The Emperor knew that nothing could be done without the command of the army which was largely in the hands of a great conservative friend of the Empress Dowager (Jung Lu) the father-in-law of the present Regent. Yuan was in charge of an army corps of 12,500 troops, but for him to have taken them even at the command of the Emperor, without informing his superior officer, would have meant the loss of his head at once. The first thing then for him to do was to take this order to Jung Lu. Yuan was in favour of reform, though he may not have approved of the Emperor's methods. Jung Lu hastened to Prince Ching and they two sped to the Empress Dowager in the Summer Palace where they laid the whole matter before her. She hurried to Peking, boldly faced and denounced the Emperor, took from him his seal of state, and confined him a prisoner in the Winter Palace. Kang Yu-wei, the young "Confucius," fled, but the Empress Dowager seized his brother and five other patriotic young reformers, and ordered them beheaded on the public execution grounds in Peking. Naturally the Empress Dowager approved of the "wise and statesmanlike methods" of Yuan in thus protecting instead of imprisoning her, and thus placing the reins of government once more in her hands, and she appointed him Junior Vice-President of the Board of Works, and when she was compelled to remove the Governor of Shantung who had organized the Boxer Society, she appointed Yuan Acting Governor in his stead. "Yuan," says Arthur H. Smith, was "a man of a wholly different stripe" from the one removed, and "if left to himself he would speedily have exterminated the whole Boxer brood, but being hampered by 'confidential instructions' from the palace, he could do little but issue poetical proclamations, and revile his subordinates for failure to do their duty." When Yuan was made Governor of Shantung a number of the Boxer leaders called upon him expecting to find in him a sympathizer worthy of his predecessor. They told him of their great powers and possibilities, and of how they were proof against the spears, swords and bullets of their enemies. Yuan listened to them with patience and interest, and invited them to dine with him and other official friends in the near future.