Page:Margaret of Angoulême, Queen of Navarre (Robinson 1886).djvu/201

186 Surely some lunacy of vain belief infected France that day when she signed away her independence among such rejoicings; surely some craze had filmed the brain of the tolerant Queen of Navarre, when, laying will and conscience and judgment at her brother's feet, she praised the infamy which doomed so many innocent to death.

The peace was signed on the 18th of September. No sooner was the King pledged to the cause of the Inquisition than Cardinal de Tournon began to supplicate him to exterminate the Vaudois from his kingdom, and by the 1st of January the King was convinced.

Who were these Vaudois—this tiny people, springing from Lyons in the twelfth century, and settled among the valleys of the Alps of Piedmont—this scanty, timid herd of mountain folk, for whose destruction the Inquisition was invented? They were, indeed, a remnant, pursued with fire and sword from their earliest days; burned alive in the twelfth century; hacked to death in the thirteenth; suffocated by hundreds under Francis I.; roasted slowly, tortured, hurled like stones down the mountains, slaughtered in every diabolic fashion through the whole diabolic seventeenth century; yet still surviving, unobtrusive and gentle as ever, with their simple faith and their plain, humble worship, unexterminated by the cruelty of ages.

One Peter de Waldo, a merchant of Lyons, is said to be the ancestor of their faith. Before his death, in 1170, this man, one of the numerous reformers who preceded the Reformation, had impressed the people of Lyons with his pure and noble faith. After his death the sect flourished, and in the thirteenth century it was