(September, 1686, to September, 1687.)
During the course of the events which have just been narrated, a great number of letters had been written to Switzerland; Holland, and Prussia (then Brandenburg), as well as to Wurtemberg, in order to awaken an interest in favour of the Vaudois in Protestant powers who might be able to assist them by their intercession, their contributions, or their hospitality. In answer to this appeal the most generous sympathy was expressed. At the commencement of the persecution, the avoyer of Berne had addressed to all the parishes of that canton, and probably also of the other Protestant cantons of Switzerland,[2] a pressing circular, to recommend the celebration of a public fast, accompanied with a general collection on behalf of the Vaudois. This circular commenced in these words: "As in these sad times our brethren of Piedmont, pursued with fire and sword, killed, made prisoners, and banished from their country, are fugitives, and in the most deplorable condition," &c.,[3]… from which it appears that at this time a number of the Vaudois had been already banished from their country, and were fugitives. Even at the beginning of the year, it would seem that the idea of an inevitable and speedy exile had been prevalent in the valleys, since means were already adopted to secure beforehand an asylum for their people in foreign countries.[4]
We have seen how they were decimated by the massacres and the prisons. The heroic resistance of the last defenders of these depopulated mountains was the means of procuring the deliverance of the captives who had surrendered themselves. These combatants did not consent to terminate their warfare, except on condition of their being permitted to retire freely, and along with them their brethren who were prisoners; and they hastened to give intimation of this to the evangelical cantons. Victor Amadeus, without seeming to come to any terms with his rebellious subjects, as they were styled, ratified this condition by implication, saying of his prisoners, in a letter to the evangelical cantons of Switzerland, "I hope that the resolution which I shall adopt with regard to them will prove agreeable to you."[5] Eight days after the reception of this letter, the Protestant cantons named deputies, who met at Arau,[6] to confer regarding the projected emigation of the Vaudois, and the asylum which could be offered them. Having taken into consideration all the documents bearing on this subject, this meeting nominated two commissioners, to whom it was intrusted to communicate concerning it with the Count Gavon, the Piedmontese representative to the Swiss government. They repaired to Lucerne, where he resided, and their negotiations simply gave an official character to the terms of agreement on which the last combatants of the valleys had laid down their arms.
As to the route by which the Vaudois were to pass out of the dominions of Savoy, Victor Amadeus had at first intended that they should go by way of St. Bernard and the Valais, but as they could not pass through the latter country without the previous consent of the Bishop of Sion, the delegates of the Protestant cantons, who remained beside the Piedmontese ambassador at Lucerne, demanded that the banished Vaudois should be sent into Switzerland by the pass of Mount Cenis. Count Gavon wrote to Turin accordingly, and this route was agreed upon.
Now, likewise, the two detachments of Vaudois began to arrive in Geneva, who had combated with so much courage in the valleys of Lucerna and St. Martin, and whose glorious capitulation had brought about the deliverance of their brethren. They were the first to enjoy the benefit of it, as they had been the last to surrender; and not having passed through the prisons, they had also suffered least, for the diseases of jails are more destructive than the wounds of battle. The magistrates of Geneva had not yet even been made acquainted with their departure from the valleys, when they entered that city with their arms and baggage, on the 25th of November, 1686. They were eighty persons in all, men, women, and children. The council of state decided that their arms should be deposited under the market-sheds, to be restored to them on their departure from the city.[7]
Intelligence was soon received that the Duke of Savoy had set at liberty a party of prisoners.[8] They were those of Turin. Salvajot, known to us by his memoirs, was one of this first party; but the liberation of the prisoners had not yet become general. The Swiss commissioners again renewed their application, and on the 3d of January, 1687, there appeared at last an edict, by which it was granted to the Vaudois who had not become Catholics, that they should be set at liberty, whatever might have been the ground of their detention, on condition that they should immediately leave the territories of Savoy, without deviating, under pain of death, from the route which should be pointed out to them.
