While the Parliament was still sitting, Cromwell had sent out two fleets, one under the command of Blake (Oct. 1654), the other under that of Penn (Dec. 1654). There was the utmost secrecy as to the destination and objects of both, but the mystery did not last long about Blake's. He had received instructions to go into the Mediterranean, make calls there on all powers against which the Commonwealth had claims, and bring them to account. Blake fulfilled his mission with his usual precision and success. His first call of any importance was on the Grand Duke of Tuscany, formerly so much in the good graces of the Commonwealth (Vol. IV. pp. 483-485), but whom Cromwell, after looking more into matters, had found culpable. Blake's demands were for heavy money-damages on account of English ships taken by Prince Rupert in 1650, and sold in Tuscan ports, and also on account of English ships ordered out of Leghorn harbour in March 1653, so that they fell into the hands of the Dutch. There was the utmost consternation among the Tuscans, and the alarm extended even to Rome, inasmuch as some of Rupert's prizes had been sold in the Papal States. A disembarcation of the English heretics and even their march to Rome did not seem impossible; and Tuscans and Romans were greatly relieved when the Grand Duke paid £60,000 and the Pope 20,000 pistoles (£14,000), and Blake retired. His next call was at Tunis, where there were accounts with the Dey. That Mussulman having pointed to his forts, and dared Blake to do his worst, there was a tremendous bombardment on the 3rd of April, 1655, reducing the forts to ruins, followed by the burning of the Dey's entire war-squadron of nine ships. This sufficed not only for Tunis, but also for Tripoli and Algiers. All the Moorish powers of the African coast gave up their English captives, and engaged that there should be no more piracy upon English vessels. Malta, Venice, Toulon, Marseilles, and various Spanish ports were then visited for one reason or another; and in the autumn of 1655 Blake was still in the Mediterranean for ulterior purposes, understood between him and Cromwell.1
1: Guizot, II. 186-198, with, documents in Appendix; Godwin, IV. 187-188; Whitlocke. IV., 206-207.
While Blake was in the Mediterranean, one Italian potentate did a sudden act of infamy, which resounded through Europe, and for which Cromwell would fain have clutched him by the throat in his own inland capital. This was Carlo Emanuele II., Duke of Savoy and Prince of Piedmont.
In the territories of this young prince, in the Piedmontese valleys of Luserna, Perosa, and San Martino, on the east side of the Cottian Alps, lived the remarkable people known as the Vaudois or Waldenses. From time immemorial these obscure mountaineers, speaking a peculiar Romance tongue of their own, had kept themselves distinct from the Church of Rome, maintaining doctrines and forms of worship of such a kind that, after the Lutheran Reformation, they were regarded as primitive Protestants who had never swerved from the truth through the darkest ages, and could therefore be adopted with acclamation into the general Reformed communion. The Reformation, indeed; had penetrated into their valleys, rendering them more polemical for their faith, and more fierce against the Church of Rome, than they had been before. They had experienced persecutions through their whole history, and especially after the Reformation; but, on the whole, the two last Dukes of Savoy, and also Christine, daughter of Henry IV. of France, and Duchess-Regent through the minority of her son, the present Duke, had protected them in their privileges, even while extirpating Protestantism in the rest of the Piedmontese dominions. Latterly, however, there had been a passion at Turin and at Rome for their conversion to the Catholic faith, and priests had been traversing their valleys for the purpose. The murder of one such priest, and some open insults to the Catholic worship, about Christmas 1654, are said to have occasioned what followed.
