cke. 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depart, and be, with their families, withdrawn, out of the said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 h