In September 1758, a charge was trumped up in Lisbon in a most tortuous fashion, based on the alleged discovery of a plot to assassinate the king. Those chiefly involved were the Duke de Averio and the Marquis de Tavora, with his wife, his two sons, his two brothers and his two sons-in-law, all of whom were seized at midnight on December 12. The marchioness and her daughter-in-law were carried off to a convent in their night-dresses; the men of the family, to dens formerly occupied by the wild beasts of the city menagerie. De Aveiro, who was supposed to be the assassin-in-chief, was not taken until next day. Several others were included in this general round-up, some of them for having asserted that the whole conspiracy was a manufactured affair. At the same time, some of the domestic servants of the marquis, probably for having offered resistance at the time of the arrest, were put to death so that they could tell no tales. Not being able to have the accused parties tried before any regularly constituted tribunal, because of the lack of evidence, Carvalho drew up a sentence of condemnation himself, and presented it to a new court which he had just established, called the inconfidenza, and demanded the signatures of the judges who were all his creatures. After being stormed at for a while, all, with one exception, put their names to the paper. Then, as by the law of the land no nobleman could be condemned to death except by his peers, he constituted himself as a tribunal, along with his secretary of the Navy and the secretary of Foreign Affairs, neither of whom had any difficulty in complying with the wish of their master.
On January 11, 1759, three of the noblemen involved, Aveiro, Tavora and Antongia, were led out to execution before the king's palace. Vast multitudes had assembled in the public square; and to ensure order, fresh regiments had been summoned from other parts of the kingdom. A riot was feared, for the Tavoras were among the noblest families of the realm. The accused had not even been defended and had been interrogated on the rack. The execution was most expeditious, and the heads of the three victims quickly rolled in the dust. That night, the marchioness was taken from the convent to the new dungeons in the fort; and on January 12, she heard the sentence of death passed on her by Carvalho himself who was both judge and accuser. The scaffold was erected in the square of Belem; and long before daylight of January 13 an immense multitude had gathered to witness the hideous spectacle. The marchioness advanced and took her seat in the chair. The axe quickly descended on her neck – and all was over. She was despatched in this hurried fashion because the interference of the king was feared. Indeed, the messenger arrived just when the head had been severed from the body. The two sons of the marchioness and her son-in-law were then stretched on the rack and strangled. The father of the family, the old marquis followed next in order. As a mark of clemency, his torture was brief but effective. Four others were then executed; fire was set to the gibbet; and its blood-stained timbers along with the bodies of the victims were reduced to ashes and thrown into the Tagus. This was not a scene in a village of savages, but in a great European capital which had just passed through a terrible visitation of God but apparently had not understood its meaning. Carvalho was thirsting for more blood, but the king held him back; so he contented himself with destroying the palaces of the Aveiras and Tavoras; sprinkling the sites with salt; forbidding anyone to bear the names hitherto so illustrious, and even effacing them from the monuments and the public archives. He was not allowed to commit any more official murders for the moment; but at least he had thousands who were dying in his underground dungeons.
What had the Jesuits to do with all this? Nothing whatever. They were accused of being the spiritual advisers of the Tavora family which it was impossible to disprove, because though the persons implicated by the accusation were all arrested on the 11th, sentence of death had been already passed on the 9th. There were twenty-nine paragraphs in the indictment. The twenty-second said that "even if the exuberant and conclusive proofs already adduced did not exist, the presumption of the law would suffice to condemn such monsters." Of course, no lawyer in the world could plead against such a charge, and it is noteworthy that in the Brief of Suppression of the whole Society by Clement XIV which brings together all the accusations against it, there is no mention whatsoever, even inferentially, of any conspiracy of the Jesuits against the life of the King of Portugal. Moreover, the Inquisition and all the Bishops of Spain judged this Portuguese horror at its proper value, when on May 3, 1759 they put their official stamp of condemnation on the pamphlets with which the whole of Europe was flooded immediately after Pombal's infamous act. They denounced the charges one by one as "designed to foment discord, to disturb the peace and tranquillity of souls and consciences, and especially to discredit the holy Society of Jesus and religious who laudably labor in it to the benefit of the Church; as is known throughout the world." Over and over again as each book is specifically anathematised, the "holy Society of Jesus" is spoken of with commendation and praise. The condemned publications were then burnt in the market place. That exculpation ought to have been sufficient, coming as it did not only from all the Spanish bishops but from the Inquisition, which from the very beginning had been uniformly suspicious of everything Jesuitical. Against this utterance Pombal was powerless for it was the voice of another nation.