On the 25th of January, 1654-5, an edict was issued, under the authority of the Duke of Savoy, "commanding and enjoining every head of a family, with its members, of the pretended Reformed Religion, of what rank, degree, or condition soever, none excepted, inhabiting and possessing estates in the places of Luserna, Lucernetta, San Giovanni, La Torre, Bubbiana, and Fenile, Campiglione, Briccherassio, and San Secondo, within three days, to withdraw and depart, and be, with their families, withdrawn, out of the said places, and transported into the places and limits marked out for toleration by his Royal Highness during his good pleasure, namely Bobbio, Villaro, Angrogna, Rorata, and the County of Bonetti, under pain of death and confiscation of goods and houses, unless they gave evidence within twenty days of having become Catholics." Furthermore it was commanded that in every one even of the tolerated places there should be regular celebration of the Holy Mass, and that there should be no interference therewith, nor any dissuasion of any one from turning a Catholic, also on pain of death. All the places named are in the Valley of Luserna, and the object was a wholesale shifting of the Protestants of that valley out of nine of its communes and their concentration into five higher up. In vain were there remonstrances at Turin from those immediately concerned. On the 17th of April, 1655, the Marquis di Pianezza entered the doomed region with a body of troops, mainly Piedmontese, but with French and Irish among them. There was resistance, fighting, burning, pillaging, flight to the mountains, and chasing and murdering for eight days, Saturday, April 24, being the climax. The names of about three hundred of those murdered individually are on record, with the ways of the deaths of many of them. Women were ripped open, or carried about impaled on spikes; men, women, and children, were flung from precipices, hacked, tortured, roasted alive; the heads of some of the dead were boiled and the brains eaten; there are forty printed pages, and twenty-six ghastly engravings, by way of Protestant tradition of the ascertained variety of the devilry. The massacre was chiefly in the Valley of Luserna, but extended also into the other two valleys. The fugitives were huddled in crowds high among the mountains, moaning and starving; and not a few, women and infants especially, perished amid the snows. On the 27th of April some of the remaining Protestant pastors and others, gathered together somewhere, addressed a circular letter to Protestants outside the Valleys, stating the hard case of the survivors. "Our beautiful and flourishing churches," they said, "are utterly lost, and that without remedy, unless God Almighty work miracles for us. Their time is come, and our measure is full. O have pity upon the desolations of Jerusalem, and be grieved for the afflictions of poor Joseph! Shew the real effects of your compassions, and let your bowels yearn for so many thousands of poor souls who are reduced to a morsel of bread for following the Lamb whithersoever he goes."1
1: Morland's History of the Evangelical Churches of the Valleys of Piedmont, with a Relation of the Massacre (1658), 287-428; Guizot, II. 213-215.
There was a shudder of abhorrence through Protestant Europe, but no one was so much roused as Cromwell. In the interval between the Duke of Savoy's edict and the Massacre he had been desirous that the Vaudois should publicly appeal to him rather than to the Swiss; and, when the news of the Massacre reached England, he avowed that it came "as near his heart as if his own nearest and dearest had been concerned." On Thursday the 17th of May, and for many days more, the business of the Savoy Protestants was the chief occupation of the Council. Letters, all in Milton's Latin, but signed by the Lord Protector in his own name, were despatched (May 25) to the Duke of Savoy himself, to the French King, to the States General of the United Provinces, to the Protestant Swiss Cantons, to the King of Sweden, to the King of Denmark, and to Ragotski, Prince of Transylvania. A day of humiliation was appointed for the Cities of London and Westminster, and another for all England. A Committee was appointed, consisting of all the Councillors, with Sir Christopher Pack and other eminent citizens, and also some ministers, to organize a general collection of money throughout England and Wales in behalf of the suffering Vaudois. The collection, as arranged June 1, was to take the form of a house-to-house visitation by the ministers and churchwardens in every city, town, and parish on a particular Lord's day, for the receipt of whatever sum each householder might freely give, every such sum to be noted in presence of the donor, and the aggregates, parish by parish, or city by city, to be remitted to the treasurers in London, who were to enter them duly in a general register. The subscription, which lagged for a time in some districts, produced at length a total of £38,097 7s. 3d.—equal to about £137,000 now. Of this sum £2000 (equal to about £7500 now) was Cromwell's own contribution, while London and Westminster contributed £9384 6s. 11d., and the various counties sums of various magnitudes, according to their size, wealth, and zeal, from Devonshire at the head, with £1965 0s. 3d., Yorkshire next, with £1786 14s. 5d., and Essex next, with £1512 17s. 7d., down to Merionethshire yielding £3 0s. 1d. from her eight parishes, and Radnorshire £1 14s. 4d. from her seven. Cromwell's own donation of £2000 went at once to Geneva for immediate use; and £10,000 followed on the 10th of July, as the first instalment of the general subscription. There were similar subscriptions, it ought to be added, in other Protestant countries.1
1: Letter from Thurloe to Pell at Geneva (Vaughan's Protectorate, I. 158-159); Council Order Books, May 17, 18, 22, 23, 25, June 1 and July 8, 1655; Morland, 562-596. Morland gives an interesting abstract of the Treasurer's Accounts of the Collection; but the original accounts in a large folio book, entitled Committee for Piedmont &c., are in the Record Office. The counties are arranged there alphabetically and the parishes alphabetically under each county, with the sums which the parishes individually subscribed. Some parishes seem wholly to have neglected the subscription, and there are blanks opposite their names.
