Achilli v. Newman is a verbatim trial report published as a shilling pamphlet in New York, covering the 1852 libel action Giacinto Achilli brought against John Henry Newman in the Court of Queen’s Bench at Westminster. It records four days of pleadings, examinations, cross-examinations, and speeches before Lord Campbell and a special jury, and it belongs to the literature of Victorian religious controversy as much as to the law reports. The case turned on whether Newman had defamed Achilli — a former Dominican priest turned Protestant preacher — in a lecture pamphlet, and whether the scandalous charges printed there were true.
Newman’s plea was not merely that the allegations were accurate but that publishing them served the public good, and the whole trial is an inquiry into the private life of one man across twenty-six years and half of Europe. The prosecution opened by reading from the pamphlet itself, where Achilli is made to enumerate his own alleged crimes at Viterbo, Capua, Naples, Corfu, and Malta; the defence answered with a procession of witnesses from Italy, the Ionian Islands, and England. The report preserves the strange texture of such a case: a woman describing a silk handkerchief and three sausages given after an assault, a tailor bursting in on his wife and a priest, a chorus singer installed as a Protestant clerk, an Inquisition document read aloud in an English court for the first time.
How the Case Against Achilli Is Built
The Pamphlet and the Court
The report opens as a shilling pamphlet from a New York press, its title page fairly shouting the scandal: a full account of the “most extraordinary trial for seduction and adultery” brought against Dr. Achilli, the apostate Catholic priest, by Dr. Newman, the Oxford Puseyite—both of them seceders from their professions. The proceedings themselves unfold in the Court of Queen’s Bench at Westminster, before Lord Campbell and a special jury, on Monday, June 21, 1852. The Queen against Newman is a criminal information filed by Giacinto Achilli against John Henry Newman, Doctor of Divinity and Roman Catholic priest, for composing and publishing a libel. Newman pleads not guilty, and then that the libel is true in substance and was published for the public benefit. The prosecution answers that he published it in his own wrong and without the cause alleged. The Attorney-General, the Solicitor-General, and Mr. Ellis appear for the prosecution; Sir Alexander Cockburn leads for the defence, with Serjeant Wilkins, Mr. Bramwell, Mr. Addison, and Mr. Baddeley.
The Attorney-General Opens
The libel sits in an October pamphlet, “Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England,” addressed to the Brothers of the Oratory. Achilli, the Attorney-General explains, is an Italian by birth, once a Dominican monk and Roman Catholic priest, now a Protestant preacher at the Italian chapel near Golden Square; he escaped the prisons of the Roman Inquisition, where he was held six months, and reached England at the start of 1850. Newman is a former clergyman of the established church, a distinguished Oxford graduate, since converted to Rome. The prosecution’s case is that Newman raked together scandal to destroy Achilli’s credit, and the Attorney-General reads at length from page 195, where Achilli is made to enumerate his own alleged crimes—Viterbo in 1831, 1833, and 1834, Capua, Naples in 1840, Corfu, Malta. The charges are so specific in date and place, he argues, that Achilli had no choice but to seek a criminal information. He explains the recent change in the law allowing a defendant to plead truth together with public benefit, and observes that Newman has pleaded truth in twenty-three cases stretching from 1826 across twenty-six years. The prosecution will wait to hear the defence evidence before calling its own witnesses, and pledges to put Achilli himself in the box for cross-examination.
The Witnesses Withdrawn
Serjeant Wilkins asks that the witnesses be excluded from court. The Attorney-General objects to Achilli being made to withdraw; a juror mutters that this is hard; Lord Campbell rules that Achilli, being a witness, must go. All the witnesses on both sides then leave the court.
Cockburn’s Warning and the Question of Motive
Cockburn opens for the defence by warning the jury against religious controversy and prejudice. Both men, he notes, abandoned their original faiths, and the jury holds views opposite to his client’s. There was no personal spite in Newman, he insists: the charges had been published fifteen months earlier, with full particulars, and went uncontradicted. Achilli’s harsh attacks on the Roman clergy, and his claim to have left Rome from conviction, make his credibility the whole matter—the question is whether he was expelled rather than a voluntary convert. Cockburn cites the June 1850 Dublin Review, which printed the charges, and Achilli’s general denial in “Dealings with the Inquisition.” Lord Campbell suggests proving the accusations first and hearing the answer afterward; the Attorney-General pledges to produce Achilli; Cockburn bows to the ruling.
