The Jesuits had pulled in their horns after Coelho's disastrous gaffe; guided by Valignano they had recovered lost ground, but its retention depended on continued discretion. Valignano argued cogently for one single control in the Japanese mission field—naturally, that of the Society of Jesus—and in 1585 he procured a papal bull confirming the Jesuit monopoly. The ardent Franciscans of Manila were not to be deterred by this embargo, and they were backed by more mercenary interests in the Philippines.^[79]

Soon, however, the Jesuits were hoist with their own petard, in the shape of one of their converts, Harada (Farada in Spanish documents). This man was a Sakai merchant who had traded in the Philippines; in 1591 he and others proposed to Hideyoshi an invasion of the islands, but the eve of the Korean war was hardly a propitious time, and instead a relative of Harada was entrusted with a message for the Governor, Gomez Perez Dasmariñas. This document, most beautifully and elaborately packaged, was less pleasing in content: it contained a demand for an embassy, on pain of such a conquest that ‘that country shall repent’. Dasmariñas, startled as he was, and understandably suspicious of an ‘ambassador’ of such lowly status (who was also the only available translator), replied tactfully, making these points but promising to refer the matter to Spain. In the meantime, to ‘show willing’, he sent a Dominican, Father Juan Cobo (presumably chosen as being a Chinese expert) to make and to receive further explanations.^[80]

Nothing positive came of Cobo's mission: he did not even report, being lost on Formosa on his return voyage. It had however some awkward negative results: an increase of Spanish-Portuguese tension, and probably the strengthening of latent suspicions in Hideyoshi's mind. Cobo did not contact the Jesuits, who if not anxious to help could at least have interpreted more reliably than Harada, but instead joined with a couple of disreputable Spanish merchants with grievances against the Portuguese. Their complaints led to some renewed action against the Jesuits in Nagasaki, but this soon blew over. Cobo is also said to have shown Hideyoshi a globe, pointing out the wide spread of Philip II's realms.^[81]

Harada now took the game into his own hands, himself carrying to Manila a second letter from Hideyoshi. This was more than explicit:

Dasmariñas stalled for time—if the Japanese could be amused for four years, Manila might then be ready for them, though as the required force was estimated- 174 -at 1517 men, this may reasonably be doubted. In May 1593 the Governor sent a second embassy of Fray Pedro Bautista and three other Franciscans: this was in breach both of Japanese decrees and of the bull of 1585 (as the Jesuits did not fail to mention), but was supposedly justified by the claim that the Fathers were going as government envoys rather than as missionaries. The real mischief was that the shady Harada had fraudulently represented that Hideyoshi, and indeed the whole country, positively desired the Franciscans, and with this encouragement a steady trickle of friars went to Japan. Hideyoshi had, it is true, warmly welcomed the embassy; but in religious matters he was a politique to the marrow, and his real desire for it was as ‘a bait for the Manila traders in the same way as the Jesuits were considered to be part and parcel’ of the Macao trade.^[82] With the fiscal strain of the Korean war, any competition between traders was welcome.

The Franciscan embassy also gave Hideyoshi an opportunity to exercise what was for him diplomacy: his next letter (1594) reads like Marlowe's Tamburlaine—at his birth the sun had shone on his breast, portending his destiny, which was nothing less than that all kingdoms must bow down at his door or be destroyed. Gomez Perez Dasmariñas had been killed by his Chinese rowers on an expedition to the Moluccas, and the task of replying fell to his son Luis, assisted by a full council of war: with the omission of a lesson on cosmogony in the first draft, the letter as sent was a masterpiece of polite hedging.^[83] There was a lull in the exchanges, but it was the proverbial lull.