At the time of the massacre Cromwell had two agents in Switzerland, viz. Mr. JOHN PELL (Vol. IV. p. 449) and the ubiquitous JOHN DURIE. They had been sent abroad early in 1654, to cultivate the friendly intercourse already begun between the Evangelical Cantons and the Commonwealth, and also to watch the progress of a struggle which had just broken out between the Popish Cantons of the Confederacy and the Evangelical Cantons. As the Evangelical Cantons were also astir about the Vaudois, whose cause was so closely connected with their own, the services of Pell and Durie were now available for that business. Cromwell, however, had thought an express Commissioner necessary, with instructions to negotiate directly with the Duke of Savoy, and had selected for the purpose Mr, SAMUEL MORLAND, an able and ingenious man, about thirty years of age, who had been with Whitlocke in his Swedish Embassy, and had been taken into the Council office on his return as assistant to Thurloe. On the 26th of May Morland left London, carrying with him the letters addressed to Louis XIV. and the Duke of Savoy. He was at La Fère in France on the 1st of June, treating with the French King and Mazarin, and was able to despatch thence a letter from the French King to Cromwell, expressing willingness to do all that could be done for the Vaudois, and explaining that he had already conveyed his views on the subject to the Duke of Savoy. Thence Morland continued his journey to Rivoli, near Turin, where he arrived on the 21st of June. He was received most politely, was entertained and driven about both at Rivoli and at Turin itself, and was admitted to a formal audience on or about the 24th. He there made a speech in Latin to the Duke, the Duchess-mother being also present, and delivered Cromwell's letter, The speech was a very bold one. He spared no detail of horror in his picture of the massacre as he had authentically ascertained it, and added, "Were all the Neros of all times and ages alive again (I would be understood to say it with out any offence to your Highness, inasmuch as we believe that none of these things was done by any fault of yours), they would be ashamed at finding that they had contrived nothing that was not even mild and humane in comparison. Meanwhile angels are horrorstruck, mortals amazed!" The Duchess-mother, replying for her son, could hardly avoid hinting that Mr. Morland had been rather rude. She was, nevertheless, profuse in expressions of respect for the Lord Protector, who had no doubt received very exaggerated representations of what had happened, but at whose request she was sure her son would willingly pardon his rebellious subjects and restore them to their privileges. During the rest of Morland's stay in Turin or its neighbourhood the object of the Duke's counsellors, and also of the French minister, was to furnish him with what they called a more correct account of the facts, and induce him to convey to Cromwell a gentler view of the whole affair. Morland kept his own counsel; but, having had a second audience, and received the Duke's submissive but guarded answer to Cromwell, and also several other papers, he left Turin on the 19th of July and proceeded, according to his instructions, to Geneva.1
1: Morland, 563-583; and Letters between Pell and Thurloe given in Vaughan's Protectorate.