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