On 4 October 1749 the Spanish crown issued a rescript which commanded that all parishes or doctrinas currently administered by the religious orders in the dioceses of Lima and Mexico should be henceforth entrusted to the care of the secular clergy. On finding that this measure had elicited little popular protest, in February 1753 the ministers of Ferdinand VI (1746–59) despatched a further rescript extending the process of secularisation to all the dioceses of Spain's American empire. The result was that within less than a decade the Franciscans, Dominicans and Augustinians lost numerous parishes which they had governed since the sixteenth century, among which figured the glorious prizes of the spiritual conquest so celebrated by their early chroniclers. The rude shock dealt both to vested interest and institutional sentiment was magnified by the brutal fashion in which these laws were applied. After all, when Juan de Palafox y Mendoza had secularised mendicant doctrinas in Puebla during the 1640s, he had allowed the friars to retain possession of their churches and priories, providing his clergy with newly built parish churches. By contrast, the colonial authorities now sought to expropriate conventual churches, expelling friars from their small country priories on the grounds that these houses had been constructed without royal licence in Indian villages. According to an anonymous protest, soldiers were at times employed to enforce the measure, so that priories were occupied without warning and friars ordered to leave at once, obliged to set out on foot, carrying little more than their clothes and breviaries.