Jesuits. The Society of Jesus was founded by Ignatius Loyola and approved by Pope Paul III in 1540. It offered total obedience to the papacy and was prominent in the effort to recover ground lost to the church by the Reformation. Mary Tudor, though a devoted catholic, mistrusted the order and did not invite it to England, though a number of Englishmen went abroad to join it. But the deterioration of relations between Elizabeth and the papacy, culminating in the bull of excommunication of 1570, changed the situation. William Allen had already founded a seminary at Douai and about 100 catholic priests had made their way back to England by 1580, living an undercover existence, hiding in priest holes, and protected by the old catholic gentry. In that year, two Jesuit priests landed—Campion and Parsons—accompanied by a lay brother. Their mission lasted only a few months but gave an important boost to the morale of English catholics. Campion was soon apprehended and executed in December 1581: Parsons left for the continent and never returned. Elizabeth's ministers were at pains to convict the Jesuits of duplicity and indeed their interpretation of the papal bull—that catholics were not bound by it ‘things being as they are’—was disingenuous. The events of the rest of the decade—powerful French and catholic influence in Scotland, plots against the queen's life, the threat of the Armada—combined to strengthen anti-catholic feeling in England, much of it concentrated on the Jesuits. But the culminating disaster for English catholics was the Gunpowder plot of 1605, which resulted in the capture of Henry Garnett, Jesuit superior in England for nearly twenty years. Though he claimed that he knew of the plot only through the confessional, others doubted, and he was executed as a traitor. For decades, ‘Jesuitical’ became a term of abuse, signifying mental reservation, prevarication, and casuistry. The prominence of Jesuits throughout Europe as teachers and confessors encouraged the belief that they practised relentless and insidious indoctrination. The fires of fear and hatred were stoked again by suspicions that Charles I (with a catholic wife) and Archbishop Laud were crypto-papists, and in 1679 by the lurid allegations of the Popish plot. Titus Oates purported to be a repentant Jesuit and his revelations of a Jesuit scheme to murder Charles II and place James, duke of York, on the throne brought nine Jesuits to the scaffold. But, in the long run, the Enlightenment proved more damaging to the order than downright persecution. The Jesuits were accused of accommodation and undue pliability in their zeal to proselytize and the order was wound up by Pope Clement XIV in 1773 after France, Spain, and Portugal had all moved against it. Surprisingly, it continued in Russia and Prussia, where there were many Jesuit teachers, and where Catherine the Great and Frederick the Great paid little attention to papal bulls. Though reconstituted in 1814 by Pope Pius VII, the circumstances which had made Jesuits so hated were no longer in existence. The French Revolution, in which the catholic church had been persecuted, first by de-Christianizers and then by Napoleon, had brought about a realignment, and French refugee clergy had been welcomed and given assistance in Britain. The English province of the order was re-established in 1829, with the Jesuits in Scotland, who had never been strong, tucked into that organization. Although fierce bursts of anti-catholic feeling were still possible, particularly at the time of ‘papal aggression’ in 1850, the role of the Society of Jesus was no longer a national bugbear.

J. A. Cannon