Note 311 — Chapter XXII
Reading edition
The Protector’s exertions to relieve and protect the unhappy Waldenses, who were at that time suffering a merciless persecution, claim for him the gratitude of every friend of religion and liberty. He appointed a day of national humiliation and prayer throughout all England and Wales, and ordered that a collection should be made in all the houses of worship, for the relief of the sufferers. He himself headed a subscription, with the liberal donation of two thousand pounds, and in a short time the large sum of nearly forty thousand pounds was raised and transmitted. Not contented with this measure, he sent letters to the Duke of Savoy, the inhuman persecutor, and to several of the princes of Europe, for the purpose of procuring deliverance for the miserable remnants of the Waldenses. The potent voice of the formidable Protector, which none of the monarchs of that day ventured to despise, uttered, as it was, by the powerful pen of Milton, the Latin Secretary, had some effect, though less than he hoped, to soften the rage of bigotry and persecution. The following sonnet was written by Milton on this occasion:
“On the late Massacre in Piedmont.
Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones
Lie scatter’d on the Alpine mountains, cold;
E’en them, who kept thy truth so pure of old,
When all our fathers worship’d stocks and stones,
Forget not; in thy book record their groans,
Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient fold
Slain by the bloody Piedmontese, that roll’d
Mother and infant down the rocks. Their moans
The vales redoubled to the hills, and they
To Heaven. Their martyr’d blood and ashes sow
O’er all th’ Italian fields, where still doth sway
The triple tyrant; that from these may grow
A hundred fold, who, having learned thy way,
Early may fly the Babylonian woe.”