THE EXILE.
New Troubles--Louis XIV. and his Confessor--Edict against
the Vaudois--Their Defenceless Condition--Their Fight and
Victory--They Surrender--The Whole Nation Thrown into
Prison--Utter Desolation of the Land--Horrors of the
Imprisonment--Their Release--Journey across the Alps--Its
Hardships--Arrival of the Exiles at Geneva--Their Hospitable
Reception.
After the great Massacre of 1655, the Church of the Valleys had rest
from persecution for thirty years. This period, however, can be styled
one of rest only when contrasted with the frightful storms which had
convulsed the era that immediately preceded it. The enemies of the
Vaudois still found innumerable ways in which to annoy and harass them.
Ceaseless intrigues were continually breeding new alarms, and the
Vaudois had often to till their fields and prune their vines with their
muskets slung across their shoulders. Many of their chief men were sent
into exile. Captain Gianavello and Pastor Leger, whose services to
their people were too great ever to be forgiven, had sentence of death
passed on them. Leger “was to be strangled; then his body was to be
hung by one foot on a gibbet for four-and-twenty hours; and, lastly,
his head was to be cut off and publicly exposed at San Giovanni. His
name was to be inserted in the list of noted outlaws; his houses were
to be burned.”[130] Gianavello retired to Geneva, where he continued
to watch with unabated interest the fortunes of his people. Leger
became pastor of a congregation at Leyden, where he crowned a life
full of labour and suffering for the Gospel, by a work which has laid
all Christendom under obligations to him; we refer to his _History
of the Churches of the Vaudois_--a noble monument of his Church’s
martyr-heroism and his own Christian patriotism.
Hardly had Leger unrolled to the world’s gaze the record of the last
awful tempest which had smitten the Valleys, when the clouds returned,
and were seen rolling up in dark, thunderous masses against this
devoted land. Former storms had assailed them from the south, having
collected in the Vatican; the tempest now approaching had its first
rise on the north of the Alps. It was the year 1685; Louis XIV. was
nearing the grave, and with the great Audit in view he inquired of his
confessor by what good deed as a king he might atone for his many sins
as a man. The answer was ready. He was told that he must extirpate
Protestantism in France.
The Grand Monarch, as the age styled him, bowed obsequiously before the
shaven crown of priest, while Europe was trembling before his armies.
Louis XIV. did as he was commanded; he revoked the Edict of Nantes.
This gigantic crime inflicted no less misery on the Protestants than
it brought countless woes on the throne and nation of France. But it
is the nation of the Vaudois, and the persecution which the counsel
of Père la Chaise brought upon them, with which we have here to do.
Wishing for companionship in the sanguinary work of purging France from
Protestantism, Louis XIV. sent an ambassador to the Duke of Savoy, with
a request that he would deal with the Waldenses as he was now dealing
with the Huguenots. The young and naturally humane Victor Amadeus was
at the moment on more than usually friendly terms with his subjects of
the Valleys. They had served bravely under his standard in his late war
with the Genoese, and he had but recently written them a letter of
thanks. How could he unsheathe his sword against the men whose devotion
and valour had so largely contributed to his victory? Victor Amadeus
deigned no reply to the French ambassador. The request was repeated; it
received an evasive answer; it was urged a third time, accompanied by a
hint from the potent Louis that if it was not convenient for the duke
to purge his dominions, the King of France would do it for him with an
army of 14,000 men, and would keep the Valleys for his pains. This was
enough. A treaty was immediately concluded between the duke and the
French King, in which the latter promised an armed force to enable the
former to reduce the Vaudois to the Roman obedience, or to exterminate
them.[131] On the 31st of January, 1686, the following edict was
promulgated in the Valleys:--
“I. The Vaudois shall henceforth and for ever cease and
discontinue all the exercises of their religion.
“II. They are forbidden to have religious meetings, under
pain of death, and penalty of confiscation of all their
goods.
“III. All their ancient privileges are abolished.
“IV. All the churches, prayer-houses, and other edifices
consecrated to their worship shall be razed to the ground.
