CHAPTER XVII.

THE PROTESTANTS OF THE VALLEYS OF PIEDMONT.

THE proceedings of the first protectorate parliament filled every enemy of the Commonwealth with hope. Royalist, republican, and leveller plottings, army plottings, and the strangest combinations of levellers and cavaliers against the Protectorate, all showed how greatly the enemies of the government rejoiced in the wayward proceedings of parliament; and how fast new difficulties were gathering to impede the brave and indomitable energy of Cromwell. Charles Stuart had advanced to the Dutch coast ready to return to England. Hyde, his future Lord Chancellor, declared the restoration already as good as settled. But Cromwell was equal to the emergency. Firmly and patiently he strangled each successive plot as it ripened under his keen eye, and lodged the chief firebrands in the Tower and elsewhere, safe from further power of mischief and distraction. Insurrections of the most alarming and contradictory nature demanded of Cromwell some new and effective instrument for their suppression, and this he speedily devised by the appointment of major-generals, a kind of general rural magistracy and police, possessed of very extensive powers, and which Forster stigmatizes as a scheme of "atrocious despotism." Like a good many of Cromwell's proceedings, it was undoubtedly little sanctioned by any use-and-wont precedents. Nevertheless it worked no little good in that distracted time. By it all England was divided into ten districts, with a major-general to each. Each of them a man carefully selected for his known probity and courage, as well as for such sagacity as pointed him out as worthy of trust in such an emergency. "Their powers are un

known to the English constitution I believe; but they are very necessary for the English Puritan nation at this time. With men of real wisdom, who do fear God and hate covetousness, when you can find such men, you may to some purpose intrust considerable powers!" So says Carlyle. It was in truth somewhat of Cromwell's method all along; and proved in his hands frequently one of the best methods that the people of England in that age had any experience of.

"If not good, yet best," might indeed very often be said of Cromwell's measures. It was no ideal scheme of abstract perfection in the art of government that he aimed at bringing into play; no piece of pure ideal republicanism, admirably adapted to the kingdom of Utopia, which he was striving to force into fitness for the English nation. No such good, indeed! But its far better substitute, a practical governing scheme that really would work in good working-day fashion, in the strange clash of party creeds and opinions that united to form that English nation of the seventeenth century. It is not to be overlooked or concealed, that such a system was a wide departure in theory from what many in England had been contending for, in opposition to Charles. But the reader will judge very rashly if he conclude, with some writers, that "after the gallantest fight for liberty that had ever been fought by any nation in the world, England found herself trampled under foot by a military despot." Some acts of individual oppression did undoubtedly flow from this system. When assassination had been proclaimed as a virtue among royalists, and the readiest road to honour and rewards; when royalists and republicans were daily devising new schemes of treason against the existing government; and at a time, moreover, when the whole bonds by which society is ordinarily held together, had been rent asunder and thrown into dire confusion;-a stringent executive became indispensable under whatever form of

government it acted. Nevertheless, in wilful forgetfulness that the system was one of those inevitable results following in the train of nearly every revolution, Forster exclaims:-"All the vices of old kingly rule were nothing to what was now imposed upon her. Some restraint had still been kept on the worst of her preceding sovereigns; now she found herself hopeless and helpless, her faith in all that she once held noblest broken, and her spirits unequal to any further struggle. Besides this, there was stealing upon her, in gradual but certain progress, a vile hypocrisy and habit of falsehood, which even good men found it necessary to sanction and endure, that some semblance of the mere pretences of a better nature might still be left to them, were it only to redeem the name of their sad degradation. Let royalty revisit them as speedily as it would, it could bring nothing back for which they might not gladly exchange all that they now endured. What was the innocent and partial tax of ship-money to an all but universal decimation? What were agonies and mutilations by the Star Chamber to wholesale murders and executions by high courts of justice? What was an open What the arrest of

profligacy worse than a secret lie? five members of the House of Commons to the utter violation and destruction of every privilege parliament possessed, and even of the very form and name of its rights and its immunities? The true cause of the death of Charles I. was his resistance to the sacred principle of popular representation. He laid down his head upon the block, because he broke violently, and in succession, three English parliaments. Oliver Cromwell had now merited, far more richly, that self-same doom; for he had committed in circumstances of greater atrocity, the self-same sin.”*

Royalty did revisit England speedily enough, and brought back with it what should have silenced such a course of reasoning in one who freely acknowledges

Forster's Life of Cromwell, vol. ii. p. 305.

the errors and wrongs heaped by Charles I. on England. With more justice Vaughan remarks:-" Concerning the domestic government of Cromwell, it may, in brief, be said, that arbitrary and severe as it sometimes was towards those who were influenced by a fixed hostility to his power, it was, on the whole, as just and humane as would have been found practicable in circumstances retaining so little of the regularity belonging to ordinary times. It is easy to show that Cromwell, as Protector, did not always act according to those great provisions of the constitution which the civil war had been prosecuted to secure; but there is a great want of intelligence, or of honesty, in the reasoning which represents his altered conduct, in times so altered, as so much clear proof of his apostacy from the cause of freedom."*

The difference between the despotism of Charles and that of Cromwell, was this very simple, but altogether fundamental one. The course of government which Charles attempted to pursue, inevitably tended to effect the complete subjugation of the constitution to the prerogative of the crown, and if unchecked for a single generation must have blotted out every relic of the liberty of Englishmen, rendering the King of England as absolute, and the people as abject, as the ruler and subjects of Spain; while it had already sufficed to degrade both beneath the contempt of every European rival. The government of Cromwell, on the contrary, while it won the honour or the fear, of its most powerful and despotic foes, and made itself the head and the champion of Protestant Europe, established principles of toleration and liberty of conscience in England, which were before unknown, and have never since been eradicated. Charles, in a word, legislated for himself; Cromwell for the people; and the gradual change in the estimation of each, proves already the power of great and noble principles to work out their results.

* Vaughan's Protectorate, p. xcvii

Of the foreign policy of Cromwell, in which Milton bore so conspicuous a share, a very slight sketch may suffice. It is altogether such as every Englishman may be proud of. Not an iota of the honours due to a crowned head would he dispense with, when negotiating, as the Protector of England, with the proudest monarchs of Europe. Spain yielded with little hesitation to accord to him the same style as was claimed by her own haughty monarchs; but Louis of France sought, if possible, some compromise. His first letter was addressed to "His Most Serene Highness Oliver, Lord Protector, &c.," but Cromwell refused to receive it. The more familiar title of "Cousin," was in like manner rejected, and Louis and his crafty minister, the Cardinal Mazarin, were compelled to concede to him the wonted mode of address between sovereigns—“ To our dear Brother Oliver." "What," exclaimed Louis to his minister, "shall I call this base fellow my brother?" "Aye," rejoined his astute adviser, "or your father, if it will gain your ends!" His influence with Mazarin, and other seemingly most intractable opponents, was soon brought to bear for the noblest ends. On the 3d of June, 1655, the sad news reached England that the Protestants of Piedmont were subjected to the sternest persecutions by the Duke of Savoy, having no means of escape offered to them but the abandonment of their faith. Churches filled with the wretched fugitives were given to the flames. Whole families were put to the sword, or hunted down in the Savoy Alps like beasts of prey, and men, women, and children hurled over the cliffs. The most revolting atrocities were perpetrated on these sufferers for conscience' sake, by the soldiers who were sent to drive them into banishment, or compel them to apostatize by horrible tortures. Milton's sonnet is known to all. It only embodies the indignant feeling that prevailed throughout England, when the people learned of the sufferings of their Protestant brethren. Cromwell took up a position in