Ferdinand continued to trust the other Jesuits and resist the pressure of Pombal, but he died in 1759, and an abler ruler, Charles III., came to the throne. Charles was a devout Catholic and was devoted to the Society. He was, like his predecessor, deaf to the warnings and entreaties of Pombal, and the ruthless expulsion of the Jesuits from Portugal (in 1759) only increased his benevolence toward them in Spain. All their errors were forgotten, and Pombal's charges against their conduct in the colonies were warmly rejected. Few could have anticipated that, under such a ruler, in less than ten years from his accession, the gorgeous structure of Jesuit prosperity in Spain would be thrown to the ground and the fathers ignominiously expelled. The first action of the Jesuits to modify the feeling of the King toward them was their opposition to the canonisation of Bishop Palafox. Charles keenly desired that the highest honours of the Church should be paid to this saintly Spanish bishop of the previous century, but, as we shall see later, Palafox had submitted to Pope Innocent X. a very grave indictment of the conduct of the Jesuits and, if he had been canonised, his letters "would have brought disgrace on the Society," as the Jesuit historian Cordara says. Cordara admits that the means they adopted to prevent canonisation were not approvable; they were, in fact, chiefly bribery and an unscrupulous vilification of the bishop. The process did not get beyond the stage of declaring the bishop "Venerable," and Charles was displeased with the Jesuits. In 1766 a less clear, but much more serious, grievance arose. An attempt to shorten the long cloaks and broad-brimmed _sombreros_ of the Spanish people, which favoured assassins, led in the spring of 1766 to a revolt at Madrid. Charles was a stern maintainer of royal authority, and the outbreak greatly angered him. His chief minister Aranda, a scholar and politician of the liberal school, who was in sympathy with Choiseul and Pombal and opposed to the Jesuits, now succeeded in persuading the King that the Jesuits had inspired the revolt. According to the official "historian" of the Society, the only ground for this was that the Jesuits had flung themselves bravely upon the angry mob and disarmed it; which aroused an improper suspicion of their power. The historian is careful not to relate that in the autumn of the year a lawyer named Navarro was arrested for bringing a false charge against certain monks (whom the Jesuits disliked) in connection with the riot, and that, when the case turned against him, he declared that the Jesuits had prompted him to do this in order to avert suspicion from their own conduct. Charles was convinced that they were the authors of the riot, and he was now prepared to listen to the charges of Pombal and Choiseul.