the French cabinet." 1 



Spain was thus made a tool of France in an act of gross injustice, 

 not only to the reverend sufferers, but to the people over whose 

 spiritual and intellectual wants they had so beneficially watched. 



From this digression to the mingled politics of Mexico and 

 Europe we shall now return to the appropriate scene of our brief 

 annals. The captain of so important a port as Havana, and the 

 inadequate protection of the coast along the main, obliged the 

 government to think seriously about the increase and discipline of 

 domestic troops, and especially, to improve the condition of the 



1 Dr. Dunham's History of Spain and Portugal, vol. 5 5 p. 175. 