When the year 1759 began, three of the most conspicuous and most venerable Fathers of Portugal were in jail under sentence of death. But neither the king nor Carvalho dared to carry out the sentence of execution. Something however had to be done; and therefore a royal edict, which had been written long before, was issued. After reciting all that had been previously said about Brazil, etc. it declared that "these religious being corrupt and deplorably fallen away from their holy institute, and rendered manifestly incapable by such abominable and inveterate vices to return to its observances, must be properly and effectually banished, denaturalized, proscribed and expelled from all his majesty's dominions, as notorious rebels, traitors, adversaries and aggressors of his royal person and realm; as well as for the public peace and the common good of his subjects; and it is ordered under the irremissible pain of death, that no person, of whatever state or condition, is to admit them into any of his possessions or hold any communication with them by word or writing, even though they should return into these states in a different garb or should have entered another order, unless with the King's permission." It is sad to have to record that the Patriarch of Lisbon endorsed the invitation to the Jesuits to avail themselves of this royal clemency.
The procurators of the missions who occupied a temporary house in Lisbon had been already carried off to jail; and their money, chalices, sacred vessels, all of which were intended for Asia and Brazil, were confiscated. The Exodus proper began at the College of Elvas on September 1. At night-fall a squadron of cavalry arrived; and taking the inmates prisoners, marched them off without any intimation of whither they were going. On the following day, Sunday, they were lodged in a miserable shed, exhausted though they were by the journey, with nothing but a few crusts to eat, after having suffered intensely from the heat all day long. They were not even allowed to go to Mass. During the next night and the following day, they continued their weary tramp and at last arrived at Evora. There the young men were left at the college, and the sixty-nine Professed were compelled to walk for six consecutive days till they reached the Tagus. Many were old and decrepit and one of them lost his mind on the journey. When they reached the river, they were put in open boats and exposed all day long to the burning sun, with nothing to eat or drink. They were then transferred to a ship which had been waiting for them since the month of April. It was then late in September.
Other exiles soon joined them, after going through similar experiences, until there were one hundred and thirty-three in the same vessel. They were all kept in the hold till they were out of sight of land. There was no accommodation for them: the food was insufficient; the water was foul; there were no dishes, so that six or seven had to sit around a tin can, and take out what they could with a wooden spoon, and the same vessel had to serve for the water they drank. The orders were to stop at no port until they reached Civita Vecchia. However, after passing the Straits of Gibraltar, it became evident that unless the captain wanted to carry a cargo of corpses to Italy, he must take in supplies somewhere: for many of the victims were sixty or seventy years of age. There were even some octogenarians among them. Hence, on reaching Alicante, in Spain, one of the Fathers went ashore. There was a college of the Society in that city; and as soon as the news spread of the arrival of the prisoners, the people rushed to the shore to supply their wants, but the messenger was the only one allowed to be seen. They then sailed away from Alicante. Off Corsica, a storm caught them and so delayed their progress that a stop had to be made at Spezia for more food. At last, on October 24, more than a month after they had left Lisbon, they were flung haggard, emaciated and exhausted on the shores of the Papal States at Civita Vecchia. Of course, they were received by the people there with unbounded affection; and as Father Weld relates "none exceeded the Dominican Fathers in their tender solicitude for the sufferers." A marble slab in their church records their admiration for these confessors of the Faith with whom the sons of St. Dominic declared they were devinctissimi – "closely bound to them in affection."
