The accession of his son, Ferdinand VI., in 1746 brought little relief to the country and no change in the power of the Jesuits. Ferdinand, a weak and virtuous monarch, of the type which proved so congenial to the Jesuits, was devoted to the Society. His confessor, Father Rabago, was his chief adviser, and courtiers gathered thickly about the Jesuit in the hope of winning his influence. His position and power, and the feebleness of the monarch, made him bolder, and a few years later he ventured upon an action which was to have disastrous consequences for his Society. In spite of all the efforts of the Jesuits Spain agreed to cede a part of Paraguay containing seven of the Jesuit reductions to Portugal, in exchange for Sacramento, I have already mentioned this incident in speaking of Portugal, and will narrate in a later chapter what happened in Paraguay. Briefly, an army of 15,000 Indians from the reductions--not merely the seven reductions in question, which would not afford more than a few hundred soldiers, but evidently the full force of the Jesuit troops drafted from the whole of their scattered reductions--drew up in the path of the Spanish and Portuguese troops, and it was only after many battles, and at the end of three years, that the agreement between the two governments could be carried out.
The Marquis de Pombal, who was then in power at Lisbon, at once claimed that the Jesuits had inspired this treasonable resistance. It would be difficult for any impartial person to imagine that this army had been mobilised from the whole area of Jesuit influence and maintained for so long a period against the will of the Jesuit fathers, who so completely dominated the Indians and were accustomed to lead them to battle. Ferdinand hesitated, but at last Pombal intercepted a secret letter from Father Rabago to the Spanish fathers, in which he urged them to resist. The English ambassador, Sir Benjamin Keene (quoted by Coxe in his _Memoirs of the Kings of Spain_), tells us that this letter and other proofs were put before Ferdinand, and the King expressed great indignation with the Jesuits in his presence. Coxe himself, who is often quoted by the Jesuits as an impartial authority, says that the letter was "undoubtedly" genuine. Rabago was, he says, ignorant at first of foreign affairs, and ruled by a junta of his colleagues in his direction of the King, but he became ambitious and intrigued against the power of the leading statesmen Carvajal and Enseñada. The letters intercepted in 1754 opened the King's eyes, and when, in the following year, the confessor was detected in his intrigues against Enseñada, he was peremptorily dismissed from office.