The storm broke in 1596. The four friars had stayed on in Japan and had been allowed to preach in Kyoto; at least in his relations with Hideyoshi, Bautista was tactful. It is however clear, even if we assume some Jesuit exaggeration, that the friars were far from content with Valignano's cautious (and temperamentally sincere) policy of adapting so far as possible to Japanese ways; after all, they had been used to dealing with submissive ‘Indians’, not proud and sophisticated daimyo. They also appealed more directly to the poor and oppressed than did the Jesuits, and in general the sons of St Francis behaved in a far more forthright and uncompromising way than those of Loyola. Their flouting of Hideyoshi's bans became more and more flagrant; but for the time being he had other preoccupations, and in July 1596 Antonio de Morga could write to Philip II, in all innocence, that ‘Xapon is kept quiet by the presence of the Franciscan religious whom we have there.’^[84] But the situation was highly unstable, and in October it was brought to a head by a chance happening, the wreck of the Acapulco-bound Galleon San Felipe on Shikoku.^[85]

The cargo was very rich, and the local daimyo and his samurai seized most of it—as Boxer remarks, ‘the coastal inhabitants of any European country would have done the same.’ The Spaniards naturally appealed to Kyoto, using the good offices of Fray Juan Bautista rather than those proffered by the Jesuits, who were after all mostly Portuguese. The Japanese intermediaries double-crossed the claimants; between the demands of the war and the losses caused by severe earthquakes, Hideyoshi was in financial straits, and accepted the suggestion that he should confiscate this gift from the sea. (He might after all have cited, had he- 175 -known of it, a tactless precedent—Elizabeth's legal but scarcely moral seizure of the Spanish treasure forced into her ports in 1568.) It is possible also that his suspicions were roused by the Spanish pilot who, in a natural desire to assert the powerful backing he might expect, is said to have displayed on a map the worldwide empire of his own sovereign, and have added that the religious were used as an advance-guard to soften up the King of Spain's prospective vassals. The similarity to the story told of Cobo is suspicious.

Be this as it may, it is certain that Hideyoshi's suspicions were aroused, and inflamed by the go-betweens and others around him; after all, he had given a clear warning to Coelho and Takayama Ukon, but had then held his hand; and now his reward was a reckless defiance of his commands. No ruler of his time could have been expected to accept such a situation. Even so, his wrath was discriminating. Presumably because after the San Felipe affair trade prospects with Manila were dim, and hence Macao's must be nursed, the Jesuits were still exempt from extreme measures, save for three Japanese lay-brothers mistakenly included in the mass crucifixion at Nagasaki on 5 February 1597. On that day six Franciscans and seventeen of their converts suffered; Morga prints a moving letter from the friars, warning that Hideyoshi, ‘his appetite whetted by what he has stolen from the San Felipe’ plans to take the Ryukyus, Formosa, then Manila: the letter is subscribed ‘On the road to the gallows’.^[86]

Further and greater persecutions were to face the Christians of Japan, but not at Hideyoshi's hands, although he did finally order the expulsion of all but a handful of Jesuits, an order again generally evaded. In August 1597, feeling his death near, he appointed a Regency council of five on behalf of his four-year-old bastard Hideyori; Ieyasu was not one of the five, but was asked to be guardian of the child: an arrangement not likely to be any more viable than the council Hideyoshi had himself subverted after Nobunaga's murder. In September 1598 Hideyoshi—and Philip II—died. Factional intrigues soon began; by 1599 Ieyasu had pledges of support from so many daimyo that he was able to occupy Osaka castle. A ‘western alliance’ was formed against him, but was itself riddled with faction, and in the great battle of Sekigahara it was utterly defeated: among those executed after the fighting was the gallant Konishi Yukinaga. A few days later Ieyasu was again in Osaka, nominally acting for Hideyori, in practice master of Japan.

Sekigahara was fought on 20 October 1600. Exactly seven months earlier a small, battered ship, with only a quarter of her hundred-odd crew still alive, was towed by the local boatmen into a small harbour of Kyushu. She had come by the Straits of Magellan, her pilot was an Englishman, but she herself was Dutch: the Liefde (‘Love’ or ‘Charity’!). Only seven weeks after Sekigahara, Oliver van Noort and Antonio de Morga were locked in a bitter sea-fight in the approaches to Manila Bay. More than the spectacular forays of Drake and Cavendish, the arrival of the Dutch heralded the end of the Iberian monopoly of the world, as distinct from the local, trade of the Spice Islands and the China Seas.