Part 1174

"Let me at the outset express my conviction that the whole attempt to ascribe to the Waldenses an earlier date than the latter half of the 12th century, to throw back their origin some two hundred years, or sometimes much more than this, even to the times of Claudius of Turin (d. 839), is one which will not stand the test of historical criticism; while the endeavour to vindicate for them this remote antiquity has introduced infinite confusion into their whole history. The date of Waldo, who, as I cannot doubt, is rightly recognized as their founder, we certainly know. When it is sought to get rid of their relation to him as embodied in the very name which they bear, and to change this name into Vallenses, the Men of the Valleys or the Dalesmen, it is a transformation which has no likelihood, philological or historic, to recommend it. … Peter Waldo,—for we will not withhold from him this Christian name, although there is no authority for it anterior to the beginning of the 15th century,—was a rich citizen and merchant of Lyons [in the later half of the 12th century]. Not satisfied with those scanty portions of Scripture doled out to the laity in divine services, and yearning above all for a larger knowledge of the Gospels, he obtained from two friends among the priesthood a copy of these last and of some other portions of Scripture translated into the Romance language; a collection also of sayings from the Fathers. The whole movement remained to the end true to this its first motive—the desire namely for a fuller acquaintance with the Word of God. That Word he now resolved to make the rule of his life. … He …, as a first step, sells all that he has, and bestows it upon the poor. In the name which he adopts for himself and for the companions whom he presently associates with him, the same fact of a voluntary poverty, as that which above all they should embody in their lives, speaks out. On this side of the Alps they are Poor Men of Lyons; on the Italian, Poor Men of Lombardy. … And now he and his began to preach in the streets of Lyons, to find their way into houses, to itinerate the country round. Waldo had no intention herein of putting himself in opposition to the Church, of being a Reformer in any other sense than St. Francis or St. Bernard was a Reformer, a quickener, that is, and reviver of the Church's spiritual life. His protest was against practical mischiefs, against negligences and omissions on the part of those who should have taught the people, and did not. Doctrinal protest at this time there was none. But for Rome all forms of religious earnestness were suspicious which did not spring directly from herself. … In 1178 the Archbishop of Lyons forbade their preaching or expounding any more. Such as did not submit had no choice but to quit Lyons, and betake themselves elsewhere. And thus it came to pass that not the city, already so illustrious in ecclesiastical story, where Irenæus taught and Blandina suffered, … but the Alpine mountains must shelter these outcasts, and in turn be made famous by their presence." In 1209, Pope Innocent III. made an attempt to absorb Waldo's society in an "Order of Poor Catholics," which he instituted. "Failing this, he repeated, a few years later, at the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), the Church's sentence against the Waldenses, including them under a common ban with the Cathari and the whole rabble rout of Manichæans and others with whom they have so often since been confounded. … {3642} Enemies have sought to confound, that so there might be imputed to the Waldenses any evil which had been brought home to the Albigenses. … Friends have sought to identify them out of the wish to recruit the scanty number of witnesses for Scriptural and Apostolical truth in the dark ages of the Church; as certainly it would prove no small numerical addition if the Albigenses might be counted among these." It seems to be certain that the Waldenses were not spared by the crusaders who exterminated the Albigenses of southern France between 1209 and 1229. They fled before that storm into the recesses of the Alps. "But they were numerous in North Italy as well; and far more widely scattered over the whole of central Europe than their present dwelling place and numbers would at all suggest. They had congregations in Florence, in Genoa, in Venice, above all in Milan; there were Waldensian communities as far south as Calabria; they were not unknown in Arragon; still less in Switzerland; at a later day they found their way to Bohemia, and joined hands with the Hussites there."

