Waldensian Review no 136 Summer 2020 136 | Page 10

Given the bestial behaviour of these egged-on troops illustrated, described
and witness-signed by Waldensians and Catholics in Samuel Morland’s 1658
700-page book ‘With a most naked and punctual relation of the late Bloody
Massacre in 1655’, suicide would have seemed a wholly rational option.
There followed the destruction now of the Rora Valley with Gentile’s Irish
Regiment ‘doing marvels’ and of the Germanasca and Chisone Valleys. By
6 May Father Ceserana, Madama Cristina’s Jesuit confessor, accompanying
Pianezza, could report ‘that the heretics have been hunted and proscribed from
every place, land, roof of the surrounding area
and are vanquished, beaten and subjected.’
On 18 May in the Cathedral Square in Turin
the remarkably low number of 40 Waldensians
including 2 Pastors made their abjuration.
However on the heights of Rora, in the Valley of
the Invincibles above Villar in the Pellice Valley
and from Pramollo towards Val Chisone two
masters of guerrilla resistance – Bartolomeo
Jahier and Joshua Janavel – led an indomitable
and exemplary resistance; even indeed in July
briefly retaking Torre Pellice itself, though Jahier
was subsequently surrounded and killed
with his 50 men. Janavel’s Guerrilla Manual
Instructions is still difficult to better.
If Huguenot military help from volunteers
was already forthcoming, so too was pressure
from ‘The Protestant International’ led by Oliver Cromwell. This was stimulated
also by the able media war the literate Bible reading Waldensians were
conducting. No longer was this just a confessional cleansing land grab. Now the
Waldensian Question mobilised the faithful in Huguenot France, Switzerland
and of course Holland, but above all in the greatest Protestant European Power
that was the United Commonwealth that is Republic of England, Scotland
and Ireland, whose reactions were informed by the work of the Waldensian’s
chief Secret Service Agent in this matter: the Italian speaking Swiss Pastor of
the French Speaking Protestant Church in London Pastor Stoppa, who was
constantly travelling on the Continent.
Being in the midst of negotiating a peace with Cardinal Mazarin’s France,
Cromwell could put pressure on Mazarin to dictate terms to his client neighbour
the Duke of Savoy and his Bourbon Regent Mother Madama Cristina.
Then there was Admiral Blake’s powerful 25 ship strong Mediterranean Fleet
[one of three Cromwellian Fleets] attacking the white-slaving by Barbary
pirates of British seamen. Blake could easily be diverted to bombard the
Savoyard port of Nice, as indeed international opinion believed imminently
it would do. Cromwell also proposed for British military action to support
the tiny remaining Waldensian Army in val Chisone but, as Secretary of State
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