That union of counsels which since the æra of BOOK

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the family compact had marked the politics of the Bourbon courts, still subsisted in its full 1776. vigor. In order to consolidate the friendship of the two crowns, the late king of France had made an entire cession of the province of Louisiana to Spain, without any other apparent motive or equivalent. In his most christian majesty's letter, dated April 21, 1764, to M. d'Abadie, director-general and commandant of the colony of Louisiana, notifying this extraordinary cession, he says, by a special act done at Fontainebleau (Nov. 3d, 1762), of my own will and mere motion having ceded to my very dear and best beloved cousin the king of Spain, and his successors, in full property, purely and simply, and without any exceptions, the whole country known by the name of Louisiana, together with New Orleans, and the island in which the said city is situated: You are, on the receipt of these presents, to deliver up to the

BOOK governor or officer appointed by the king of XVIL Spain, the said country and colony of Loui

1776. siana."

The discontents prevailing in Spain since the accession of the present king, and which at length broke out in open insurrection, were ap peased by the dismission of the marquis de Squillacio, and the other Neapolitans who had accompanied the sovereign from Italy; and the attention of the court of Madrid had been for some years chiefly occupied with the means of effecting the expulsion of the Jesuits from the kingdom; which was at length carried into ex, ecution with circumstances of relentless cruelty, scarcely inferior to those which distinguished the expulsion of the Moriscoes in the last century. The other branches of the house of Bourbon, France, Naples, and Parma, followed the example set by Spain; and this once famous and flourishing order of religionists now found themselves in almost every country the objects of reproach, hatred, and persecution. Having attained to colosseal growth, they were suddenly menaced with colosseal destruction. Urgent soli citations were made by the Catholic powers to the pope Clement XIII. for the utter abolition of this order: but the holy father, notwithstanding the seizure of Avignon by France, and

XVIL

Benevento by Naples, in order to enforce a com- BOOK pliance, persisted in a peremptory and positive refusal.

A very remarkable edict having been published by the infant duke of Parma, virtually annihilating the authority of the papal see in his dominions, the Roman pontiff issued, January 1767, a BULL against the duke, in terms which the haughtiest of his predecessors could scarcely have exceeded. By this instrument the pope claimed to himself the sovereignty of the duchy of Parma, and declared the duke to be only his feudatory. He pronounced, on the authority of the church, and of former decisions of his predecessors, that ecclesiastics are not subject to any temporal power or laic jurisdiction; and that, seeing the duke had been guilty of an infringement of the immunities of the church, he had justly incurred its heaviest censures; and unless he desisted from his rash enterprise, he now gave him warning, "that the sentence of excommunication would be denounced against him, and his dominions laid under an interdict." Nor on the joint application of the courts of France, Spain, and Vienna, would his holiness deign to revoke this decree, or even admit the ambassadors of these powers to an audience. As the common father of the faithful, the pope disclaimed indeed every idea of executing any de

1776.

BOOK cree of the Holy See by the aid of temporal force, XVII. were it in his power. On the contrary, he de

1776.

clared himself ready, after the example of his predecessors, to suffer whatever personal injury might befall him, and to go into exile wherever it might be thought proper to send him, rather than betray the interests of religion and of the church. The Holy See, he added, was not accustomed to revoke its judgments, which were never passed till after the most mature deliberation, and always with the assistance of the Holy Ghost. At length, loaded with years, with grief and infirmities, this arrogant and inflexible pontiff sunk into his grave; and the famous Ganganelli, who assumed the name of Clement XIV. was, after the conclave had sat three months, elected, May 1769, to the vacant chair of St. Peter. 'The pontificate of Ganganelli was rendered for ever memorable by the abolition of the order of the Jesuits, in virtue of a bull, issued A. D. 1773, charging them with having adopted opinions scandalous, contrary to good morals, and of dangerous import to the church and all christian states.

This pontiff died in the course of the next year (1774), universally beloved and regretted, not without very general suspicion of poison, of which he is said to have been himself previously an I strongly apprehensive; but of this no deci

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1776.

sive evidence has been produced. He was suc- BOOK ceeded by cardinal Braschi, who took the appellation of Pius VI. Nearly at the same time died Charles Emanuel, king of Sardinia, after a reign of forty-three years. He succeeded to the throne on the resignation of his father in 1730, and governed his dominions with great prudence and felicity. His son, Victor Amadeus, after the acquisition of Corsica by France, perceiving the ascendancy acquired by the house of Bourbon, entered into a strict alliance with the court of Versailles-the princess Clotilda, sister to the king of France, marrying the prince of Piedmont; and the two princesses, daughters of his Sardinian majesty, espousing the counts de Provence and d'Artois, brothers of his most christian majesty.

In the north of Europe Russia still maintained her full ascendancy, and the predominance which she had acquired in the affairs of Poland was opposed not by the glorious ardor of civil liberty, but by a wretched and miserable spirit of religious bigotry; and the majority of the diet, instigated by the BISHOPS, still persisted in refusing to the dissidents, who were chiefly of the Greek church, that liberty of conscience to which they were entitled, not merely by the rights of nature, but by the most express and solemn conventions.