“I... Steer Right Onward” 1654–1658through all the supposedly protected villages. Letters and documents recorded in
graphic detail the fighting, burning, pillaging, and savage butchery: women ripped
open or impaled on spikes; men nailed upside down to trees; many hacked, tor-
tured, and roasted alive; children ripped apart and their brains eaten; fugitives hud-
dled high in the mountains freezing and starving; men, women, and children flung
from precipices; some “tyed Neck and Heels together, and rowled down some
Precipices”; “fearful scriechings, made yet more pitiful by the multitude of those
Eccho’s, which are in those Mountains and Rocks”; scattered bones, “here a Head,
and there a Body; here a Leg, and there an Arm.”^36 According to a contemporary
historian of the affair, Samuel Morland, reports arrived in England, “Letters upon
letters, just like Job’s Messengers... with the sad and doleful Tidings,” spurring
Cromwell to make himself spokesman for the shocked Protestant nations, sending
out nine “pathetical and quickening Letters” in May and June, and raising money at
home and abroad for the Waldensians’ relief.^37 Milton’s high rhetoric was called
upon for all these letters as well as, probably, for the draft of the bold speech which
Cromwell’s ambassador extraordinary to Savoy, Samuel Morland, delivered before
the duke on June 24.^38 It allows the duke deniability but describes graphically the
horrors done in his name:
[Cromwell] hath been informed... that part of those most miserable people, have
been cruelly massacred by your forces, part driven out by violence and forced to leave
their native habitations, and so without house or shelter, poor and destitute of all
relief, do wander up and down with their wives and children, in craggy and uninhab-
ited places, and Mountains covered with snow.... Oh the fired houses which are yet
smoking, the torn limbs, and ground defiled with bloud! Virgins being ravished, have
afterwards had their wombs stuffed up with gravel and Rubbish, and in that miserable
manner breathed out their last. Some men an hundred years old, decrepit with age,
and bed-rid, have been burnt in their beds. Some infants have been dashed against the
Rocks, others their throats cut, whose brains have with more than Cyclopean cruelty,
been boiled and eaten by the Murtherers.... Heaven it self seems to be astonied with
the cries of dying men.... Do not, O thou most high God, do not thou take that
revenge which is due to so great wickednesses and horrible villanies! Let thy blood, O
Christ, wash away this blood! (CM XIII, 485–7)Six letters prepared by Milton are dated May 25, though they were drafted some-
what earlier. That to the Duke of Savoy^39 was to be delivered by Morland at the
time of his speech: it avoids describing the horrors, which Morland would recount
verbally, and instead appeals to the duke to rescind his edict and restore the
Waldensians to their rights, property, and religious liberty, reminding him “that the
inviolable right and power of conscience are in His [God’s] possession alone”(CPW
V, 684–7). Parallel letters to Louis XIV of France and to Cardinal Mazarin –
Cromwell’s customary practice during the king’s minority – were to be delivered
by Morland en route to Savoy, to bespeak their influence with the duke (698–701).