The deceased ruler had foreseen this, and had made such arrangements as he could to strengthen the position of his young son. He foresaw that Iyeyas was the man of the future; the man most fitted by talent, military capacity, and position to take the reins. He therefore tried to bind him by ties of marriage, as well as by oaths, to support the youthful inheritor of power. He had, as one of his methods of governing, induced or compelled the nobles to lavish large sums of money in presents to himself, in keeping up large retinues, in making expensive journeys between their country residences and the capital, and in building palaces in the two cities of Osaka and Fusimi. By these means the nobles were impoverished. They could not afford to keep many armed followers. Mowori of Nagato had been lately compelled to give up some of his territories, and to pay his respects at the court. Satsuma had suffered during the recent wars in Kiusiu. Iyeyas alone had kept aloof from Taikosama. He had kept his court and established himself at Yedo, where he was allowed to remain undisturbed, an object of jealousy as well as of fear. Still he seems to have been occasionally about the court of Taikosama, as he is mentioned in one of the letters as being present at the meeting of Taiko and his nephew. He perhaps kept Taikosama’s mother still as a hostage in Yedo. Each of these potentates, in all probability, knew and read the other’s thoughts--each thinking that the territories and the position of both would fall into the hands of the longest liver. The most dissembling are often the most credulous, and Taikosama was catching at a straw when he summoned Iyeyas to his deathbed. Iyeyas had refused to visit him on a former occasion without a hostage in the person of his mother. On this occasion he came, but, no doubt, with sufficient precautions. He saw that a political crisis was impending, and he knew that the fruit he had long waited for was falling into his hands. There was little reason now why he should not seize it. The only persons who seem not to have descried the change that was at hand were the Roman Catholic fathers. By their own letters they do not appear to have paid any court to the sun rising in the east. No missions are mentioned to Yedo, or in the Kwanto; no interpreter is sent to the court of Iyeyas; no conversions are spoken of there as in Miako and the west; and no priests were located there, who might have been acceptable if they had been able to speak in the dialect of the eastern provinces. The Jesuit fathers, up to this time, had rarely mentioned any of the provinces east of Mino or Owarri.