Indeed in that month his Highness was again at white heat on the subject of his favourite Piedmontese.  The Treaty of Pignerol, by which the persecuting Edict of 1655 had been recalled and liberty of worship again yielded to the poor Vaudois (ante pp. 43-44), had gradually been less and less regarded; there were new troubles to the Vaudois from the House of Savoy; there were even signs of a possible repetition in the valleys of all the former horrors.  How to prevent that was a serious thought with Cromwell amid all his other affairs; and he made his most effective stroke by an immediate appeal to the French King.  On the 26th of May there went to his Majesty one of Milton’s Latin State Letters in the Protector’s name, adjuring him, by his own honour and by the faith of their alliance, to save the poor Piedmontese and secure the Treaty which had been made in their behalf by former French intervention; and on the same day there went a letter to Lockhart urging him to his utmost diligence in the matter, and suggesting that the French King should incorporate the Piedmontese valleys with his own dominion, giving the Duke of Savoy some bit of territory with a Catholic population in exchange.  Reaching Louis XIV. and Lockhart at the moment of the great success before Dunkirk, these letters accomplished their object.  The will of France was signified at Turin, and the Protestants of the Valleys had another respite.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Burnet (ed. 1823), I. 133; Letters of Downing, &c. in Thurloe, Vol.  VII.; Council Order Books of date; Carlyle, III. 357-365.]

Were one asked what subject of home concern had the first place in Cromwell’s attention through all the events and transactions that have hitherto been noticed, the answer must still be the same for this as for all the previous portions of his Protectorate.  It was “The Propagation of the Gospel,” with all that was then implied in that phrase as construed by himself.

As regarded England and Wales, the phrase meant, all but exclusively, the sustenance, extension, and consolidation of Cromwell’s Church Establishment.  The Trustees for the better Maintenance of Ministers, as well as the Triers and Ejectors, were still at work; and in the Council minutes of the summer of 1658, just as formerly, there are orders for augmentations of ministers’ stipends, combinations of parishes and chapelries, and the like.  Substantially, the Established Church had been brought into a condition nearly approaching Cromwell’s ideal; but he had still notions of more to be done for it in one direction or another, and especially in the direction of wider theological comprehension.  He did not despair of seeing his great principle of concurrent endowment yet more generally accepted among those who were really and evangelically Protestant.  Much would depend on the nature of that Confession of Faith which Article XI. of the Petition and Advice had required or promised as a standard of what should be considered