_Jealousy on the Part of the Dominicans and Franciscans towards
Jesuits—This Jealousy coöperates with the Mercantile Jealousy of the
Spaniards at Manila—Franciscan Friars establish themselves at Miyako,
Ōsaka, and Nagasaki—Edicts against them—Deposition and Death of the
Emperor’s Nephew—A. D. 1593-1595._
It was not alone against the emperor’s hostility and the mercantile
envy of the Spanish that the Jesuits had to contend. The rapid rise
and great successes of the Company of Jesus had excited against them
not only the dread and deadly hatred of the Protestants (which might
naturally enough have been expected), but feelings also of envy and
jealousy, scarcely less hostile, and by no means very scrupulous,
on the part of their monastic brethren of the Catholic church,—the
Dominicans, and especially the numerous bodies of Franciscans, who had
attempted, by various reforms and modifications, to revive and purify
that ancient order so as to make it equal to compete with the Jesuits.
A brief of Pope Gregory XIII, dated in 1585, had forbidden, under pain
of the greater excommunication, any but Jesuits to proceed to Japan
with the view of exercising any ecclesiastical function there; and
this bull was not less disagreeable to the Dominicans and Franciscans,
than the Portuguese monopoly of the Japanese trade was to the Spanish
merchants. At Manila these feelings of dissatisfaction, both mercantile
and ecclesiastical, combined in a common focus, giving rise to the
most injurious and unfounded reports, which were even embodied in
print, of extensive apostasies among the Japanese converts, and of
the great jeopardy into which Catholicism had been brought by the
misconduct of the Jesuits, who, at this moment, were out of favor in
Spain.
The same Harada, already mentioned, having gone in person to Manila,
inflamed the zeal of some Franciscans whom he found there, by
representing that it was to the Jesuit missionaries personally, and not
to their religion, that the emperor was opposed. The Spanish governor,
not having received the emperor’s answer to his former letter, was
induced, in the hope of opening the door to commercial intercourse, to
write a new one; and four Franciscans attached themselves to the bearer
of it, eagerly seizing upon this opportunity to gain admission into
Japan.
When the emperor found that these new deputies had not brought the
submission which he had demanded, at first he was very angry, but
was finally persuaded to allow them to travel through the empire in
order to see and to report its greatness. The Franciscans were even
suffered to build or buy a house at Miyako, to which they presently
added a church; and, being joined by others of their order, a convent
was established at Ōsaka. Two of them having gone to Nagasaki, took
possession of a church in the environs of that city, which had remained
closed since the commencement of the persecution; and here, as well as
in the other two cities, they performed their religious functions with
an ostentation and publicity which greatly alarmed the Jesuits, whom
the Franciscans accused of an unworthy timidity.
The Jesuits, under these circumstances, thought proper to call the
attention of these new-comers to the bull of Gregory XIII, above
referred to, prohibiting the entry into Japan of any ecclesiastics
except those of the Company of Jesus; to which the Franciscans replied,
that they had entered Japan not as ecclesiastics, but as envoys from
the governor of Manila; and that being there without any violation of
the bull, nobody had any right to prevent them from exercising their
ecclesiastical functions,—a piece of casuistry which not even a Jesuit
could have outdone. Very soon, however, the governor of Nagasaki
closed the church of the Franciscans, and, before long, an edict
appeared threatening the punishment of death to all who frequented
the convent and church at Miyako,—procedures which the Franciscans
were uncharitable enough to ascribe to the intrigues of the Jesuits.
It seems probable, however, that decisive steps would still earlier
have been taken against these over-zealous Franciscans, had not the
emperor’s attention been engrossed by other more pressing matters. He
had conceived a jealousy against his nephew and colleague, whom, by
slow and cautious steps, he stripped of all his authority, sending him
at length to a monastery of bonzes, where he soon received an order to
cut himself open. The thirty-one wives of the deposed prince, with all
their children, were publicly beheaded, and all his closest adherents
shared his disgrace, and many of them his tragical fate.[59] An
infant son, by name Hideyori, borne to the emperor from his new wife
[Yodo-gimi by name], and to whom he desired to secure the succession,
was the innocent cause of these cruelties. No sooner was the nephew
out of the way than that infant received from the Dairi the title of
Kwambacudono.