On September 29, troops surrounded the College of Coimbra. The astonished populace was informed that it was because the Fathers had been fighting; that some were already killed and others wounded; and the soldiers had been summoned to prevent further disorders. That night amid pouring rain, the tramp of horses' hoofs was heard; and as the people crowded to the windows, they saw the venerable men of the college led away between squads of cavalry as if they were brigands or prisoners of war. They arrived at the Tagus on October 7, where others were already waiting. They numbered in all 121, and were crowded into two small ships which were to carry them into exile. They had scarcely room to move. Yet, when they arrived at Genoa, they were all packed into one of the boats. At Leghorn, they were kept for a whole month in close confinement on board the ship. When they started out, they were buffeted by storms, and not until January 4, 1760 did they reach the papal territory. They were in a more wretched state of filth and emaciation than their predecessors.
These prisoners were the special criminals of the Society, namely – the professed Fathers. The other Jesuits were officially admitted to be without reproach and were exhorted, both by the civil and ecclesiastical authorities, to abandon the Order and be dispensed from their vows. As these non-Professed numbered at least three-fourths of the whole body, the difficult problem presents itself of explaining how the Professed who are looked up to by the rest of the Society for precept and example should be monsters of iniquity and yet could train the remaining three-fourths of the members in such a way as to make them models of every virtue.
Pombal was convinced that he could separate the youth of the Society from their elders; and he was extremely anxious to do so, because of the family connections of many of them, and because of the loss to the nation at one stroke of so much ability and talent. But he failed egregiously. They were all gathered in the colleges of Coimbra and Evora. No seclusion was observed. Everybody was free to visit them from the world outside; and inducements of every kind were held out to them to abandon the Society: family affection, worldly ambition, etc. – but without avail. They had no regular superior, so they elected a fourth-year theologian who had just been ordained a priest. Another was made minister; and a third, master of novices. The house was kept in excellent order; the religious discipline was perfect and the exercises of the community went on with as much regularity as if nothing were happening. Pombal sent commissioner after commissioner to shake the constancy of the young men, but only two of the tempted ones weakened. "Who is their superior?" he asked one day in a rage. The answer was: "Joseph Carvalho – your namesake and relative." On October 20, a letter from the cardinal was read in both houses. He expressed his astonishment that these young Jesuits did not avail themselves of the royal favor to desert; and he warned them that they were not suffering for their faith, and that "their refusal of His Majesty's offer to release them from their vows was not virtuous constancy but seditious obstinacy."
Finally, October 24 was fixed for their departure, and notice was given that they could not expect to go to any civilized land, but would probably be dropped on some desolate island off the African coast. That shook the resolution of two of the band, but the rest stood firm. In the morning, all went to Holy Communion and at an hour before sunset, the word was given to start. They sang a Te Deum and then set out – 130 in all. They were preceded by a troop of cavalry; a line of foot soldiers marched on either side; while here and there torches threw their glare over this grim nocturnal procession. It took them four days to reach Oporto, where they met their brethren from Braganza and Braga. There were only ten from the former place, but sixty soldiers had been detailed to guard them. Indeed, the troopers from Braga had to keep the crowds back with drawn swords, so eager were the people along the road to express their sympathy. At Oporto the young heroes had to witness the desertion of four Professed Fathers; but that did not weaken their resolution. They were all crammed into three small craft, but the weather was too stormy to leave the port; and there they remained a whole week, packed so close together that there was scarcely room to lie side by side. The air became so foul that it was doubtful if they could survive. Even their guards took sick, and, at last, a number of the prisoners were transferred to a fort in the harbor.
At last to the number of 223 they sailed down the Douro. One of them died, and his companions sang the Office of the Dead over him and buried him in the sea. When the ship did not roll too much, Mass was said and they went to Communion. All the exercises that are customary in religious houses were scrupulously performed, and the Church festivals were observed as if they were a community at home. They were quarantined two weeks at Genoa without being permitted to go ashore. Then another scholastic died, and they found that his earthly goods consisted of nothing but a few bits of linen, that must have been foul by this time, besides a discipline and a hair shirt. They cast anchor at Civita Vecchia on February 7, having left inhospitable Portugal in October.
