the Crown would still protect them. The French Jesuits, rejecting Gallicanism, refused to consent. On 1 April 1763, the colleges were closed, and by a further arrêt of March 9, 1764, the Jesuits were required to renounce their vows under pain of banishment. At the end of November 1764, the king signed an edict dissolving the Society throughout his dominions, for some provincial parlements still protected them, as in Franche-Comté, Alsace, and Artois. In the draft of the edict, he canceled numerous clauses that implied that the Society was guilty, and writing to Choiseul, he concluded: "If I adopt the advice of others for the peace of my realm, you must make the changes I propose, or I will do nothing. I say no more, lest I should say too much." Decline of the Jesuits in New France Following the British 1759 victory against the French in Quebec, France lost its North American territory of New France, where Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth century had been active among indigenous peoples. British rule had implications for Jesuits in New France, but their numbers and sites were already in decline. As early as 1700, the Jesuits had adopted a policy of merely maintaining their existing posts instead of trying to establish new ones beyond Quebec, Montreal, and Ottawa. Once New France was under British control, the British barred the immigration of any further Jesuits. By 1763, only twenty-one Jesuits were still stationed in what was now the British colony of Quebec. By 1773, only eleven Jesuits remained. The British crown claimed Jesuit property in Canada in the same year and declared that the Society of Jesus in New France was dissolved. Spanish Empire suppression of 1767 Events leading to the Spanish suppression The Suppression in Spain and the Spanish colonies, and in its dependency the Kingdom of Naples, was the last of the expulsions, with Portugal (1759) and France (1764) having already set the pattern. The Spanish crown had already begun a series of administrative and other changes in their overseas empire, such as reorganizing the viceroyalties, rethinking economic policies, and establishing a military, so the expulsion of the Jesuits is seen as part of this general trend known generally as the Bourbon Reforms. The reforms aimed to curb American-born Spaniards' increasing autonomy and self-confidence, reassert crown control, and increase revenues. Some historians doubt that the Jesuits were guilty of intrigues against