_R. C. Trench, Lectures on Mediæval Church History, lecture 17._

"The valleys which the Vaudois have raised into celebrity lie to the west of Piemont, between the province of Pignerol and Briançon, and adjoining on the other side to the ancient Marquisate of Susa, and that of the Saluces. The capital, La Tour, being about 36 miles from Turin, and 14 from Pignerol. The extent of the valleys is about 12 Italian miles, making a square of about 24 French leagues. The valleys are three in number, Luzern, Perouse, and St. Martin. The former (in which the chief town is now Catholic) is the most beautiful and extensive."

_J. Bresse, History of the Vaudois, part 1, chapter i._

The Waldenses are sometimes confused, mistakenly, with the Albigenses, who belonged to an earlier time.

See ALBIGENSES.

ALSO IN: _A. Muston, The Israel of the Alps._

_E. Comba, History of the Waldenses of Italy._.

WALDENSES: A. D. 1526-1561. Identification with the Calvinists. Persecuting war of the Duke of Savoy. The tolerant treaty of Cavour.

See SAVOY AND PIEDMONT: A. D. 1559-1580.

WALDENSES: A. D. 1546. Massacre of the remnant in Provence and Venaissin.

See FRANCE: A. D. 1532-1547.

WALDENSES: A. D. 1655. The second Persecution and Massacre. Cromwell's intervention.

"They [the Vaudois, or Waldenses] had experienced persecutions through their whole history, and especially after the Reformation; but, on the whole, the two last Dukes of Savoy, and also Christine, daughter of Henry IV. of France, and Duchess-Regent through the minority of her son, the present Duke, had protected them in their privileges, even while extirpating Protestantism in the rest of the Piedmontese dominions. Latterly, however, there had been a passion at Turin and at Rome for their conversion to the Catholic faith, and priests had been traversing their valleys for the purpose. The murder of one such priest, and some open insults to the Catholic worship, about Christmas 1654, are said to have occasioned what followed. On the 25th of January, 1654-5, an edict was issued, under the authority of the Duke of Savoy, 'commanding and enjoining every head of a family, with its members, of the pretended Reformed Religion, of what rank, degree, or condition soever, none excepted, inhabiting and possessing estates in the places of Luserna … &c., within three days, to withdraw and depart, and be, with their families, withdrawn out of the said places, and transported into the places and limits marked out for toleration by his Royal Highness during his good pleasure,' … unless they gave evidence within 20 days of having become Catholics. Furthermore it was commanded that in every one even of the tolerated places there should be regular celebration of the Holy Mass, and that there should be no interference therewith, nor any dissuasion of anyone from turning a Catholic, also on pain of death. All the places named are in the Valley of Luserna, and the object was a wholesale shifting of the Protestants of that valley out of nine of its communes and their concentration into five higher up. In vain were there remonstrances at Turin from those immediately concerned. On the 17th of April, 1655, the Marquis di Pianezza, entered the doomed region with a body of troops mainly Piedmontese, but with French and Irish among them. There was resistance, fighting, burning, pillaging, flight to the mountains, and chasing and murdering for eight days, Saturday, April 24, being the climax. The names of about 300 of those murdered individually are on record, with the ways of the deaths of many of them. Women were ripped open, or carried about impaled on spikes; men, women, and children, were flung from precipices, hacked, tortured, roasted alive; the heads of some of the dead were boiled and the brains eaten; there are forty printed pages, and twenty-six ghastly engravings, by way of Protestant tradition of the ascertained variety of the devilry. The massacre was chiefly in the Valley of Luserna, but extended also into the other two valleys. The fugitives were huddled in crowds high among the mountains, moaning and starving; and not a few, women and infants especially, perished amid the snows. … There was a shudder of abhorrence through Protestant Europe, but no one was so much roused as Cromwell. … On Thursday the 17th of May, and for many days more, the business of the Savoy Protestants was the chief occupation of the Council. Letters, all in Milton's Latin, but signed by the Lord Protector in his own name, were despatched (May 25) to the Duke of Savoy himself, to the French King, to the States General of the United Provinces, to the Protestant Swiss Cantons, to the King of Sweden, to the King of Denmark, and to Ragotski, Prince of Transylvania. A day of humiliation was appointed for the Cities of London and Westminster, and another for all England." A collection of money for the sufferers was made, which amounted, in England and Wales, to £38,000—equal to about £137,000 now. Cromwell's personal contribution was £2,000—equivalent to £7,500 in money of the present day. The Protector despatched a special envoy to the court of Turin, who addressed very plain and bold words to the Duke. Meanwhile Blake with his fleet was in the Mediterranean, and there were inquiries made as to the best place for landing troops to invade the Duke's dominions. "All which being known to Mazarin, that wily statesman saw that no time was to be lost. {3643} While Mr. Downing [second commissioner sent by Cromwell] was still only on his way to Geneva through France, Mazarin had instructed M. Servien, the French minister at Turin, to insist, in the French King's name, on an immediate settlement of the Vaudois business. The result was a 'Patente di Gratia e Perdono,' or 'Patent of Grace and Pardon,' granted by Charles Emanuel to the Vaudois Protestants, August 19, in terms of a Treaty at Pignerol, in which the French Minister appeared as the real mediating party and certain Envoys from the Swiss Cantons as more or less assenting. As the Patent substantially retracted the Persecuting Edict and restored the Vaudois to all their former privileges, nothing more was to be done." These events in Piedmont drew from Milton his immortal sonnet, beginning: "Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints."

