In their conflict with the Jesuits, the Creoles shortly received a valuable reinforcement in Bishop Cardenas, a very able and energetic prelate, and a man gifted as a ruler and statesman. Born in the city of Charcas, on the Bolivian plateau, he was a Creole of the Creoles. He became a great missionary and evangelist throughout Upper Peru and Tucuman, acquiring wonderful fame and popularity by his eloquence. In spite of the fact that he was a Creole, he was immensely popular among the Indians, and seems to have been a natural leader of both branches of the native population. He bitterly hated the Jesuits. As a member of the rival Franciscan Order, his professional jealousy was aroused by their success, and his Creole prejudices were outraged by their efforts to prevent the extension of white power among the aborigines. By sheer force of ability and eloquence, he rose into great prominence in southern Spanish America, and was rewarded for his successful labours in Tucuman by being appointed Bishop of Paraguay. There the Creoles accepted him as their leader, and he soon became the dominant figure in the community. He quarrelled repeatedly with the governor, but such was his force of character, and the skill with which he took advantage of the superstitious reverence for his apostolic office, that he invariably achieved his ends. Once the governor, at the head of a file of soldiers, presented himself at the bishop's door to arrest a fugitive whom the bishop had undertaken to protect. When the door was opened there stood the dauntless priest in full canonicals, defying the governor to cross his threshold. He excommunicated the governor and every soldier who had dared take part in this affront to his dignity, and, like Hildebrand, was only appeased when the governor had begged for pardon on his knees. When the governor died, Bishop Cardenas succeeded _ad interim_. His popularity and prestige were unbounded, and his audacity and courage unprecedented. Uniting in himself the religious, civil, and popular power, he controlled the forces of the community more completely than any one who had preceded him. His great work was the humiliation and destruction of the Jesuits. He hampered their insidious spread on the hither side of the Parana, and attempted the secularisation of many of their missions. In 1649 he took the audacious step of issuing a decree expelling all the members of the Society of Jesus, and he actually drove the Fathers from their churches and schools in Asuncion itself. The Jesuits appealed to the Viceroy, and a governor was sent out to depose him.