[554] Vaughan, i. 260.
Commissioners must content themselves to give "some means of subsistence to feed and clothe them, with some small sum of money to those whose houses have been burnt, to enable them to provide timber against the spring time, that they may build them some small cottages to shelter."—Public Intelligencer, October 13th, 1655.
"The last letters out of Dauphine advise that there is a provincial synod of them of the reformed religion, where, after they had taken a view of their own particular affairs, it was resolved that they would send a deputation to their brethren of the valleys of Piedmont, consisting of four ministers, two of which are to be of the most eminent, learned, and zealous men of that province, to be joined with two younger, and two gentlemen of the country most noted for their affection to the Protestant religion, and for purity of life and conversation, who are to go as deputies to see to the distributing of the moneys collected in this kingdom for relief of our poor brethren according to the necessity of their conditions and families."—Ibid., October 15th to 22nd.
[555] Milton's Prose Works, ii. 220.
In an Order Book (State Paper Office) there is, under date May 18th, 1658, an order for £3,000 to be paid to the suffering Vaudois.
[556] Upon the 2nd of September, 1658, £3,700 was ordered to be paid to the merchant adventurers at Hamburgh on behalf of the Polish Protestants.
A petition for assistance by Polish exiles appears under date November 18th, 1658, with the endorsement:—"I know this petition to be true, and know the petitioners to be very deserving, learned, godly persons, members of the Churches for whom the collection was made, as are also some others living with us on our charity, in the same condition with those petitioners. John Owen."
The bundle in the State Paper Office, containing the documents from which we have taken the foregoing particulars, is endorsed, Papers relative to the Protestant Exiles from Poland and Bohemia, &c., 1657, 1658.
[557] Clarendon's Hist., 863, and Burnet's Hist. of his Own Times, i. 77.
[558] Ibid. Stoupe was minister of the French Reformed Church in London, and was sent to Geneva in 1654 to negotiate affairs relative to Protestantism. There are several allusions to him in Pell's Correspondence. In one letter he is spoken of as a man "with good zeal, but little policy."—Vaughan's Protectorate, i. 48.