_D. Masson, Life of John Milton, volume 5, book 1, chapter 1, section 2._

ALSO IN: _J. B. Perkins, France under Mazarin, chapter 16 (volume 2)._

_A. Muston, The Israel of the Alps, volume 1, part 2, chapters 6-9._

WALDENSES: A. D. 1691. Toleration obtained by William of Orange.

"In the spring of 1691, the Waldensian shepherds, long and cruelly persecuted, and weary of their lives, were surprised by glad tidings. Those who had been in prison for heresy returned to their homes. Children, who had been taken from their parents to be educated by priests, were sent back. Congregations, which had hitherto met only by stealth and with extreme peril, now worshipped God without molestation in the face of day. Those simple mountaineers probably never knew that their fate had been a subject of discussion at the Hague, and that they owed the happiness of their firesides and the security of their humble temples to the ascendency which William [of Orange] exercised over the Duke of Savoy," who had lately joined the Grand Alliance against Louis XIV. of France.

_Lord Macaulay, History of England, chapter 17._

WALDENSES: End--------

WALDSHUT: Capture by Duke Bernhard (1637).

See GERMANY: A. D. 1634-1639.

WALES: Start--------

WALES: Origin of the name.

See WELSH.

WALES: Ancient tribes.

See BRITAIN, CELTIC TRIBES.

WALES: 6th Century. The British states embraced in it.

See BRITAIN: 6TH CENTURY.

WALES: A. D. 1066-1135. The Norman Conquest.

See ENGLAND: A. D. 1087-1135.

WALES: A. D. 1282-1284. The final conquest.