The band from Evora to the number of ninety-eight, of whom only three were priests, had not such a rude experience except in the distress of seeing some deserters, among them two Professed Fathers. The officer in charge of the ship, unlike most of the government employees, was tender and kind to them. How could he have been otherwise? His name was de Britto – the same as that of the Portuguese martyr in India. It meant the loss of his position, perhaps, but what did he care? When they reached Lisbon, the nineteen who had been separated from the first detachment to be kept in jail came aboard, and the little band numbered 115 all told, when the ship hoisted anchor and made for the sea. They reached Civita Vecchia where the two happy troops of valiant young Jesuits met in each others arms. Their number was then 336. They were distributed among the various establishments of Italy, the novices being sent to Sant' Andrea in Rome. Two cardinals and a papal nuncio who were making their retreat in the house at the time insisted on serving them at table, while the Pope sent a message to the General to say: "These young men have reflected great honor on the Society and have shown how well they have been trained."
The fury of Pombal was not yet sated. Not an island of the Atlantic, not a station in Africa or India, not a mission in the depths of the forests of America that was not searched and looted by his commissioners, who ruthlessly expelled the devoted missionaries who were found there. Men venerable for age and acquirements were given over to brutal soldiers who were ordered to shoot them if any attempt at escape was made. They were dragged hundreds of miles through the wildest of regions, over mountains, through raging torrents, amid driving storms; they were starved and had nothing but the bare ground on which to rest; they were searched again and again as if their rags held treasures; were made to answer the roll call twice a day like convicts in jail; and then tossed in the holds of crazy ill-provisioned ships with no place to rest their weary heads, except on a coil of rope or in the filth of the cattle; and when dead, they were to be flung to the sharks. When at last they reached Lisbon they were forbidden to show themselves on deck, lest their fellow-countrymen and their families might be shocked by their degradation. They were then spirited away to the dungeons of St. Julian and Jonquiera to rot, until death relieved them of their sufferings. Those who were not placed in the crowded jails were sent in their rags to find a refuge somewhere outside of their native land.
As has been said, there were two provinces in Portuguese South America – Brazil and Maranhão. In the former, besides the Seminary of Belem, the Society had six colleges and sixty-two residences with a total of 445 members. Orders were given to the whole 445 to assemble at Bahia, Pernambuco and San Sebastian. Everything was seized. At Bahia, the novices were stripped of their habits and sent adrift, though the families of some of them lived in far away Portugal. The rest were confined in a house surrounded by armed troops while the bishop of the city proclaimed that any one who would encourage the victims to persevere in their vocation would be excommunicated. Then, one day, without a moment's notice, all were ordered out of the house and sent to jail in different places. There they remained for the space of three months waiting for the missionaries from the interior to arrive. They came in slowly, for some of them lived eight hundred miles away, and had to tramp all that distance through the forests and over mountain ranges. Before all had made their appearance, however, the first batches were sent across to the mother country to make space. They started on March 16 and reached the Tagus on June 6. Those from Bahia had taken from April to June, and it was fully three months before the convict ship from Pernambuco arrived in port.
All this time the deported religious were kept between decks, and soldiers stood at the gangway with drawn swords to prevent any attempt to go up to get a breath of fresh air. Their food was nothing but vegetables cooked in sea-water, for there was not enough of drinking water even to slake their thirst. The result was that the ship had a cargo of half-dead men when it anchored off Lisbon; but the unfortunate wretches were kept imprisoned there for fifteen days with the port-holes closed. They were then transferred to a Genoese ship and sent to Civita Vecchia. It appears that the Provincial of these Brazilian Jesuits was named Lynch; but strange to say, there is no mention of him in any of the Menologies. The deportation from Pernambuco and San Sebastian were repetitions of this organized brutality; and the same methods were employed at Goa in India, and the other dependencies, such as Macao and China. In the transportations from these posts in the Orient, the ships had to stop at Bahia which had been witness of the first exportations; but the victims in the China ships could learn nothing of what had happened. Twenty-three of them died on one of the journeys from India. It is noted that a Turk at Algiers and a Danish Lutheran sea-captain, had shown the greatest humanity to the victims whose fellow countrymen seemed transformed into savage beasts. The prisoners had been kept in confinement twenty months before they left Goa; and when they arrived at Lisbon on October 18, 1764, they were taken off in long boats at the dead of night, and lodged in the foulest dungeons of the fortress of St. Julian.
