Page:Mexico, Aztec, Spanish and Republican, Vol 1.djvu/262

246 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 preconcerted plan to get rid of an obnoxious minister; and, as soon as it was known that this personage had been exiled, the rioters instantly 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 downfall, the French minister eagerly joined with the advocates of plunder; 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 designs. 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 commotion was chiefly the work of the body, deeply alarmed Charles, and drew him into the views of the French cabinet."

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