"All the other races had combined on the soil of Britain, the Welsh would not. The demands of feudal homage made by the kings of England were evaded or repudiated; the intermarriages by which Henry II. and John had tried to help on a national agreement had in every case failed. In every internal difficulty of English politics the Welsh princes had done their best to embarrass the action of the kings; they had intrigued with every aspirant for power, had been in league with every rebel. … The necessity of guarding the Welsh border had caused the English kings to found on the March a number of feudal lordships, which were privileged to exercise almost sovereign jurisdictions, and exempted from the common operation of the English law. The Mortimers at Chirk and Wigmore, the Bohuns at Hereford and Brecon, the Marshalls at Pembroke, and the Clares in Glamorgan, were out of the reach of the King, and often turned against one another the arms which had been given them to overawe the Welsh. … So long as the Welsh were left free to rebel the Marchers must be left free to fight. … Llewelyn, the prince of North Wales, had, by the assistance given to Simon de Montfort, earned as his reward a recognition of his independence, subject only to the ancient feudal obligations. All the advantages won during the early years of Henry III. had been thus surrendered. When the tide turned Llewelyn had done homage to Henry; but when he was invited, in 1273, to perform the usual service to the new king, he refused; and again, in 1274 and 1275, he evaded the royal summons. In 1276, under the joint pressure of excommunication and a great army which Edward brought against him, he made a formal submission; performed the homage, and received, as a pledge of amity, the hand of Eleanor de Montfort in marriage. But Eleanor, although she was Edward's cousin, was Earl Simon's daughter, and scarcely qualified to be a peacemaker. Another adviser of rebellion was found in Llewelyn's brother David, who had hitherto taken part with the English, and had received special favours and promotion from Edward himself. … The peace made in 1277 lasted about four years. In 1282 the brothers rose, seized the border castles of Hawarden, Flint, and Rhuddlan, and captured the Justiciar of Wales, Roger Clifford. Edward saw then that his time was come. He marched into North Wales, carrying with him the courts of law and the exchequer, and transferring the seat of government for the time to Shrewsbury. He left nothing undone that might give the expedition the character of a national effort. He collected forces on all sides; he assembled the estates of the realm, clergy, lords, and commons, and prevailed on them to furnish liberal supplies; he obtained sentence of excommunication from the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Welsh made a brave defence, and, had it not been for the almost accidental capture and murder of Llewelyn in December, England might have found the task too hard for her. The death of Llewelyn, however, and the capture of David in the following June, deprived the Welsh of their leaders, and they submitted. Edward began forthwith his work of consolidation. … In 1284 he published at Rhuddlan a statute, called the Statute of Wales, which was intended to introduce the laws and customs of England, and to reform the administration of that country altogether on the English system. The process was a slow one; the Welsh retained their ancient common law and their national spirit; the administrative powers were weak and not far-reaching; the sway of the lords Marchers was suffered to continue; and, although assimilated, Wales was not incorporated with England. It was not until the reign of Henry VIII. that the principality was represented in the English Parliament, and the sovereignty, which from 1300 onwards was generally although not invariably bestowed on the king's eldest son, conferred under the most favourable circumstances little more than a high-sounding title and some slight and ideal claim to the affection of a portion of the Welsh people. The task, however, which the energies of his predecessors had failed to accomplish was achieved by Edward. All Britain south of the Tweed recognised his direct and supreme authority, and the power of the Welsh nationality was so far broken that it could never more thwart the determined and united action of England."

_W. Stubbs, The Early Plantagenets, chapter 10._

ALSO IN: _D. Hume, History of England, chapter 13._

_J. Lingard, History of England, volume 3, chapter 3._

_C. Knight, Popular History of England, chapter 25._

_C. H. Pearson, History of England during the Early and Middle Ages._

{3644}

WALES: A. D. 1402-1413. Owen Glendower's Rebellion.