But they did not get away without new sufferings. The Propaganda saw with regret so great a number of heretics escape, even by exile, from their endeavours of conversion. It will be borne in mind how many eminent persons and great families were engaged in their work, with a fervour very unenlightened, no doubt, but perhaps sincere. Their proselytizing had at first proceeded from zeal, afterwards it came to be instigated by ambition. The favour of the court and of the clergy had recompensed the devotion of the first persons who had generously charged themselves with the maintenance and education of a few Vaudois children. It was found to be a way of obtaining such favour; everybody, therefore, wished to have his convert. This zeal became quite the fashion in the fashionable world, and a letter written from Turin says, "You will seldom see a coach pass which has not its barbet[9] behind it, and sometimes there are two of them, distinguished by the dragoon's cap which they wear."[10] But like everything else which is a mere fashion, this fancy quickly passed away, and these poor children were forgotten, and often sunk into wretchedness, sometimes into degradation. On the departure of their families attempts were still made to seize upon some of them. "The prisoners of my division," writes the conductor of one of them, "have informed me that as they left the citadel of Turin the major took from them a number of children by force."[11]
The Vaudois who had abjured in the valleys, or in the prisons, were also very numerous.[12] It may be imagined what effect an excitement, amounting almost to madness, must have produced upon weak minds, and how very readily such persons might forget themselves amidst the terrors of persecution. Moreover, many of the converted had abandoned their church only in the hope of remaining in their native land; but for this they were severely punished. To prevent them from joining those who went into Switzerland, they were not allowed to leave the prisons until the departure of the last of their brethren. The fashionable rage for converts was then over; the faithful Vaudois had won for themselves respect and admiration, even from their enemies; the apostates continued suspected, even by their new brethren in religion; and, to crown all, instead of being permitted to return to their native Alps, they were sent to the swampy plains of Verceil,[13] and prohibited from leaving them under penalty of ten years of the galleys. Their life there was very miserable, and many of them died of the typhoid fevers which they contracted in these climates, so different from their own.
Their compatriots, who had preferred exile to apostasy, were free to choose an asylum for themselves in a foreign land, whilst, like the descendants of Jacob in Egypt, these unhappy people were detained in slavery in the mephitic rice-grounds of Verceil, to which they had been carried. A penalty of ten years of the galleys was denounced against any inhabitant of any part of the country, out of that province, who should receive into his house one of the catholicized Vaudois. They were not permitted to leave the province, even for the briefest time, without formal leave obtained from the government; being bound, moreover, to produce, on their return, attestations of their regular attendance on the rites of the Church of Rome, signed by the priests of all the parishes in which they had sojourned. May it not well be said, that in place of the dignity of exile they had chosen the degradation of servitude?
Finally, they were prohibited, in the strictest manner, from ever setting foot again in the Vaudois valleys, upon any account whatever,[14] or in virtue of any permission. Anyone who should be taken there was to be punished with death; and a reward of 2000 francs[15] was promised to the person who should apprehend any one transgressing this order.
It is evident that the unhappy persons thus carried to Verceil, who had hoped for some mitigation of their sufferings by their apostasy, were, on the contrary, less favourably treated than their faithful and proscribed fellow-countrymen. The latter, after having left the dominions of Savoy without degradation, were received with esteem, affection, and universal sympathy in foreign countries, and at last effected a return to their own land, which they quitted no more; whilst the miserable converts to Catholicism, distrusted and despised by all, and having lost their self-respect, and pined in a region remote from their mountains, and, without a prospect of ever returning to them, dragged out the miserable remainder of their days, forgotten, afflicted, and scorned. What important lessons may be learned from their profound degradation!
Before the arrival of this unhappy colony, Verceil had already a number of Vaudois within its walls; but as they were prisoners, and not converts to Catholicism, they were summoned to go out of the country with their faithful brethren, and commenced their journey at the same time with the prisoners of Turin.
This was in the winter of 1686-7. These mountaineers, once so vigorous, were now pallid, feeble, ill-clothed, without shoes, and afflicted with fevers and dysenteries.[16] Death had thinned their ranks during their long confinement;[17] the severity of winter now threatened to put an end to the enfeebled lives which had scarcely escaped from the hardships of the dungeon.[18]
They arrived at Turin; and there still sadder scenes awaited them. On account of the bad weather, of course, orders had been given that no children under twelve years of age should be allowed to go away; but their parents were promised that they would be sent to them on the return of a better season.[19] These poor people, already so often deceived, saw in this only a stratagem intended to deprive them of their children, that they might be kept away from their parents, made Catholics, and taken from them for ever. All the prisons were filled with cries, tears, and groans;[20] the mothers especially were in the utmost distress; many of them would rather have seen their children dead than given up to their persecutors.[21] On the first attempt to carry off a child in consequence of this order, blood began to flow;[22] the resistance was so energetic that the execution of the order was relinquished."[23] It was one, the execution of which humanity would have approved, if the recollection of former perfidies had not given too good reason for suspecting its design. Not only were the children which these emigrating families retained then left to them, but likewise a number of those who had been previously taken away, learning that their parents were about to leave the country, quitted the great houses in which they had been placed, and fled to join the company of exiles.[24] However, the greater part of these poor children were pursued, seized, and again dragged from the arms of their proscribed families to the palaces which were their prisons. On the way through Savoy, some of those who had actually set out on the journey were still carried off--some by the monks,[25] some by the gentry,[26] and some by the soldiers.[27] It must, however, be added, that the greater part of these children were afterwards restored.[28]
But thus distress of every kind was added to the sufferings of their parents. "These poor people," says Arnaud,[29] "were worn out with infirmity and languor; some were devoured by vermin, and others exhausted by their wounds; covered with sores and rags, they resembled ghosts rather than human beings." Such was the condition in which the first detachments of this expatriated people appeared under the walls of Geneva.
