execrable and ignominious of all time. Their name has become a byword, a
term of reproach and abuse. Yet they are truly patient people who by silence
and hope have overcome all the assaults and violence of their enemies.’
In 1534 Olivetan’s young cousin John Calvin resigned his Catholic benefice
in France and moved to Basle. ‘Without the Gospel we are useless and vain,
without the Gospel wealth is poverty, wisdom is folly before God, strength
is weakness. But through the power of the Gospel we are made children of
God.’ So wrote Calvin in the Latin preface to what, until the nineteenth cen-
tury, became the accepted French Protestant version of the Bible—as Luther’s
was the German one. In 1588 its English translation became the English Ge-
neva Bible—the Bible used by Cromwell throughout his life! (The King James
Authorised Version only came into common use after 1660.) This, however,
was the ‘pure’ Genevan translation, which gave its adherents the name of
‘Puritans’. Here was no biblical evidence for bishops, copes or choirs but
rather WASHING for BAPTISM, and CONGREGATION instead of CHURCH.
This was the moral and even physical world that Oliver and his contem-
poraries inhabited
The intra-Protestant battle had moved from the fight to print the Bible to
the battle for which Bible? In the spectrum of Church and Chapel, Cromwell
was a Congregationalist, who firmly believed that we reach faith through
individual trial and error. He dissolved all three of his Parliaments because
they sought to impose Presbyterian confessional uniformity after abolishing
Anglicanism. For Cromwell, and his soldiers, this was jumping out of the
frying pan into the fire in imposing another exclusive authoritarianism on
the individual seeker after truth. We advance in faith through responding
to God’s blessing, or otherwise, of our actions. Individual faith made each
sinner responsible for his actions. Science, for we are in the age of Newton
and Boyle, is equally a testing of hypotheses—of trial and error. Cromwell is
a Janus figure on the cusp of modernity!
If the tiny Waldensian Church of ‘slaughtered saints’, whose Church had
reputedly been formed by St Paul while crossing the Alps, could produce this
‘pure’ version of the Bible, and also bear a huge cost of up to 1500 gold ecus
to do so, no wonder the Lord Protector felt and reacted, as the Ambassador to
Turin Samuel Morland said, ‘as if the massacre was happening to his closest
family members’.
No less impassioned was John Milton, Cromwell’s Latin Secretary or
official writer in Latin, the language of diplomacy, of dispatches. These, in
the case of the Piedmontese Easter of 1655, were so intemperate and ‘undip-
lomatic’ that the young Ambassador Samuel Morland thought it would be
counter-productive to present them unvarnished directly to Madama Cristina,
the Dowager Duchess of Savoy and Regent on behalf of her son. for she had
not only initiated the persecution but was also the sister of Charles I’s widow
Queen Henrietta Maria. But then the children of converts are invariably bigots,
although their father Henry IV, the erstwhile leader of the French Protestant
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