In Portugal, Borgia found the remarkable spectacle of one of his subjects virtually ruling the kingdom. Portugal had fallen lamentably from its earlier greatness. The vast frame of its Empire was undiminished, but the spirit necessary to sustain it had died, and it was doomed to decay. No serious historian questions that the Jesuits had, at least by setting up the Inquisition and pursuing the Jews and Moors, greatly accelerated its fall, and under the rule of Father Gonzales da Camara and his brother, in the name of the young King, the temporal interests of Portugal steadily declined. A stern French critic of the Jesuits, Pasquier, says that he was told by the Marquis de Pisani, the French ambassador at the Spanish court, that the Jesuits were bent on obtaining control of the kingdom of Portugal. Their apologists invite us to be amused at this incredible fiction of the anti-Jesuit, yet it is hardly more than a strong expression of the historical facts. Pasquier expressly says that the Jesuits meant to rule, not without a king, but through a king of their own choice, and they had done this for ten years when Borgia came to visit them. They had, as we saw, helped to replace Catherine by Cardinal Henry, and they had in 1568 displaced the Cardinal by declaring Sebastian of age (in his sixteenth year). That they promoted the interests of the Society in Portugal and its colonies need hardly be said, but there is ample evidence that they had a larger influence. The King's mother wished him to marry the daughter of the Emperor Maximilian, but papal policy preferred a marriage with the sister of the French King; and we have a letter from Borgia to Gonzales, as confessor of Sebastian, enjoining him to promote the French marriage. Even Borgia could overlook the decrees of his Society at times, or convert temporal matters into spiritual. We may, however, regard it as a strained and fanciful conjecture of certain critics that the Portuguese fathers tried to deter Sebastian from marriage, and pressed him to undertake his fatal mission to Africa, in order that the crown might fall into their hands. But this belongs to a later date. Father Gonzales was still the virtual head of the State when Borgia visited Portugal, and the Society flourished there and in the Indies. Although Borgia had lately received an angry protest from Catherine against the interference of the fathers in political matters, he left Gonzales at the court. Alessandrini and Borgia next went to France; and when we reflect that the historic massacre of the Huguenots occurred a few months afterwards, we feel that it is important to study the visit and the position of the Jesuits with some care. Let us first see how the Society had fared in its ceaseless struggle with its opponents at Paris.