rored God’s all-seeing will. The deeds of this man of action were thus ‘Not
mine O Lord but Thine’, and both success or failure marked divine approval
or disapproval! Thus Cromwell’s great victories were blessed, but his failures
like the 1655 Grand Design in the Caribbean, and his temptation over taking
the Crown were marks of Divine disapproval. His success, as in the survival
of the Waldensians, marked the relief of evident approval. The Book of Rev-
elations was the source of so many of his strategic plans, for were not the
persecuted Huguenots and Waldensians the two servants killed at the Door
of the Beast of the Apocalypse!
With John Milton it was personal. Milton’s dearest friend at St Paul’s
School had been Charles Diodati, whose early death broke John’s heart.
Charles was the nephew of Giovanni Diodati, whose Italian translation in
exile of the Bible, the first in the vernacular, was to be used by the Waldensian
Church.
It has been claimed, and believed by many in England, that St Paul had
taken the short-cut through the Cottian Alps and the Waldensian Valleys
on his way to Provence and Marseilles. ‘Anglican’ divines like Hooker the
theologian and the bibliophile Archbishop Ussher of Armagh and Primate
of Ireland believed that St Paul had founded a primitive church in the Alps
and that the Waldensians were the survivors of this. They thus provided a
living link with the pre-Gregorian Early Christian Church. So the reformed
Catholicism of the Church of England, rather than the post-Gregorian Church
of Rome, was the true successor to the Primitive Church.
However, it was at the rich crossroads of Europe in Lyon that in c. 1180
Waldo, a rich merchant, during a party sees a friend suddenly die. He re-
pents, embraces poverty and follows Jesus’ instruction to his discipls and
travels along with his followers as Christ had instructed his disciples to do
and preaches the Gospel in the vernacular. This was dynamite. The interpreta-
tion, or even the translation, of the Word was exclusively the property—and
power—of the Church of Rome.
This way lay heresy. Francis, a generation later, was tolerated, and then
encouraged, because he did not preach the Word. The Waldensians went
underground, centring on Alpine holes in the wall in the Cottian Alps like Pra
del Torno in Val Angrogna, where the barbets [uncles] studied the Bible in the
winter and then set off in pairs as ‘merchants’ with ‘a pearl of great price’
(the Gospel) to visit isolated little communities throughout Europe. What we
know of them is from transcripts of the Inquisitions Interrogations in trials
for Heresy, usually leading to the Stake.
Throughout the Middle Ages the underground clandestine Waldensian
Church also inspired important Reformation figures. Richard II’s queen was
Anne of Bohemia and via her connections Wycliffe’s chief follower Peter Payne
linked up in Prague with the Hussites, the Taborites and the Moravian Breth-
ren, and through them the Waldensians. ‘I shall be condemned and called a
Waldensian and a Wycliffite’, wrote Luther. Calvin, as a law student in Bourges,
6