The Charges Outlined
Cockburn then lays out the accusations he means to prove. At Viterbo, Achilli robbed a young woman of eighteen of her honor, with three similar charges, confessions, trial, a finding of guilt, imprisonment, deprivation of his faculty to lecture, and the matter hushed up in Rome. At Capua there were two cases of incontinence. A girl under fifteen was debauched in a room in a Neapolitan convent, conceived, and was compensated; she is now married and in England with her mother. In 1839 Achilli separated from the Dominicans, and scandal brought him before his superior, three years’ suspension and seclusion, and then a sentence from the Inquisition of perpetual deprivation of ecclesiastical functions and three years’ rigorous seclusion at Nizaro. He left for Ancona, used a gentleman’s passport to reach Corfu, renounced Rome, and preached in a Protestant chapel. At Corfu a tailor, suspecting his separated wife, seized Achilli in her house, and proceedings were compromised. At Zante Achilli took a chorus singer and his wife, a woman of notorious character, into his suite; Mr. Reynolds of the customs and Vice-Governor Colonel Forbes helped establish a reformed Italian church, and Reynolds was surprised to find the woman made pew-opener and her husband clerk. Achilli called her “a second Magdalene”; Reynolds observed him in a loose dress in an ambiguous position with her; the familiarity continued, the blinds were drawn, and the church closed. At Malta Achilli taught in a college headed by the Earl of Shaftesbury; charges of incontinence against two priests, with Achilli’s connivance, led to an investigation, and Achilli sent one of them, Zaccharis, to Sicily to distribute bibles, halting the inquiry; the London board, the Earls of Shaftesbury and Waldegrave, dismissed him. In England he attempted to seduce the servant Harris, then had connexion with Jane Legg, who conceived; he did not deny providing for the child. He also pursued two—
The First Witness Cross-Examined
The first witness, brought over from Viterbo, is cross-examined by the Attorney-General. She arrived in England “Thursday last”; it will be six months on the 23rd since she left Viterbo. She lived three months at Paris, then Dover, then a place between Dover and London. A lady, Madame Rosini Diberna, and her husband came with her from Viterbo; she reached Dover in May and lived near the sea. A lawyer whose name she does not know instructed her to leave Viterbo for England, and her priest, Don Giuseppe Ramaggi, told her she ought to come. She told the priests what happened to her, and they told her what happened to them—a sally that draws laughter. She has seen Mr. Reynolds in London and no Roman Catholic priest since arriving. She knew Dr. Achilli a month before going to the convent, when he was called Padre Achilli; he went to spend a month with Signora Gentili, where she was the only servant and two other men were in the house. Five or six days after he came, on a walk to show her a shooting place where two family members were shooting, he took her to a hut—a shepherd passing with sheep—and solicited her chastity. She absolutely denied him, counting it a sin, and returned home in his company. She told her confessor, the parish curate, not a Dominican, but not Madame Gentili. He solicited her again in the lady’s house, telling her to wait at night because he was to memorize a panegyric in praise of St. Cecilia—more laughter—and he knocked gently at her locked bedroom door. She showed herself disturbed and said she would leave, giving no reason; she had taken the place for only a month and told neither father nor mother. She went to the sacristy in the convent because it was convenient for him; he beckoned from the sacristy next the chapel and took her into another room. She was frightened but did not lose her senses; many years have elapsed, so she cannot tell all, but “he dishonored me.” She was in a perspiration; he gave her a silk handkerchief older than he was and sent her away. The next day the same confessor told her, “I knew you were in the hands of a rapacious wolf in sheep’s clothing.” The confessor forbade her to tell anyone, because Achilli was an ecclesiastic. Achilli, having relations in Viterbo, later sent for her and she went, feeling dishonored; affection springs out of such an event, and she regretted his going away. She next saw him in the convent. She told another confessor all, without naming the sinner, since custom is to mention the sin, not the sinner. The first time he forced her—“he may have forced me”—and afterward he used the caresses usual with women. Besides the handkerchief he gave her “three sausages,” which sets the court laughing again. She told only her confessors. Salvatori Carosi, a chemist and druggist, asked her months later, “Is it true that Father Achilli has deflowered you?” Achilli may have remained in Viterbo two years after she ceased seeing him. She first told her mother six months ago, saying she was coming on a trial but not that he had deflowered her. No money has been given her, but she has been “found in everything” by the lady living with them, a Roman Catholic.
Re-Examination and the Machinery of the Church
On re-examination by Mr. Bramwell, she says her curate first sent for her, asking whether she had known Dr. Achilli; pressed why, he said it was “for the honor of the holy mother church—for the honor of God.” She refused to speak except in the confessional; he said he could not come there and she must speak “without shame.” She went to the vicar-general, where a Dominican monk from Rome and another monk of Viterbo were present; they told her she must go to Rome. There she saw an Englishman, made a statement before the vicar, and was obliged to say everything she now says. She has never seen Dr. Achilli since he left Viterbo; he never said “Good bye” or “Go to the devil.” She spent three years in a convent of nuns to try whether the Lord called her; finding no call, she left by the strong advice of her confessor, who saw the danger of her becoming a disreputable woman.