"At last these brave people arrive--these generous confessors of our Lord Jesus Christ!" exclaims an eye-witness of their entry into that city. "We have, as yet, only the first division, composed of seventy persons, of every sex and age, who have arrived amidst a cold which has frozen the Rhone to its bottom. They are all that remain of more than a thousand, who were imprisoned in two different places, and they have left twenty of their number on the roads, where they have died of cold, famine, and wretchedness. These their conductors would not permit them to succour. Perhaps it was a father who left his child, a mother who left her daughter, or children who left their parents."[30]
They arrived at different times, and in several divisions, to the number of about 3000 persons.[31] But they were almost all in such a state of destitution, that the greater part of them could not have reached the frontiers of Savoy without frequently receiving assistance. Some, bent down with age and sickness, had nothing with which to clothe themselves; others, pierced with wounds, which had become more serious and malignant in the neglect of the jails, had scarcely linen to dress them; numbers of them had lost the use of their limbs, which had been frostbitten on the way, and could not employ their hands even to receive or to convey to their mouths the food which was offered them; there were some whose stomachs were so disordered that they could not digest the least nourishment without severe pain. Those whose illness was greatest had been flung into carts or set upon beasts; there were some who staggered from the burden of extreme debility; others were so far gone that they had not strength left to speak; others were so overwhelmed with mental distresses that they would have preferred death. Some breathed their last on the frontier, as if they could not survive the loss of their unnatural country; others died as they arrived at Geneva, between the two gates of the city, finding thus the termination of their woes at the moment when they might have found some solace of them. All these particulars are derived from the relations of the time: there is not one of them which does not depend upon contemporary testimony.
The people of Geneva displayed an admirable devotedness of generosity, and the most delicate and ardent sympathy in relieving these great sufferings. They welcomed the proscribed Vaudois with a sort of enthusiasm. One-half of the population went out to meet them as far as the banks of the Arve, which formed the boundary of their noble country, so small upon the map, but so great in the world. "The Genevese contended with one another," says a contemporary, "as to the reception of the most miserable of these poor Vaudois, which of them should first conduct them to his dwelling. Some there were who bore them in their arms from the frontiers to the city." This eagerness to give them a kind reception was so great, that in order to prevent the roads from being inconveniently crowded, and houses from being over-filled, the council of state of Geneva was under the necessity of passing a decree, by which it was enjoined that each citizen should wait, before receiving any of the newly arrived exiles into his house, the distribution of their billets of lodging.[32]
But what a distress it was for them all when, on seeking for one another in the crowd, the members of the same family could not find one another! The Vaudois who had arrived first, and to whom the generous hospitality of that Christian city had restored some measure of strength, ran in their turn to meet the new divisions, whose arrival was announced, to inquire after relatives and friends whom they missed. "A father sought his son, and a son his father; a husband sought his wife, and a wife her husband."[33] These searches were often followed only by the saddest disappointments. "This produced a spectacle so melancholy and distressful, that all the beholders wept, whilst these poor sufferers, oppressed and overwhelmed with the excess of their woe, had no strength either to weep or to lament."[34]
Janavel was one of the first to go out from Geneva to meet his countrymen. His sad anticipations were realized; his counsels had failed to prevent this great catastrophe; and he--who having for thirty-two years eaten the bread of exile, would so much the more have sought to save the children of the Vaudois mountains from its bitterness--may sometimes have felt the pleasure of seeing again those from whom it had been so painful to be separated--those families whose recollection he had cherished, and the people whom he had defended--contending against the grief which this new proscription caused to his patriotic heart. But at the distressful spectacle of so many miserable beings, wanderers without a country--as each portion of this great wreck was cast beneath the walls of Geneva, the sad remains of an entire people expatriated--this generous city, as great in charity as Janavel had been in battle, showed itself ready to give new assistance to the exiles.
