In May of 1521, amidst the conflict of the Four Years’ War, the son of a noble Basque family was gravely injured at the French siege of Pamplona when a cannonball fired by the French-supported Navarrese forces shattered his leg. It is said that the Navarrese were so impressed with the courage of this young soldier, Inigo Lopez, that they carried him back to his home in Loyola, but this is likely an embellishment typical of hagiography, for Inigo Lopez de Loyola would go on to become a famous saint. That cannonball set young Inigo on the path to sainthood, for after a terribly bungled surgery that required the rebreaking and resetting his leg, he lay convalescing for some time, during which he pondered his future while reading about the lives of Jesus Christ and the Catholic saints. After his conversion and dedication to Catholicism, he traveled to Jerusalem, intent on helping to convert Muslims or die trying, but he was convinced by Franciscan monks there to go back home, where he began to build something of a following. He and his so-called Iniguistas, who called him simply The Pilgrim, went from city to city in Spain, barefoot and living off of alms, preaching the message that the church faithful should be receiving the Eucharist and confessing their sins weekly, rather than once a year, as was then common practice. While today this is standard, back then it was something of a disruptive doctrine, causing the Inquisition to take notice of him and his disciples. This was the beginning of Inigo Lopez’s commitment to orthodoxy. His Inquisitors instructed him that it was only the place of educated priests to instruct the laity, so Inigo and his followers traveled to France and enrolled at the Sorbonne, where he took the Latinized name Ignatius Loyola while completing his priestly training. Among his early apostles, he formed a brotherhood, the Society of Jesus, which was formally approved by Pope Paul III in 1540. Other Catholic orders suggested that it was arrogant and presumptuous to take the name of Jesus for his brotherhood, but before long it was hard to argue that Ignatius Loyola’s society, called Jesuits by their critics, did not live up to their exalted namesake. Ignatius lived to see the spread of his order through its ministry of education, when the Spanish viceroy of the Kingdom of Naples requested he set up a school in Sicily, but he never dreamed that his little priestly order would become the vast international network into which it transformed, growing within a couple hundred years to include some 22,000 priests operating 200 seminaries and 700 colleges, and acting as the confessors and counselors of princes and monarchs around the world. Nor could he have imagined the coequal growth of his order’s enemies, who would allege that the Jesuits were schemers, spies, conspirators, and even murderers. The story of the Society of Jesus is one of global power, its fearful suppression, its restoration, and the enduring conspiracy theories that surround the order even today.

In my recent series I touched on the Jesuits in Bavaria, and I mentioned in passing that they were the subject of a vast conspiracy theory. Certainly Ludwig II was not the only monarch to suppress the Society of Jesus in his kingdom, nor was he the first to see in them an insidious political force doing the bidding of the Pope and undermining his authority. Indeed, the Jesuits have been lurking in their black robes in the background of many a historical tale I have told on this podcast. They were said to have guarded the mysterious Voynich Manuscript, only entrusting it to Wilfrid Voynich because they believed he could keep it secret, as I stated in The Found Manuscript of Wilfrid Voynich. And it was a Jesuit priest, Jean Hardouin, who concocted the conspiracy theory that all of ancient history had been forged by an impious cohort of monks, as discussed in the final installment of my Chronological Revision Chronicles. The Jesuits stood as the orthodox opponents of Jansenists, as described in my series on The Jansenist Miracles of Enlightenment France, and we further discussed how Jesuits were seen as evil corrupters by their critics in France in my patron exclusive The Stigmatic Maiden and the Wanton Jesuit. The series on Jansenist miracles laid the groundwork for my discussion of the French Revolution in The Illuminati Illuminated, in which series I discussed conspiracy theories on the right that blamed revolutionary activity and Jacobinism particularly on the scheming of philosophes, Freemasons, and specifically on a Bavarian secret society inspired by Enlightenment ideals called The Illuminati, which just happened to be organized by a former Jesuit, Adam Weishaupt, and was said to be structured according to that religious order’s organizational model. What I did not discuss in these series is the so-called “Black Legend” of the Jesuits, the claims that the Society of Jesus was essentially a cabal of plotters scheming at world domination. The Society of Jesus makes no effort to hide the fact that it is a direct tool of the Pope. From its beginnings, even though it considered a mendicant order, the former soldier Ignatius Loyola conceived of it as a kind of military order, with a tightly centralized command structure, with all provincial superiors answering to a single Superior General, a commander elected to the position for life, who answers only to the Pope himself. This authority structure has led conspiracists to dub the Jesuit Superior General the “Black Pope,” arguing that the order is actually a kind of shadow government of the church. By the time of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, when those on the right sought a conspiratorial explanation of recent political developments, and later, after the Bourbon Restoration, when belief in a Jesuit conspiracy would become the overarching paranoid view of leftist politics, the Black Legend of the Jesuits would already be well established. It had arisen, unsurprisingly, during the Protestant Reformation, when Roman Catholic beliefs and practices became “papistry,” a pejorative term, among many who viewed the Pope and his Church, and especially his elite cadre of priests who controlled education and had the ear of many a sovereign, as evil.

