Milton could only
dictate, and therefore everything entrusted to him must pass through
an amanuensis, who might blab. One exception to the commonplace
character of the state papers there is. The massacre of the Vaudois
by their own sovereign, Charles Emanuel II., Duke of Savoy, excited a
thrill of horror in England greater than the massacres of Scio or of
Batak roused in our time. For in Savoy it was not humanity only that
was outraged, it was a deliberate assault of the Papal half of Europe
upon an outpost of the Protestant cause.
One effect of the Puritan revolution had been to alter entirely the
foreign policy of England. By nature, by geographical position, by
commercial occupations, and the free spirit of the natives, these
islands were marked out to be members of the northern confederacy of
progressive and emancipated Europe. The foreign policy of Elisabeth
had been steady adhesion to this law of nature. The two first Stuarts,
coquetting with semi-Catholicism at home, had leaned with all the
weight of the crown and of government towards catholic connexions. The
country had always offered a vain resistance; the Parliament of
1621 had been dismissed for advising James to join the continental
protestants against Spain.
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