Savoy, known as Amadeus with the Tail, son of Humbert of the White Hands, founder of the House, went to the Holy Roman Emperor with such a body of retainers that the guards refused them entrance to the Council Chamber.  ’Either I shall go in with my Tail or not at all,’ said Humbert, and with his Tail he went in.  This was the metal of the race.  Even at the time when they were vassals of the Empire, they expected to dictate rather than to obey.  They studiously married into all the great royal houses of Europe.  Though they persecuted their Vaudois subjects, who were only in 1848 rewarded by emancipation for centuries of unmerited sufferings and splendid fidelity, yet the Princes of Savoy had from the first, from the White-Handed Humbert himself, held their heads high in all transactions with the Holy See, between which and them there was an ever-returning antagonism.  Not to the early part of the nineteenth century, when the rebound from revolutionary chaos did not suffice to denationalise the Kings of Sardinia, but sufficed to ally them with reaction, ought we to turn if we would seize the true bearings of the development of the Counts of Maurienne into Kings of Italy.  At that moment the mission of Piedmont, though not lost, was obscured.  What has rather to be contemplated is the historic tendency, viewed as a whole, of both reigning house and people.  No one has pointed out that tendency more clearly than the anonymous author of a pamphlet entitled Le Testament politique du Chevalier Walpole (published at Amsterdam in 1769), who was able to draw the horoscope of the House of Savoy with a correctness which seems almost startling.  He was not helped by either sympathy or poetic imagination, but simply by political logic.  Sardinia, he said, was the best governed state in Europe.  Instead of yielding to the indolent apathy in which other reigning families were sunk, its princes sought to improve its laws and develop its resources according to the wants of the population and the exigences of the climate.  Finance, police, the administration of justice, military discipline, presented the picture of order.  From the nature of the situation, a King of Sardinia must be ambitious, and to satisfy his ambition he had only to bide his time.  Placed between two great Powers he could choose for his ally whichever would give him the most, and by playing this mute role, it was impossible that he would not hereafter be called upon to play one of the most important parts in Europe.  Italy was the oyster disputed by Austria and France; might it not happen that the King of Sardinia, becoming judge and party, would devour the oyster and leave the shells to the rival aspirants?  It was unlikely, added this far-seeing observer, that the Italian populations should have got so innured to their chains as to prefer the harsh, vexatious government of Austria to the happy lot which Sardinian domination would secure to them, but even if they had become demoralised to this extent, they could not resist the providential advance of a temperate, robust and warlike nation like Piedmont, led by a prince as enlightened as the King (Charles Emmanuel) who then reigned over it.