AWAY FROM ROME!
Jose, a melancholy epicure who signed whatever his minister laid on his desk without reading it, now declared war on the Jesuits both in the colonies and in Portugal itself. Among the foes of the Society he was the most energetic and the most merciless a free thinker, a beast of prey who felt no twinge of the heart as he crouched and sprang. He knew everything that had been said and written againsr the Society and offered selected readings to the King. His soldiers dealt ruthlessly with the Indians who, partly for the sake of theii spiritual fathers, defended themselves bravely but were finally defeated by an army led by Carvalho's brother.
Carvalho had many reasons for fearing that he might be dismissed and so held the nobles and the clergy all the more firmly under his thumb. He wrote pamphlets against the Jesuits in which he accused them of connivance with an attempt on the King's life, though that attempt had probably been instigated by a noble family in order to avenge the seduction of a daughter. He declared them guilty of having instigated a popular rebellion in Oporto against the destruction of the vineyards, and said that behind the screen of efforts to improve the economic situation of their missions they were planning to get control of world trade and to establish an independent kingdom. Carvalho's associate was Cardinal Saldanha, Papal inspector of the Society, whom some say had been bribed. One night during Septem- ber, 1756, all Jesuits at the Court were arrested and exiled. A sudden search of their houses in Portugal for money and papers revealed noth- ing incriminating. The hundred thousand pesos duros which were found in Lisbon had been a present from the Queen of Spain to the missions. Three years later, hundreds of fathers were marched off to the Papal States with rations like those given to convicts. Many re- mained behind in inhuman prisons, and more than fifty mounted die scaffold during 1761. Among them was one of die greatest figures in the Society, the eighty-year-old missionary Father Mala- greda whose life had been as rich in adventure as the Odyssey. He went to his death in a habit on which grimacing demons had been painted. A pointed paper cap was placed on his head, and a gag was put in his mouth. The Court and the ministers enjoyed the play from gaily decorated loges. Twenty years later, the damp subterranean dungeons were opened and more than eight hundred Jesuits again saw
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