Moreover, there were still among these exiles courageous bands, who had comparatively escaped, and privileged families, who excited admiration as well as pity. The Vaudois speak of one of their Barbas, ninety years of age, who brought with him a tribe of seventy-two children and grandchildren.[35] These worthy portions of the wreck of the Vaudois Church seemed to revive amongst the people of modern times the imposing images of the patriarchal emigrations, of which the Bible has made the memory familiar to all Protestants.
The exiles arrived in Geneva, singing, with a grave and sad voice, that psalm of fugitive Israel which Theodore Beza had translated into the language of Calvin--
"Faut-il, Grand Dieu, que nous soyons epars!"[36]
and in which, speaking of the enemies of the people of God, the psalmist has introduced particulars which so exactly accord with the excesses committed in the valleys by the persecutors of the Israel, of the Alps:--
"They fired have thy sanctuary,
And have defiled the same,
By casting down unto the ground
The place where dwelt thy name.
Thus said they in their hearts, Let us
Destroy them out of hand;
They burnt up all the synagogues
Of God within the land."
But the miseries of war had been merely the prelude to the longer and more grievous sufferings which the Vaudois had undergone in the prisons. They had entered them in number about 12,000, and there came out only 3500[37] In some of these places of captivity they got only foul water to drink; in others they had nothing to eat but insufficient and bad food. At Queyrasque and Asti they were crowded into the ditches of the town, exposed to all the inclemencies of the seasons; elsewhere, lying on the pavement or on the naked earth; and sometimes so closely packed in a small place, that they had difficulty in moving. The heat of the summer in 1686, say the accounts of the time, engendered such a quantity of lice, that the captives were not able to sleep; there were even great maggots, which bit through the skin;[38] and numbers of these poor people who were sick, were so devoured that their flesh was falling in pieces. As many as seventy-five sick have been numbered in a single chamber, and when they left it in the middle of winter, passing by a sudden transition from their captivity to their journey, without strength, and without clothing,[39] many of them marched only to their death.
At Mondovi, the order to allow the Vaudois to depart was not communicated to them until the day before Christmas, at five o'clock in the evening;[40] and the prisoners were at the same time told, that if they did not profit by it forthwith, they would not have it in their power to go next day. The prisons were immediately empty; all these unfortunate people rushed, notwithstanding the night and the snow, to the middle of the frozen highroads; they went on five leagues without halting; but one hundred and fifty of them died on the way. What barbarity on the part of those who had deceived them, and who celebrated, next day, the festival of Christmas without annoyance in their church!
At Fossan they were caused to set out for Mount Cenis in the midst of a violent storm. Eighty-six of these unfortunate outlaws perished in the snows, and many others had their feet or their hands frostbitten.[41]
The next division, who passed over Mount Cenis about the end of February,[42] were still able to recognize, lying upon the snow, the corpses of those who had perished in January. But the complaints addressed by the Swiss government to the court of Turin, on the little attention shown to the Vaudois, and the destitution in which they were left, notwithstanding the article of the stipulations by which Victor Amadeus undertook to provide for their wants until they reached the frontiers of Savoy--the indignation which arose on the spectacle of so many woes, and the voice of humanity itself, led the Duke of Savoy to adopt more efficacious measures for the preservation of their lives. He caused fifteen bales of thick black woollen greatcoats to be carried to Novalèze, at the foot of Mount Cenis, intended for the succeeding convoys. That which passed over this mountain a month after the catastrophe which had covered it with mourning, was composed of two bands of prisoners--the one brought from Lucerna, and the other from Turin, but united at St. Ambroise, and amounting to 202 persons. Forty of these woollen cloaks, sent by Victor Amadeus, were distributed to them. The Chevalier De Parelles had accompanied them as far as the bridge of Frèlerive, and his brother, Captain Carrel, conducted them from thence to the frontiers of Geneva. They were greatly satisfied with the care with which they were treated on the journey, and gave an attestation to this effect to the captain, who demanded it of them. This last circumstance shows that the Duke of Savoy had at last begun to be in earnest, and was sincerely desirous that the unhappy outlaws should be cared for.[43]
They did not yet, however, cease to have great privations to endure. "They are in a pitiable state, "wrote one of the Swiss commissioners sent to meet them.[44] "Almost all of them are sick, and without our assistance half of them would have been dead on the road. I have succeeded in recovering the girl who was carried off at Lanslebourg, and a fine boy whom the Master of La Ramassa had detailed at Mount Cenis. I wrote to the commissioner of his 1oyal highness to cause the children to be given up who were detained at St. John and Aiguebelles; four of them have been sent, there still remain five, whom it is promised that I shall receive along with the thirteen sick persons who were left on the way." "These people have suffered much. Yet they are patient and contented, and thank God with tears, blessing you continually as they behold the care which is taken to succour them." These last words are quoted exactly from the letter of the commissioner.
