pontiff. Their crimes assuredly deserved punishment; but as it was not in the disposition of Pius to be cruel or revengeful, he was doubtless instigated to act in this case with unwonted rigour. But who his instigators were, or whence he derived the malignant and retributory inspiration on which he acted, it would be difficult to determine. We only know that the Jesuits had been persecuted by the Caraffas from the beginning, and that “Pius IV.,” as Crétineau affirms, “shewed himself from first to last to be more favourable to the Jesuits than even Paul III. had been.”[119] The Jesuits, it is certain, had then great influence at the Court of Rome. Cardinal Caraffa and the Duke of Palliano, nephews to the late Pope, along with two of their relatives, were condemned to death. They were denied their own confessors, and Jesuits were called in as their spiritual comforters. Crétineau says, that the Duke of Palliano asked Lainez to send him a Jesuit confessor, while the detractors of the order think that they intruded themselves, to witness the agony and death of their enemies. We let our readers judge for themselves. The unfortunate culprits were executed during the night of the 6th and 7th August 1561. The cardinal never for a moment suspected that they would execute the sentence upon him. He tried to delay his execution by lingering with his confessor. “Make an end, my lord, we have other business on hand,” exclaimed an officer of police. A few minutes longer, and the cardinal was a corpse. The Society now seemed upon the whole to be in a prosperous condition, and increased rapidly. Lainez did not exercise his authority with an iron hand, like Loyola, but he had great tact, and knew how to govern a community by cunning policy. Some mishaps, however, befel the Society. In Grenada, a Jesuit confessor refused to give absolution to a woman till she had revealed the name of her accomplice in the sin which she had confessed. This made a great noise. But the Jesuits, supported by the archbishop and the Inquisition, braved the opinion of the public so far, that one of them, John Raminius, declared from the pulpit, as an established doctrine, “that although in general no sin of the most holy confession ought to be revealed, there may, nevertheless, be circumstances in which the confessor may oblige the penitent to discover the accomplice of the sin, or to give up the names of the persons infected with heresy, permitting him (the confessor) to denounce the person or persons to the competent tribunal.”[120]