Ignatius reading while convalescing at Loyola after a war injury. Public Domain.

A central element of the Black Legend is the belief that through the Jesuits, the Pope commits regicide, having kings and queens killed if they oppose his will. We may trace this view back to the Protestant Reformation, a time of violent upheaval and rising anti-Catholicism transpiring as Loyola’s order was growing in influence. In England and Scotland, the divisions created by the Reformation were dramatic, as I discussed at length in my Royal Blood Mystery series on Mary, Queen of Scots, and the murder of Lord Darnley. Indeed, numerous were the plots devised by Catholic conspirators to depose or even assassinate Queen Elizabeth and put Mary, Queen of Scots, on the throne. Pope Pius V even encouraged such plots when he issued a bull granting English Catholics the authority to overthrow her. Moreover, one of these, the Babington plot, was masterminded by a Jesuit priest named John Ballard, though there is no evidence that this plot had been expressly orchestrated by the Jesuit Superior General. Rather, Mary’s French Catholic supporters seem to have urged him to undertake the task. Nevertheless, and despite the plot’s failure and its exploitation as an excuse to execute Mary, it did much to tarnish the image of all Jesuits, painting them as intriguers and assassins. Following Elizabeth’s reign, Mary’s son James acceded to the throne, garnering support from Catholic powers by leading them to believe he would bring an end to some of Elizabeth’s persecutions of Catholics, such as the execution of priests who said Mass in secret and the onerous recusancy fines that any who refused to attend Protestant church service were forced to pay. Upon taking the throne, it appeared James might actually leave these fines in place, until he agreed to suspend them in exchange for Catholic loyalty. However, by the time he gave in to their appeals, some Catholic plots were already underway and shortly thereafter came to light. The Bye and Main plots involved abducting the king, forcing declarations of Catholic toleration, and then replacing him with a Catholic queen, his cousin, Lady Arbella Stuart. This plot was actually uncovered when a Jesuit priest named Father Gerard, fearing that the plot would result in further persecution of Catholics, betrayed them by passing information to the authorities. Strangely, though, this same Jesuit, and others, would soon be implicated in the most notorious assassination plot in British history.