But these were not the only victims of Carvalho. There were prisoners from every grade of society, and their number reached the appalling figure of nine thousand. Among them were eminent ecclesiastics, bishops and canons and some of the most distinguished laymen of the kingdom. A description of the prisons in which they were confined for years or till they died has been given to posterity by some of the victims. Father Weld in his "Suppression of the Society in Portugal" quotes extensively from their letters. The jails were six in number: Belem, Almeida, Azeitano, St. George, Jonquiera and St. Julian. They had annexes, also, along the African coasts or on the remote islands of the Atlantic. Belem, the Portuguese name for Bethlehem, so called because it had once been an abbey, was about four miles from Lisbon towards the ocean. It had the distinction of keeping its prisoners behind iron bars, but exposed to the public like wild beasts in a menagerie; so that the public could come and look at them and feed them if so disposed. The Portuguese criminals were given a pittance by the government, to purchase food, but the foreigners had to beg from the spectators for the means to support life. It was admirably contrived to induce insanity.
Jonquiera lay between Belem and Lisbon. The cells were numerous in this place. Moreira, the king's former confessor, and Malagrida were among the inmates. The Marquis de Lorna who was also confined there says "there were nineteen cells, each about seven paces square, and so tightly closed that a light had to be kept burning continually; otherwise they would have been in absolute darkness. When the prisoners were first put in them, the plaster was still wet and yielded to the slightest pressure. The cold was intense. Worst of all for a Catholic country, the sacraments were allowed the prisoners only once a year." The Marquis says that during the sixteen years he spent there "he never heard Mass." In these dungeons there were 221 Jesuits, 88 of whom died in their chains. The Castle of St. Julian stood on the banks of the Tagus and the walls were washed by the tide. In this place, there were 125 Jesuits of all nations; men of high birth, of great virtue and intellectual ability. The cells were situated below the sea-level; and were damp, unventilated, choked with filth and swarming with vermin. Some of the Fathers passed nineteen years in those tombs. The drinking water was putrid; the prisoners' clothes were in rags; often not sufficient for decency; many had no under garments and no shoes; their hair and beards were never cut; the food was scant and of the worst quality, and was often carried off before there was time to eat it. The oil of the single lamp in the cells was so limited that to save it, the wick was reduced to two or three threads. The same conditions prevailed in the other prisons. Meantime the jailers were making money on the supplies supposed to be served to the prisoners. Such was prison life in Portugal during the twenty years of Pombal's administration.
One of the particularly outrageous features of these imprisonments was that Pombal preferred to hold foreigners rather than native Portuguese. The foreigners, having no friends in the country, would not, in all probability, be claimed by their relatives; and as the ministers of nearly all the nations of Europe were of the same mind as himself, he had no fear of political intervention. Thus we find in a letter of Father Kaulen, a German Jesuit, which was published by Christopher de Murr, that in one section of St. Julian, besides fifty-four Portuguese Jesuits, there were thirteen Germans, one Italian, three Frenchmen, two Spaniards, and three Chinese. These Chinese Jesuits must have made curious reflections on the meaning of the term "Christian nations." "There are others in the towers," adds Father Kaulen, "but I cannot find out who they are, or how many, or to what country they belong."