Let us now look at some of the particulars which Salvajot gives of the march of the convoy to which he belonged.
"After having made many promises to us to get us to embrace Catholicism, they allowed us to depart on the 27th of February, 1687.[45] We set out in good order. The children and persons who could not walk were put in carts. When the road was too bad for vehicles, they gave us mules, asses, and horses. We passed through nearly the whole of Savoy on horseback; and when the Savoyards did not do their duty, the sergeant gave them blows with his stick." It appears that the manners of the time were scarcely more mild in regard to Catholic subjects than in regard to proscribed Protestants. Both the one and the other, in the estimation of the attendants of sovereigns, were clowns, to be taxed and made to work for them at their pleasure.
"Our sergeants were very good," adds Salvajot. "They were careful that no harm should be done to us." (For fear, no doubt, of the corporal chastisements which would have awaited themselves, in consequence of the new feelings towards the proscribed Vaudois, which had been called forth by the accidents arising from the harshness of the first conductors.)
At Geneva, says the relation of 1689, "the Vaudois were received, only as brethren, but as persons who brought with them peace, and a blessing to families."[46] Reserved places were prepared for them in the church of St. Peter, behind those of the syndics of the town.[47] The hospital of Plain-Palais had been put in order for them;[48] but almost all of them, even those who were sick, were lodged and provided for by the inhabitants of Geneva.
The other Protestant towns of Switzerland hastened to concur in this generous welcome. That of Berne offered to the magistrates of Geneva, to clothe the Vaudois at its own expense,[49] but this had been already done.[50]
However, all these successive bands of emigrants could not be accumulated in a single town. Frequent couriers passed and repassed among all the Protestant cantons of Switzerland, to accomplish the division amongst them in the most advantageous manner possible, of so great a number of exiles. Part of them were sent on to Wurtemberg and Brandenburg in the course of the year 1687; but the greater part spent the winter in Switzerland, waiting till a station should be definitively assigned them. Some went to Holland, and thence to America; the greater number, however, were totally unwilling to remove far from the Vaudois valleys. The poor exiles hoped to be able to return to them again in a short time, and deferred as much as possible the fixing of an establishment which would have bound them to a foreign land.
Janavel cherished these sentiments of patriotism in their hearts. They had, moreover, left part of their brethren in Piedmont; for independently of those who were at Verceil, all the Vaudois who, during the war of 1686, had been taken with arms in their hands, far from being released with the other prisoners, were condemned to the galleys, and subsequently were employed on the works of fortifications.[51] Moreover, all the Vaudois pastors, with the exception of Arnaud and Montoux, were retained, notwithstanding the frequent and pressing representations of Switzerland, to which it was replied that Victor Amadeus reserved his decision on their fate till his return from a journey which he had just made to Venice.[52] "Two days before our departure from Turin," Salvajot says, "all our ministers, with their families, were put in a separate chamber; guards were placed at the door that no one might go out of it; and thus our poor ministers remained in prison, who thought they should have been the first to have left it.[53] But Victor Amadeus was in no haste to resolve upon their fate; for we read in a work published in 1690--"The Vaudois pastors are still prisoners; promises and threats have been tried, time about, to make them abjure; and at this very time they still pine, dispersed and confined, in three castles, where they are exposed to much discomfort and misery, without any apparent prospect of their deliverance.[54] They were not set at liberty till June, 1690, when the victorious Vaudois had regained possession of their valleys, and when Victor Amadeus found it his interest to attach them once more to himself, in consequence of the political rupture which had taken place between Piedmont and France.[55]
The secret of the power of kings is in knowing how to make men oppress one another; their armies are formed of the people, and directed against the people. The wars which arise amongst nations are never for the interests of nations; it is the ambition of dynasties which produces them and profits by them. Thus every oppressed people is the accomplice of the tyrant whose oppression it endures; for if he were left alone no tyrant could prevail against an entire people. But God has permitted this severe tutelage of communities of men, in order that they may know the value of emancipation; and, in order to have liberty, it is necessary to be worthy of it. An independent mind is more free, even in oppression, even in martyrdom, than a servile one when its masters are taken away.
Let me conclude with these words of the gospel, "If Christ make you free, you shall be free indeed."
Notes: