All the Moorish powers of the African coast gave up their English captives, and engaged that there should be no more piracy upon English vessels.

Malta, Venice, Toulon, Marseilles, and various Spanish ports were then visited for one reason or another; and in the autumn of 1655 Blake was still in the Mediterranean for ulterior purposes, understood between him and Cromwell.[1] [Footnote 1: Guizot, II.

186-198, with, documents in Appendix; Godwin, IV.

187-188; Whitlocke.IV., 206-207.] While Blake was in the Mediterranean, one Italian potentate did a sudden act of infamy, which resounded through Europe, and for which Cromwell would fain have clutched him by the throat in his own inland capital.

This was Carlo Emanuele II., Duke of Savoy and Prince of Piedmont.
In the territories of this young prince, in the Piedmontese valleys of Luserna, Perosa, and San Martino, on the east side of the Cottian Alps, lived the remarkable people known as the Vaudois or Waldenses.
From time immemorial these obscure mountaineers, speaking a peculiar Romance tongue of their own, had kept themselves distinct from the Church of Rome, maintaining doctrines and forms of worship of such a kind that, after the Lutheran Reformation, they were regarded as primitive Protestants who had never swerved from the truth through the darkest ages, and could therefore be adopted with acclamation into the general Reformed communion.