On the 4th of November, 1605, King James ordered a search of the cellars and vaults of the old Palace of Westminster, meeting place of the House of Commons and the House of Lords. Nine days earlier an anonymous letter warning a Catholic nobleman to stay away from the meeting of Parliament scheduled for November 5th had been brought to his attention. They had been on high alert, and earlier that day, while making his rounds, the Lord Chamberlain had encountered a man named Guy Fawkes in a vault that contained a large pile of firewood. The Lord Chamberlain had initially thought little of the encounter when Fawkes stated that he worked for Thomas Percy, who had legally rented the vault. Only later was it suggested to the king that it was strange that Percy, a Catholic, would have need of renting a vault under Westminster when he owned a house in London. Upon returning to investigate further, Fawkes was discovered preparing a long match to detonate 36 barrels of old, decaying gunpowder that was hidden beneath the woodpile. The plot’s intention was clearly to blow up the building, killing King James in the same way as his father Lord Darnley had been killed at Kirk O’Field, and taking with him all of Parliament, save the few Catholic Lords the plotters had warned. “Remember, Remember, the Fifth of November,” became the perennial refrain, and Guy Fawkes, a villain to some and anti-hero to others, would be commemorated ever since. But Fawkes was not the orchestrator of this plot. In fact, he was something of a late recruit. The plot had been orchestrated by Robert Catesby, a well-known recusant Catholic. He and some of his fellow plotters were afterward killed in a dramatic shootout at the conclusion of a manhunt. Yet strangely, for many at the time, none of these plotters were seen as the real culprits, and instead blame was laid on the Jesuit order.

The Gunpowder Plot conspirators hanged, drawn and quartered. Public Domain.

While today it is remembered as the Gunpowder Plot, in its day, it was often referred to as the Jesuit Treason. The reason for this is that, as it came out during the ensuing trials, when the plotters held their initial secret meeting the year before, the Jesuit priest who had years earlier foiled the Bye and Main plots had said Mass for them, and though he denied any knowledge, it was assumed he aware of their plans. But more than this, during the summer leading up to the enactment of their plot, Robert Catesby had confessed his intentions to a Jesuit priest named Tesimond, who afterward was troubled enough to ask his superior, Father Garnet, for guidance in the matter. Garnet then went to Catesby and warned him the Pope had no desire for English Catholics to act out and cause further troubles for themselves. Clearly, this was not a Jesuit conspiracy. Nevertheless, Gerard, Tesimond, and Garnet did not go to the government with their knowledge of the plot, as Gerard had done in the past, so they were considered complicit. In reality, there is no indication that Gerard really was privy to their plans, and considering that he was known to have gone to the authorities with such knowledge before, it seems unlikely they would have entrusted him with the information. As for Tesimond and Garnet, the simple fact that the crown was known to put Catholic priests to death simply for saying Mass for crypto-Catholics and encouraging their recusancy seems reason enough for them not to go running to the authorities about anything. While King James gave a speech on the 9th of November stating that he believed the plot to be the work of a handful of zealots and would not hold the larger Catholic community responsible, he nevertheless chose to prosecute these Jesuits. While Gerard and Tesimond escaped his grasp, Garnet was arrested, tried for treason, hanged by the neck, disemboweled, and torn apart by horses.

The belief that Jesuits in particular conspired at regicide developed at the same time across the Channel, during the French Wars of Religion, when a Catholic zealot named Jacques Clément, encouraged by members of the Catholic League, murdered King Henri III with a dagger. Oddly, Henri III had been something of a champion of Catholicism, but recent concessions to Protestants had turned the ultra-orthodox against him. This was not exactly a Jesuit plot. Clément was a Dominican friar. But during later years, when anti-Jesuitism became indistinguishable from anti-Catholicism generally, it was seen as the start of a pattern in which Catholics murdered monarchs. Henri III’s successor, Henri IV, would survive multiple attempts on his life by disturbed Catholics who believed they were assassinating a tyrant, despite the fact that he had renounced Protestantism and converted to Catholicism. Only a month after his conversion, another Dominican priest, Pierre Barrière, attempted to kill him, and during his trial, it was alleged that he had confessed his intentions to certain Jesuits, who encouraged him. Suspicion of the Jesuits encouraging regicide came to a head a year and a half later, when a merchant’s son named Jean Châtel made another attempt on Henri IV’s life, and it was revealed he had been educated at a Jesuit college. The doctrinal teachings of the Jesuits came under scrutiny. Jesuits opposed the Divine Right of Kings, which many viewed as subordinating the secular authority of kings to papal authority. Additionally, Jesuits subscribed to a theoretical doctrine that the Pope’s temporal authority may in some situations extend to deposing kings, and that sometimes, in extreme circumstances, tyrannicide, the murder of tyrants, may be justified. None of these were central doctrines promoted by Jesuits, but in the wake of these assassination attempts, they seemed to confirm a conspiracy. As a result, Châtel’s college was shuttered, two of his teachers were exiled, and a third was hanged and burned at the stake. The Society of Jesus was thereafter outlawed in France, though this ban only lasted a decade. Thereafter, in 1610, one François Ravaillac, another fanatical Catholic, misconstrued Henri IV’s plans to invade the Spanish Netherlands as a declaration of war against Catholicism and murdered him in his carriage. Afterward, his interrogators tried to link him to a Jesuit conspiracy, even though Ravaillac insisted he had acted alone. They accused his Jesuit confessor of having been privy to his plans, which the priest denied. That year, as the Society of Jesus came under renewed attack for condoning and even fostering regicide, the Jesuits declared a moratorium on discussing justifications for tyrannicide. By that time, though, the Black Legend that Jesuits were little more than an order of conspirators and assassins had already taken shape.

Attack by Jean Châtel on Henri IV. The murderer's torment is depicted in the background. Public Domain.

Only a few years after this, the founding document of the Black Legend of the Jesuits appeared: the Monita Secreta Societatis Iesu, or Secret Instructions of the Society of Jesus. This document would prove to be as foundational for Jesuit conspiracy theories as The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion would be for the Jewish world conspiracy theory, and just like the Protocols, it was proven entirely false early on but continued to be touted as accurate for centuries. The Monita Secreta purported to be, as the title implies, a set of instructions given by the order’s Superior General, Claudio Acquaviva, detailing how to achieve the order’s goals of hoarding wealth and seizing power and influence. Essentially, like the Protocols, it was supposedly their plan for world domination. According to the Secret Instructions, wealth was to be accumulated by the manipulation and swindling of widows and heirs, power in the church was to be pursued by working to promote Jesuits to Bishoprics and actively discrediting priests of rival medicant orders, political influence was to be achieved by positioning themselves as the advisors of kings, or as their confessors, through which role they could gather intelligence and even acquire material with which they could blackmail monarchs. At all costs, the order’s image was to be kept pure, such that the reputation of any priest who left the order was to be injured by slander. The preface even stated that, if the Monita Secreta were ever revealed, the order should put forward a member of the society who had no knowledge of these Secret Instructions to offer plausible denials to the public. The thing is, though, that these Secret Instructions were known to have been written in Kraków, by Polish former Jesuit Jerome Zaharowski as a satire and libel. Bitter over having been kicked out of the order the year before, he fabricated the Monita Secreta in an effort to lampoon the Society of Jesus. Originally, he had not even published them as genuine, but rather as a kind of caricature of the order. Nevertheless, they were subsequently republished in numerous editions, accompanied by fabricated stories about how they had been discovered in Prague, or Paderborn, or was it Antwerp, or perhaps aboard a captured ship. Despite having been proven spurious and rejected as false even by some of the Jesuits’ staunchest critics, it would be raised again and again, often as though it had only just been discovered. Much like the Protocols of Zion, it was a hoax that would far outlive its hoaxer, and it would not be the last hoax or forgery to contribute to the Black Legend of the Jesuits.

