Two of the key episodes in the history of liberty in which he was about to take part are easy for us to admire today. The first has a particular resonance for evangelical Protestants: Cromwells intervention in the domestic politics of Savoy-Piedmont to save the Waldenses.
England was shocked when the news from Savoy-Piedmont arrived, foreshadowing as it did the final extermination of the Waldenses. Such a fate could not be allowed to befall those who had been, as it was thought, Protestants before the Reformation. Cromwell promptly declared May 30 a day of national humiliation, prayer, and fasting, and launched a public appeal for funds to aid the decimated Waldensian communities, to which he donated £2,000 from his own purse (more than US$260,000 in current values). But he did not merely act to help the survivors of the massacres, for he was well aware that they, too, might be put to the sword in due course.
He therefore also took political action. Cromwell appealed to all the Protestant states, urging them to intervene. His foreign secretary, the great poet John Milton, drafted the official letters and then composed his own personal, passionate rejection of religious massacre and plea for divine justice, in language that is still extraordinarily moving:
Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold,
Forget not: in thy book record their groans
Who were thy sheep and in their ancient fold
Slain by the bloody Piemontese that rolled
Mother with infant down the rocks.
Cromwell meanwhile set an example to Protestant Christendom (and, dare it be said, to later generations of Western statesmen confronted with ethnic [or religious] cleansing, whether in Bosnia or the Sudan). He dispatched an extraordinary ambassador to the Savoyard court at Turin and ordered the English fleet then in the Mediterranean to act against the commerce and coast of Savoy if the embassy was rebuffed. The dispatch of the fleet also had implications for the government of Francea Catholic state, but which at this time still permitted (very limited) liberty of worship to its Huguenot minority and which exercised considerable influence over its much smaller neighbor. France desired an alliance with Britain against Spain, but Cromwells ambassador, Samuel Morland, stopped in Paris en route to Turin and made it plain that no British military aid would be forthcoming unless the persecution of the Vaudois was halted. He hinted that if it were not, the English fleet might act against French maritime trade. France duly swung its weight behind the British demands, and when Morland arrived in Turin, the government capitulated to Cromwells demands.
The House of Savoy not only halted the massacres; it was also compelled to conclude a formal treaty between Duke and Protector that guaranteed to Savoys heretical minority the free exercise of their faith. Morland then distributed to the poorest of the Vaudois the money raised by popular donation in response to Cromwells appeal; it totaled a remarkable £39,000equal at todays prices to more than US$5,000,000. The Waldenses had been spared and provided with a basis for rebuilding their lives. Across Europe, Cromwell was regarded as the savior of the Vaudois, a point of view shared by the modern Waldense community, which regards his intervention as one of the most significant events of their long history. It was not, alas, the last time the Vaudois were to be vigorously persecuted, but at no other time was there such danger that they might be entirely exterminated.
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Cromwellian Britain intervened in Savoy even though special foreign embassies were expensive to mount, and fleets expensive to maintain in foreign waters. Although force was not ultimately used, Cromwell seriously contemplated ordering the bombardment of Nice (then part of Savoy, not France). He had no economic incentives to act, for British commerce with Savoy was of minimal importance; the region was also strategically unimportant, for Cromwells foreign policy objectives focused on the Low Countries and the West Indies. He put preserving the Vaudois ahead of the valuable prospect of an alliance with France. And he was to do so again, for when a treaty was concluded with France, soon after, the price for British military aid against Spain was much greater rights for the Huguenots.
There were no benefits for Cromwells government or for Britain more generally to be gained by Cromwells actions on behalf of endangered minorities. His intervention in Savoy was altruistic and motivated by genuine concern for those who, in Miltons vision, kept thy truth so pure of old, when all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones.
Re: Friday/Saturday/Sunday morning preaching.
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Originally Posted by John 14:27
what subset someone is either, but I'm also not daft enough to claim that I literally cannot see the differences between races like you've been claiming. I'm not saying you should care what racial phenotype someone is, that's literally the opposite of what I said. 
