Peace thus reëstablished, everything seemed to favor the spread of Catholicity, when, all of a sudden, and in the most unexpected manner, in the month of July, 1587, the emperor signed an order for the banishment of the missionaries; and because Ukondono would not renounce his religion (at least such was the ostensible cause), stripped him at once of his place and his property. Father Cuello, the vice-provincial, was ordered to assemble all the missionaries at Hirado; and, in obedience to his order, they collected there to the number of about one hundred and twenty, only Father Gnecchi remaining concealed at Ōsaka, and one brother in Bungo. But when the emperor commanded them to embark on board a Portuguese vessel about to sail, they resolved not to obey. A few indeed went on board and sailed for China; but the greater part remained, a message being sent to the emperor that the vessel could not carry the others; to which he responded by ordering all the churches in Miyako, Ōsaka, and Sakai to be destroyed. The converted princes, however, in general, stood firm, except Yoshimune, king of Bungo; and even the unconverted ones are said to have protested against the emperor’s edict as in violation of the freedom of religious opinion heretofore allowed. The missionaries, in disguise, were distributed through the territories of their adherents. The emperor’s grand admiral, Konishi Settsu-no-Kami, who was viceroy of Shimo, though himself a convert, still kept the confidence of the emperor, as did also Kodera, the chief commander of his cavalry. The Portuguese merchants were admitted as before. After a little while the emperor seemed disposed to wink at the conduct of the converted princes, and the missionaries soon began to conceive hopes that, by caution on their part, the work of conversion might still go on, the stimulus of a prohibition not very strictly enforced, more than supplying all the benefits hitherto derived from the _éclat_ of imperial favor. Some difficulty about obtaining recruits for the imperial seraglio, especially from the province of Hizen, celebrated for its handsome women, but in which the converts were numerous, was said to have provoked the emperor, in a fit of drunken fury, to put forth so suddenly his edict of persecution. But, in fact, his policy brooked no power but his own. He did not fancy a religion which taught his subjects to look up with implicit reverence to a distant and foreign potentate; nor probably was his hostility to the Jesuits much different in substance from that sentiment which had caused Henry VIII, of England, fifty years earlier, to break with the holy see—a breach also ascribed by the Catholics to amorous passion.