Back in Great Britain, after the English Civil War and the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy, anti-Catholicism, and fears of Jesuit conspiracy, remained high. Ever since the so-called Jesuit Treason, or Gunpowder Plot, Jesuits were suspected of intrigue and nefarious machinations whenever something terrible transpired. Just as Jews had been blamed for the Black Plague in prior centuries, in 1665, when the bubonic plague struck London with renewed ferocity, Jesuits were seen as the culprits. And Jesuits were likewise scapegoated the next year, 1666, which many had dreaded for decades as the “Year of the Beast,” believing that the apocalyptic prophecies of Revelation would come to fruition then because the number of the year was so close to the Number of the Beast, 666. With the plague outbreak still waning, a fire broke out in September that consumed around 80 percent of the city, and amid the city’s panic and paranoia, Jesuit arson was alleged. The atmosphere was ripe for a conspiracy hoax, and one Protestant clergyman, Israel Tonge, who blamed Jesuits for the loss of his church in the fire, would help to supply it. Tonge became a rabid anti-Catholic conspiracy theorist, authoring numerous incoherent articles about the Roman Catholic Church’s plans for world domination. He shared these explicitly anti-Jesuit conspiracy theories with everyone he knew, including young Titus Oates, the son of a Baptist preacher. Tonge and Oates made plans to write some anti-Catholic pamphlets together, and Tonge even lent Oates some money, but Oates, a former chaplain of the Royal Navy, fell in with Catholics and converted. Encouraged by an English provincial Jesuit, he managed to get himself into a Jesuit College in Spain, which afterward kicked him out for his crude and foul mouth. Then, he lied his way into another Jesuit college for expatriates, this one in St. Omer, France, and again was expelled for blasphemous talk. A defeated Titus Oates finally returned to London with a definite ax to grind, and upon their reunion, he claimed to Israel Tonge that he had only converted in order to learn the Jesuit secrets, and learn them he had, he said. He then told Israel Tonge that the Jesuits were plotting something massive in London: to assassinate King Charles II, supplant him with his Catholic brother, the Duke of York, and reestablish Roman Catholicism as England’s state religion.

The Great Fire of London, 1666. Public Domain.

It is unclear whether Israel Tonge helped Titus Oates concoct this conspiracy claim or whether he was Oates’s first dupe and truly believed him, but it does seem apparent that Tonge helped Oates compose a manuscript detailing his knowledge of the conspiracy. And it is certain that he told Oates to hide the manuscript so that he could pretend to discover it. Tonge then arranged to get the information to the king by showing the manuscript to the king’s chemist, a mutual acquaintance. King Charles II thought the claims of the so-called Popish Plot were all lies. He believed, like many, that Israel Tonge was a bit touched by madness, and he believed Titus Oates, who was rather quickly revealed as the author of the manuscript, to be a wicked liar. Nevertheless, once word got around and his brother, the implicated Duke of York, demanded further investigation, he felt that it would have to be looked into further, even if just to debunk it. Oates swore out the truth of his statement for a local magistrate, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, and afterward, he and Tonge were questioned by the king’s Privy Council. Oates made numerous specific accusations against many Catholic noblemen and more than 500 Jesuits, whom he called out by name. As evidence, letters supposedly written by some of the accused but probably forged by Oates were presented, and some were impressed that Oates was able to recognize each by their handwriting, even though his having forged them was a more likely explanation for his ability to identify them. While the accusations were taken seriously enough that authorities began rounding up some of the Jesuits named by Oates for questioning, the affair did not escalate to become a full-fledged moral panic until Magistrate Godfrey, to whom Oates had sworn out his initial deposition, was discovered dead. Oates insisted Godfrey had been murdered by Jesuits, and then, as one skeptical contemporary put it, “the very Cabinet of Hell…opened.” Mass panic gripped London, and anyone even suspected of being Catholic was driven from the city. Nine Jesuits were executed for their alleged parts in the conspiracy, and twelve more perished while imprisoned on suspicion. At the height of the panic, Titus Oates went as far as implicating the Queen in plans to poison the king. Before long, though, it became clear that he was a liar. In the end, Titus Oates was tried for perjury, and declared “a shame to mankind,” and sentenced to endure a public shaming before he was imprisoned. He was pilloried, and then he was marched to prison behind a cart and whipped the entire way. As for Israel Tonge, he seems to have suffered no consequences for his part in promoting the Popish Plot.