“V. All the pastors and schoolmasters of the Valleys are
required either to embrace Romanism or to quit the country
within fifteen days, under pain of death and confiscation
of goods.
“VI. All the children born, or to be born, of Protestant
parents shall be compulsorily trained up as Roman
Catholics. Every such child yet unborn shall, within a week
after its birth, be brought to the curé of its parish, and
admitted of the Roman Catholic Church, under pain, on the
part of the mother, of being publicly whipped with rods,
and on the part of the father of labouring five years in
the galleys.
[Illustration: THE PASS OF PRA DEL TOR.]
“VII. The Vaudois pastors shall abjure the doctrine they
have hitherto publicly preached; shall receive a salary,
greater by one-third than that which they previously
enjoyed; and one-half thereof shall go in reversion to
their widows.
“VIII. All Protestant foreigners settled in Piedmont are
ordered either to become Roman Catholics, or to quit the
country within fifteen days.
“IX. By a special act of his great and paternal clemency,
the sovereign will permit persons to sell, in this
interval, the property they may have acquired in Piedmont,
provided the sale be made to Roman Catholic purchasers.”
This monstrous edict seemed to sound the knell of the Vaudois as a
Protestant people. Their oldest traditions did not contain a decree so
cruel and unrighteous, nor one that menaced them with so complete and
summary a destruction as that which now seemed to impend over them.
What was to be done? Their first step was to send delegates to Turin,
respectfully to remind the duke that the Vaudois had inhabited the
Valleys from the earliest times; that they had led forth their herds
upon their mountains before the House of Savoy had ascended the throne
of Piedmont; that treaties and oaths, renewed from reign to reign,
had solemnly secured them in the freedom of their worship and other
liberties; and that the honour of princes and the stability of States
lay in the faithful observance of such covenants; and they prayed him
to consider what reproach the throne and kingdom of Piedmont would
incur if he should become the executioner of those of whom he was the
natural protector. The Protestant cantons of Switzerland joined their
mediations to the intercession of the Waldenses. And when the almost
incredible edict came to be known in Germany and Holland, these
countries threw their shield over the Valleys, by interceding with the
duke that he would not inflict so great a wrong as to cast out from
a land which was theirs by irrevocable charters, a people whose only
crime was that they worshipped as their fathers had worshipped, before
they passed under the sceptre of the duke. All these powerful parties
pleaded in vain. Ancient charters, solemn treaties, and oaths, made in
the face of Europe, the long-tried loyalty and the many services of the
Vaudois to the House of Savoy, could not stay the uplifted arm of the
duke, or prevent the execution of the monstrously criminal decree. In a
little while the armies of France and Savoy arrived before the Valleys.
At no previous period of their history, perhaps, had the Waldenses
been so entirely devoid of human aid as now. Gianavello, whose stout
heart and brave arm had stood them in such stead formerly, was in
exile. Cromwell, whose potent voice had stayed the fury of the great
massacre, was in his grave. An avowed Papist filled the throne of Great
Britain. It was going ill at this hour with Protestantism everywhere.
The Covenanters of Scotland were hiding on the moors, or dying in the
Grass-market of Edinburgh. France, Piedmont, and Italy were closing in
around the Valleys; every path guarded, all their succours cut off, an
overwhelming force waited the signal to massacre them. So desperate did
their situation appear to the Swiss envoys, that they counselled them
to “transport elsewhere the torch of the Gospel, and not keep it here
to be extinguished in blood.”
The proposal to abandon their ancient inheritance, coming from such a
quarter, startled the Waldenses. It produced, at first, a division of
opinion in the Valleys, but ultimately they united in rejecting it.
They remembered the exploits their fathers had done, and the wonders
God had wrought in the mountain passes of Rora, in the defiles
of Angrogna, and in the field of the Pra del Tor, and their faith
reviving, they resolved, in a reliance on the same Almighty Arm which
had been stretched out in their behalf in former days, to defend their
hearths and altars. They repaired the old defences, and made ready for
resistance. On the 17th of April, being Good Friday, they renewed their
covenant, and on Easter Sunday their pastors dispensed to them the
Communion. This was the last time the sons of the Valleys partook of
the Lord’s Supper before their great dispersion.
Victor Amadeus II. had pitched his camp on the plain of San Gegonzo
before the Vaudois Alps. His army consisted of five regiments of
horse and foot. He was here joined by the French auxiliaries who had
crossed the Alps, consisting of some dozen battalions, the united
force amounting to between 15,000 and 20,000 men. The signal was to be
given on Easter Monday, at break of day, by three cannon-shots, fired
from the hill of Bricherasio. On the appointed morning, the Valleys
of Lucerna and San Martino, forming the two extreme opposite points
of the territory, were attacked, the first by the Piedmontese host,
and the last by the French, under the command of General Catinat, a
distinguished soldier. In San Martino the fighting lasted ten hours,
and ended in a complete repulse of the French, who retired at night
with a loss of more than 500 killed and wounded, while the Vaudois
had lost only two.[132] On the following day the French, burning with
rage at their defeat, poured a more numerous army into San Martino,
which swept along the valley, burning, plundering, and massacring, and
having crossed the mountains descended into Pramol, continuing the
same indiscriminate and exterminating vengeance. To the rage of the
sword were added other barbarities and outrages too shocking to be
narrated.[133]
The issue by arms being deemed uncertain, despite the vast disparity
of strength, treachery, on a great scale, was now had recourse to.
Wherever, throughout the Valleys, the Vaudois were found strongly
posted, and ready for battle, they were told that their brethren in the
neighbouring communes had submitted, and that it was vain for them,
isolated and alone as they now were, to continue their resistance.
When they sent deputies to head-quarters to inquire--and passes were
freely supplied to them for that purpose--they were assured that the
submission had been universal, and that none save themselves were now
in arms. They were assured, moreover, that should they follow the
example of the rest of their nation, all their ancient liberties would
be held intact.[134] This base artifice was successfully practised at
each of the Vaudois posts in succession, till at length the Valleys had
all capitulated. We cannot blame the Waldenses, who were the victims
of an act so dishonourable and vile as hardly to be credible; but the
mistake, alas! was a fatal one, and had to be expiated afterwards by
the endurance of woes a hundred times more dreadful than any they would
have encountered in the rudest campaign. The instant consequence of
the submission was a massacre which extended to all their Valleys, and
which was similar in its horrors to the great butchery of 1655. In
that massacre upwards of 3,000 perished. The remainder of the nation,
amounting, according to Arnaud, to between 12,000 and 15,000 souls,
were consigned to the various gaols and fortresses of Piedmont.[135]
We now behold these famous Valleys, for the first time in their
history, empty. The ancient lamp burns no longer. The school of the
prophets in the Pra del Tor is razed. No smoke is seen rising from
cottage, and no psalm is heard ascending from dwelling or sanctuary.
No herdsman leads forth his kine on the mountains, and no troop of
worshippers, obedient to the summons of the Sabbath-bell, climbs the
mountain paths. The vine flings wide her arms, but no skilful hand
is nigh to train her boughs and prune her luxuriance. The chestnut
tree rains its fruits, but there is no troop of merry children to
gather them, and they lie rotting on the ground. The terraces of the
hills, that were wont to overflow with flowers and fruitage, and
which presented to the eye a series of hanging gardens, now torn and
breached, shoot in a mass of ruinous rubbish down the slope. Nothing
is seen but dismantled forts, and the blackened ruins of churches and
hamlets. A dreary silence overspreads the land, and the beasts of the
field strangely multiply. A few herdsmen, hidden here and there in
forests and holes of the rocks, are now the only inhabitants. Monte
Viso, from out the silent vault, looks down with astonishment at the
absence of that ancient race over whom, from immemorial time, he had
been wont to dart his kindling glories at dawn, and let fall at eve in
purple shadows the ample folds of his friendly mantle.
We know not if ever before an entire nation were in prison at once. Yet
now it was so. All of the Waldensian race that remained from the sword
of their executioners were immured in the dungeons of Piedmont! The
pastor and his flock, the father and his family, the patriarch and the
stripling had passed in, in one great procession, and exchanged their
grand rock-walled Valleys, their tree-embowered homes, and their sunlit
peaks, for the filth, the choking air, and the Tartarean walls of an
Italian gaol. And how were they treated in prison? As the African slave
was treated on the “middle passage.” They had a sufficiency of neither
food nor clothing. The bread dealt out to them was fetid. They had
putrid water to drink. They were exposed to the sun by day and to the
cold at night. They were compelled to sleep on the bare pavement, or on
straw so full of vermin that the stone floor was preferable. Disease
broke out in these horrible abodes, and the mortality was fearful.
“When they entered these dungeons,” says Henri Arnaud, “they counted
14,000 healthy mountaineers; but when, at the intercession of the Swiss
deputies, their prisons were opened, 3,000 skeletons only crawled out.”
These few words portray a tragedy so awful that the imagination recoils
from the contemplation of it.
However, at length the persecutor looses their chains, and opening
their prison doors he sends forth these captives--the woe-worn remnant
of a gallant people. But to what are they sent forth? To people again
their ancient Valleys? To rekindle the fire on their ancestral hearths?
To rebuild “the holy and beautiful house” in which their fathers had
praised God? Ah, no! They are thrust out of prison only to be sent into
exile--to Vaudois a living death.
The barbarity of 1655 was repeated. It was in December (1686) that the
decree of liberation was issued in favour of these 3,000 men who had
escaped the sword, and now survived the not less deadly epidemic of
the prison. At that season, as every one knows, the snow and ice are
piled to a fearful depth on the Alps; and daily tempests threaten with
death the too adventurous traveller who would cross their summits. It
was at this season that these poor captives, emaciated with sickness,
weakened by hunger, and shivering from insufficient clothing, were
commanded to rise up and cross the snowy hills. They began their
journey on the afternoon of that very day on which the order arrived;
for their enemies would permit no delay. One hundred and fifty of them
died on their first march. At night they halted at the foot of the
Mont Cénis. Next morning, when they surveyed the Alps they saw evident
signs of a gathering tempest, and they besought the officer in charge
to permit them, for the sake of their sick and aged, to remain where
they were till the storm had spent its rage. With heart harder than
the rocks they were to traverse, the officer ordered them to resume
their journey. That troop of emaciated beings began the ascent, and
were soon struggling with the blinding drifts and fearful whirlwinds of
the mountain. Eighty-six of their number, succumbing to the tempest,
dropped by the way. Where they lay down, there they died. No relative
or friend was permitted to remain behind to watch their last moments or
tender them needed succour. That ever-thinning procession moved on and
on over the white hills, leaving it to the falling snow to give burial
to their stricken companions. When spring opened the passes of the
Alps, alas! what ghastly memorials met the eye of the horror-stricken
traveller. Strewed along the track were the now unshrouded corpses of
these poor exiles, the dead child lying fast locked in the arms of the
dead mother.
But why should we prolong this harrowing tale? The first company of
these miserable exiles arrived at Geneva on Christmas Day, 1686, having
spent about three weeks on the journey. They were followed by small
parties, who crossed the Alps one after the other, being let out of
prison at different times. It was not till the end of February, 1687,
that the last band of these emigrants reached the hospitable gates of
Geneva. But in what a plight! way-worn, sick, emaciated, and faint
through hunger. Of some the tongue was swollen in their mouth, and
they were unable to speak; of others the arms were bitten with the
frost, so that they could not stretch them out to accept the charity
offered to them; and some there were who dropped down and expired on
the very threshold of the city, “finding,” as one has said, “the end
of their life at the beginning of their liberty.” Most hospitable was
the reception given them by the city of Calvin. A deputation of the
principal citizens of Geneva, headed by the patriarch Gianavello, who
still lived, went out to meet them on the frontier, and taking them to
their homes, vied with each other which should show them the greatest
kindness. Generous city! If he who shall give a cup of cold water to a
disciple shall in nowise lose his reward, how much more shalt thou be
requited for this thy kindness to the suffering and sorrowing exiles of
the Saviour!
[Illustration: VIEW OF THE PROTESTANT CHURCH OF ST. JEAN, WALDENSIAN
VALLEYS.]