The three Frenchmen, Fathers du Gad and de Ranceau along with Brother Delsart were set free at the demand of Marie Leczinska, the wife of Louis XV; it was through them that Father Kaulen was able to send his letter to the provincial of the Lower Rhine. He himself was probably liberated later by the intervention of Maria Theresa, but there is no record of it. His letter is of great value as he had personal experience of what he writes. His experience was a long one, for he entered the prison in 1759; and this communication to his provincial is dated October 12, 1766. In it he writes: —
"I was taken prisoner by a soldier with a drawn sword and brought to Fort Olreida on the frontier of Portugal. There I was put in a frightful cell filled with rats which got into my bed and ate my food. I could not chase them away, it was so dark. We were twenty Jesuits, each one in a separate cell. During the first four months we were treated with some consideration. After that, they gave us only enough food to keep us from dying of hunger. They took away our breviaries, medals, etc. One of the Fathers resisted so vigorously when they tried to deprive him of his crucifix that they desisted. The sick got no help or medicine.
"After three years they transferred nineteen of us to another place because of a war that had broken out. We travelled across Portugal surrounded by a troop of cavalry, and were brought to Lisbon; and after passing the night in a jail with the worst kind of criminals, we were sent to St. Julian, which is on the seashore. It is a horrible hole, underground, dark and foul. The food is bad, the water swarming with worms. We have half a pound of bread a day. We receive the sacraments only when we are dying. The doctor lives outside but if we fall sick during the night, he is not called. The prison is filled with worms and insects and little animals such as I never saw before. The walls are dripping wet, so that our clothes soon rot. One of the Fathers died and his face was so brilliant that one of the soldiers exclaimed: 'That's the face of a saint.' We are not unhappy, and the three French Fathers who left us envied our lot.
"Very few of us have even the shreds of our soutanes left. Indeed we have scarcely enough clothes for decency. At night a rough covering full of sharp points serves as a blanket; and the straw on which we sleep as well as the blanket that covers us soon become foul, and it is very hard to get them renewed. We are not allowed to speak to any one. The jailor is extremely brutal and seems to make a point of adding to our sufferings; only with the greatest reluctance does he give us what we need. Yet we could be set free in a moment if we abandoned the Society. Some of the Fathers who were at Macao and had undergone all sorts of sufferings at the hands of the pagans, such as prison chains and torture say to us that perhaps God found it better to have them suffer in their own country for nothing, than among idolaters for the Faith.
"We ask the prayers of the Fathers of the province, but not because we lament our condition. On the contrary, we are happy. As for myself, though I would like to see my companions set free, I would not change places with you outside. We wish all our Fathers good health so that they may work courageously for God in Germany to make up for the little glory he receives here in Portugal.
Your Reverence's most humble servant
Lawrence Kaulen,
Captive of Jesus Christ."
Pombal was determined now to make a master-stroke to discredit the Portuguese Jesuits. He would disgrace and put to death as a criminal their most distinguished representative, Father Malagrida, now over seventy years of age, who had already passed two years in the dungeons of Jonquiera. Malagrida was regarded by the people as a saint. He had labored for many years in the missions of Brazil and was marvelously successful in the work of converting the savages. Unfortunately he had been recalled to Portugal in 1749 by the queen mother to prepare her for the end of her earthly career. As Malagrida knew how Carvalho's brother was acting in Brazil, he was evidently a dangerous man to have so near the Court. Hence when the earthquake occurred and the holy old missionary dared to tell the people that possibly it was a punishment of God for the sins of the people, Carvalho banished him to Setubal and kept him there for two years. When the supposed plot against the king's life occurred, Malagrida was sent to prison as being concerned in it, though he had never been in Lisbon since his banishment. He was condemned to death with the other supposed conspirators; but his character as a priest, and his acknowledged sanctity made the king forbid the execution of the sentence. Pombal, however, found a way out of the difficulty. A book was produced which was said to have been written by Malagrida during his imprisonment. It was crammed with utterances that only a madman could have written: In any case it could not have been produced by the occupant of a dark cell, where there was no ink and no paper. When it was presented to the Inquisition whose death sentences the king himself could not revoke, the judges refused to consider the case at all; whereupon they were promptly removed by Pombal who made his own brother chief inquisitor; and from him and two other tools, promptly drew a condemnation of Malagrida for heresy, schism, blasphemy and gross immorality.