The astonishing success of Titus Oates’ lies in enflaming public ire against the Jesuits may have had the further effect of inspiring one of the most prolific and little-known forgers in history, whose fabrications were long mistaken for primary historical evidence and helped to propagate the Black Legend of the Jesuits for centuries. His name was Robert Ware, an Irish son of a distinguished historian. Given to seizures as a child, Robert Ware was not chosen to be the principal beneficiary of his father’s estate, despite being his eldest son, because he was not expected to live long. When he defied medical expectations and grew out of his afflictions and even showed great aptitude in historical study and writing, his father ended up bequeathing Robert his library and manuscripts. During the Popish Plot mass hysteria, Robert Ware saw an opportunity both to make money from his skills and his father’s papers, and to encourage the anti-Catholic sentiment that was running amok. Like his father before him, he was staunchly Protestant, but more than that, he was a royalist, so in his initial forgeries, which he presented as having been discovered among his father’s papers even though he had fabricated them, he published supposed evidence that Catholics had secretly orchestrated Protestant dissent, and thus were responsible for the English Civil War and the execution of Charles I that was still fresh in English memory. He published pamphlets purporting to be reprints of true historical documents, complete with detailed but fraudulent provenance, describing how Catholic priests, often Jesuits, posed as Protestants and gathered congregations that they then led away from the Church of England. But more than this, during his career as a forger, he claimed to have turned up letters and documents that served as evidence of Catholic and specifically Jesuit plotting against the English crown. In one of his forgeries was presented the supposed oath taken by Jesuits upon initiation, which required a promise to “wage relentless war, secretly and openly, against all heretics, Protestants and Masons… to extirpate them from the face of the whole earth,” pledging to “hang, burn, waste, boil, flay, strangle, and bury alive these infamous heretics; rip up the stomachs and wombs of their women, and crush their infants' heads against the walls in order to annihilate their execrable race.” To emphasize the secrecy of their murderous plots, the Jesuits supposedly swore that, “when the same cannot be done openly I will secretly use the poisonous cup, the strangulation cord, the steel of the poniard, or the leaden bullet.” In Ware’s imagination, each Jesuit was issued a dagger at initiation, and signed their oath in blood, swearing, “should I prove false, or weaken in my determination, may my brethren and fellow soldiers of the militia of the Pope cut off my hands and feet and my throat from ear to ear, my belly be opened and sulphur burned therein.” Late Victorian scholars would eventually uncover Ware and his forgeries for what they were, but by then, it would be far too late. For a hundred years, his fabrications polluted the historical record and enflamed anti-Catholic conspiracy theories. And even long after their discovery as forgeries, copies of the Jesuit Oath have turned up in reprints of vague provenance and much like the Monita Secreta continue to be touted as evidence of a worldwide Jesuit conspiracy.

Disturbances in connection with the Popish Plot. Public Domain.

These roots of the Jesuit conspiracy theory cannot be fairly characterized as a leftist political conspiracy theory and counterpart to conspiracy theories on the right. Indeed, the entire notion of a left-to-right spectrum in politics would not arise until the French Revolution. The terminology derives from the fact that, during the National Assembly of 1789, monarchists arrayed themselves on the right of the chair, while supporters of revolution gathered on the left. As years passed, this became standard practice. In 1791, during the Legislative Assembly, those seeking change, calling themselves “Innovators,” placed themselves on the left, while the defenders of the Constitution and the status quo kept to the right, with moderates in the center. And so even today, when we speak of progressive politics, which seek change, we regard them as Leftist, and conservative politics, which resist change and seek to preserve the status quo or even revert to a former political order, fall to the right of the spectrum. In the years after the Revolution, those on the right had their bogeymen, specifically the secret societies of the Enlightenment, and after the Bourbon Restoration, as we shall see in part 2 of this series, those on the left found their own in the Jesuits. And yet, in one essential way, the belief in a Jesuit conspiracy always represented conservatism, for it alleged a secret combination dedicated to fighting against and reversing change. While in the 19th century, the Society of Jesus would come to represent the forces of counterrevolution, originally, as we have seen, they represented the forces of the Counter-Reformation. But before their Black Legend underwent its 19th-century transfiguration, the Jesuits would first need to be destroyed and subsequently resurrected, just like their namesake.

The Rise and Fall of the Society of Jesus: Part One - The Black Legend of the Jesuits

Follow and Support Us!