Cardinal Newman suffered both mentally and physically after he was sued for libel, writes Chris Upton.
In 1857 the anti-Catholic lecturer William Murphy came to Birmingham to stir up trouble between Protestants and Catholics.
The result was two days of rioting, a lot of broken windows and numerous arrests.
The Murphy Riots are thus entered in the annals as one of the worst instances of sectarianism in Victorian England.
But William Murphy was far from the only convert to Protestantism to be touring the country in these years.
Just as the Catholic Church became emancipated from the numerous restrictions placed on it since the Reformation, so it was obliged to defend itself against a torrent of ill-will and intolerance.
Alongside Murphy there was Giovanni Giacinto Achilli, whose message, if not quite so inflammatory, was just as unpalatable to Catholics.
Achilli’s own career could be called, at the very least, colourful.
Born in central Italy, he joined the Dominicans in 1819 and six years later was ordained as a priest. This was the end of the respectable part of his career.
After that came allegations of sexual misconduct, including the rape of a 15-year-old girl.
Banished by the Pope to a remote monastery, in 1842 Achilli instead fled to Corfu (at this time a British protectorate) to claim political asylum, declaring that he had converted to Protestantism.
None of the charges against, we ought to note, ever came to court.
It was then that Achilli won the backing of the Evangelical Alliance in London, which was only too eager to nurture the career of one whose fervent anti-Catholicism matched its own.
To cut a long story short, by 1849 Achilli was in London and, under the wing of the Evangelical Alliance, doing lecture tours around the UK.
In those lectures Achilli portrayed himself, not as a sinner repentant, but as the victim of Catholic hypocrisy and persecution. It would probably have been best had the leaders of the English Catholics turned a deaf ear to Achilli’s vitriol, and relied on the ex-priest’s chequered reputation to undermine his credibility.
But the resurgent Catholic Church in England was no longer inclined to sit quietly by.
The Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Wiseman, responded in an article in the Dublin Review, recounting details of Achilli’s misdemeanors, for which (he said) he had written proof.
Achilli’s visit to Birmingham in the summer of 1850 also brought him to the attention of the leading Catholic writer of his age, John Henry Newman.
Newman was at this point engaged in building the Oratory on the Hagley Road, but took time to deliver a lecture of his own, dismissing Achilli’s propaganda and, in what we might call an argument ad hominem, referring directly to the allegations swirling around the Italian.
The cardinal did seek legal advice in advance.
“Could I be had up for libel?” he asked lawyer James Hope-Scott.
Newman was informed an action was possible, but unlikely, and that he should go ahead.
Big mistake.