"Since the day when it was conquered by Edward I. Wales had given the kings of England very little trouble. The Welsh remained loyal to the son and grandson of their conqueror, and were the most devoted friends of Richard II., even when he had lost the hearts of his English subjects. But on the usurpation of Henry [IV.] their allegiance seems to have been shaken: and Owen Glendower, who was descended from Llewelyn, the last native prince of Wales, laid claim to the sovereignty of the country [A. D. 1402]. He ravaged the territory of Lord Grey of Ruthin, and took him prisoner near Snowdon; then, turning southwards, overran Herefordshire and defeated and took prisoner Sir Edmund Mortimer, uncle to that young Earl of March, who should have been heir to the crown after Richard according to the true order of descent. In this battle upwards of a thousand Englishmen were slain, and such was the fierce barbarity of the victors that even the women of Wales mutilated the dead bodies in a manner too gross to be described, and left them unburied upon the field till heavy sums were paid for their interment. It was necessary to put down this revolt of Glendower, and the King collected an army and went against him in person. It was the beginning of September; but owing, as the people thought, to magical arts and enchantments practised by the Welshman, the army suffered dreadfully from tempests of wind, rain, snow, and hail before it could reach the enemy. In one night the King's tent was blown down, and he himself would have been killed if he had not retired to rest with his armour on. Finally the enterprise had to be abandoned. … Glendower continued as troublesome as ever, and the King was unable from various causes to make much progress against him. At one time money could not easily be raised for the expedition. At another time, when he actually marched into the borders of Wales [A. D. 1405], his advance was again impeded by the elements. The rivers swelled to an unusual extent, and the army lost a great part of its baggage by the suddenness of the inundation. The French, too, sent assistance to Glendower, and took Carmarthen Castle. Some time afterwards [A. D. 1407] the King's son, Henry Prince of Wales, succeeded in taking the castle of Aberystwith; but very soon after Owen Glendower recovered it by stealth. In short, the Welsh succeeded in maintaining their independence of England during this whole reign, and Owen Glendower ultimately got leave to die in peace." On the accession of Henry V. (A. D. 1413), "the Welsh, who had been so troublesome to his father, admired his valour and claimed him as a true prince of Wales, remembering that he had been born at Monmouth, which place was at that time within the principality. They discovered that there was an ancient prophecy that a prince would be born among themselves who should rule the whole realm of England; and they saw its fulfilment in King Henry V."

_J. Gairdner, The Houses of Lancaster and York, chapter. 4, section 3; and chapter 5, section 1._

ALSO IN: _J. H. Wylie, History of England under Henry IV., volume 1, chapter 14._

WALES: End--------

WALES, Prince of.

"When Edward I. subdued Wales, he is said to have promised the people of that country a native prince who could not speak English, and taking advantage of the fact that his queen, Eleanor, was delivered of a child at Carnarvon Castle, in North Wales, he conferred the principality upon his infant son Edward, who was yet unable to speak. By the death of his eldest brother Alphonso, Edward became heir to the throne, to which he afterwards succeeded as Edward II.; but from this time forward, the principality has been appropriated solely to the eldest sons of the kings of England, who previous to this period had only borne the title of 'Lord Prince.' In 1841, for the first time, the dukedom of Saxony was introduced among the reputed titles of the Prince of Wales. This dignity his Royal Highness derives merely in right of his own paternal descent. … Without any new creation, and previous to his acquiring the title of Prince of Wales, the heir-apparent of the sovereign is Duke of Cornwall, the most ancient title of its degree in England. Edward the Black Prince … was created the first Duke of Cornwall in 1337. … The dukedom merges in the Crown when there is no heir apparent, and is immediately inherited by the prince on his birth, or by the accession of his father to the throne, as the case may be. … The earldom of Chester is one of the titles conferred by patent, but it was formerly a principality, into which it had been erected by the 21st of Richard II. In the reign of Henry IV., however, the act of parliament by which it had been constituted was repealed, and it has ever since been granted in the same patent which confers the title of Prince of Wales. As the eldest sons of the kings of Scotland have enjoyed the titles of Duke of Rothsay, Earl of Carrick, Baron Renfrew, and Hereditary Great Steward of Scotland, those dignities are also invariably attributed to the Prince of Wales."

_C. R. Dodd, Manual of Dignities, part 2._

WALI.

An Arabian title, given to certain governors of extensive provinces under the caliphate. It seems to have had a viceroyal significance, marking the bearer of it as an immediate representative of the caliph.

_T. P. Hughes, Dictionary of Islam._

WALID I., Caliph, A. D. 705-715.

Walid II., Caliph, 743-744.

WALKER, William: Filibustering in Nicaragua.

See NICARAGUA: A. D. 1855-1860.

WALL IN BRITAIN, Roman.