About the year 1590, the English Jesuits obtained, from the liberality of Philip II of Spain, the foundation of their principal college at St. Omer; and, soon after, the bishop of that city conferred upon them an ancient abbey, with its demesnes, situated in the neighbouring small town of Watten. A few years later, they acquired the foundation of their college at Liege, from Maximilian the elector of Bavaria, and likewise a smaller settlement in the city of Ghent. In these several houses, they applied themselves to the education of British catholic youth, and to the formation of missionaries. In 1762, the two first-mentioned of these establishments were subjected to confiscation by the unsparing _arrêts_ of the parliament of Paris. The inhabitants could obtain no mercy, on the consideration of being foreigners admitted on the public faith; they were all ejected, {225} without the smallest allowance for their support, or even for their return to their native soil. They presented themselves to the Austrian government of the Netherlands, at Bruxelles; they were admitted under an _octroi_, the most solemn act of that government, and they established themselves in the city of Bruges. In 1773, on the appearance of pope Clement XIV's destructive brief, they were once more unmercifully pillaged, in despite of the public faith, pledged in the _octroi_; and here the fangs of fiscal avarice were sharpened to an uncommon edge, because it was the persuasion of that despotic government, that, being Jesuits, they deserved no pity, and, being English, they must be rich. At the same period, their large college at Liege was stript of all its income, by the two courts of Munich and Rome, and the inmates of the house were also here turned adrift, without any allowance for their personal subsistence. In this utter distress, a few of these persecuted men, who remained at Liege, not quite dispirited by their calamities, were encouraged by the prince {226} bishop of Liege, to form, within the old college, a school and a seminary of priests. The plan was sanctioned by a brief of pope Pius VI; they found friends, and unremitting labour and industry during twenty years advanced their work to a degree of consistency, which merited the approbation and confidence of the public. But all this was of no avail. Utter destruction was to be their doom. In 1794, when the French armies, by one general sweep, overturned, in the Low Countries, every thing that related to the religion of Jesus Christ, they were finally dislodged and scattered; their house and all their valuables were left to the disposal of those outrageous freebooters; waggon-loads of their best books were converted into wadding for the cannon; their mathematical and optical cabinet was pillaged; they retired in sorrow, each to seek a refuge, with hardly a hope of seeing better days. Thus terminated the English province of the society of Jesus.