Giotti and the Burnt Archives
Giotti, examined by Mr. Addison, is a native of Viterbo, thirty-two years old, partly educated at the Lyceum College there from the age of eleven. Achilli was professor of philosophy and a Dominican monk in priest’s orders, and his moral character was very bad; by the Court, his reputation was bad.
Cockburn’s Address to the Jury
Sir Alexander Cockburn opened the defence’s final address by recasting the whole trial. The question was no longer simply whether Dr. Newman had libelled Dr. Achilli; the two bodies of testimony could not both be true, and so the jury must decide by whom the most deliberate perjury had been committed. A woman, he observed, never forgets the person of her seducer, and the women could not have mistaken Achilli’s identity. He asked for calm weighing of the evidence and warned that his learned friend would have the last word before a sympathetic audience.
He defended the first witness’s credible manner, noting that the prosecutor had every chance at Viterbo to attack her character and said nothing against it. To the suggestion that her priest had influenced her, he turned the argument around: Achilli himself had been educated a Jesuit, a subtle disputer and ingenious casuist, and the evidence against him came from a Jesuit, a monk, and an Italian. No one doubted Dr. Newman’s honour or suggested he had suborned witnesses, whereas everything dear to Achilli—his standing in the Roman church and his future interest—was at stake.
Corroboration, he argued, lay everywhere. Achilli admitted visiting the country house of a Cristopoli near Viterbo in October, where a widow formerly named Gentili lived. At Naples the Principe seduction could not be hushed up; the police commissary believed the daughter and dismissed the household. At Corfu there was the case of Garamoni’s wife, where he mocked the “obsequiously convenient husband” and pointed to discrepancies between Achilli’s account and Madame Garamoni’s. At Zante, Caraboni the chorus singer became a Protestant clerk; converts, Cockburn suggested, are almost invariably moved by sordid motives, and Mr. Reynolds had no interest to fabricate. At Malta, Achilli sent two accused priests away before a second inquiry could be held. In England he solicited the chastity of his own servant, and Madame Achilli had not disproved the servant’s statement. Luke was a woman of bad character but honest about paternity; Sarah Wood had been placed by Mrs. Tennant with Mrs. Achilli. As for the Inquisition document, Dr. Grant had said the Inquisition took cognizance of faith and grievous immorality, and Achilli admitted his suspension from ecclesiastical functions. Why, if archbishops and the Pope favoured him, was he put into the Inquisition in 1841?
The Defence Presses Its Case
The defence speech went on to attack the credibility of the witness—evidently Dr. Newman—who had been persuaded of the imposture of the mass and of two great heresies in Roman doctrine, yet lacked the courage to abandon it, remaining for ten years a hypocrite under the cowl, ministering outwardly while revolting inwardly, practising hypocrisy at the very altar of God. Such a man, counsel urged, should not be believed in the witness-box, especially when a heap of witnesses might be consigned to guilt and punishment for perjury and that called justice. Why had the accuser stayed among the Roman priests until deprived of his functions, if he thought they might lead immoral lives while performing their duties? Had he not been convicted by the Inquisition for obeying conscience, he might have attained any position in the Roman church. Pressing Achilli on general continence was fair, and his silence was equivalent to all that could be said. Counsel conceded that if Dr. Newman’s allegations were true he was justified in calling attention to the character of such a witness against Romanism, and asked why Achilli had let the Dublin Review’s raking-up of every circumstance sleep, coming forward only months after the charges were repeated—suggesting his protectors had urged him to vindicate himself. He warned the jury against relying implicitly on Achilli’s testimony against many persons, spoke of the two great champions of religion and the revived spirit of proselytism, with the Catholic “with upraised cross” entering the Protestant arena, and implored calm consideration and confidence in a verdict for his client.
Campbell’s Proposal and the Attorney-General’s Reply
Lord Campbell praised the defence’s propriety and ability, and before the reply proposed that the jury receive a copy of the twenty-three charges in the single plea and decide separately what had been made out. The Attorney-General then rose. He called his learned friend’s address eloquent, noted that Achilli’s counsel had twice addressed the jury while this was his first hearing on the accusations, and described the mass of evidence accumulated to destroy one man. Achilli had not been allowed to remain in court to confront the witnesses or instruct cross-examination; the methods of his opponents resembled the Holy Inquisition. His calm demeanour through nearly eight hours of examination proved his innocence. This was no religious controversy but a slander case, and the charges had been attributed in Achilli’s book, at page 76, to Dr. Wiseman, Archbishop of Westminster by the Pope’s creation. Achilli had first proceeded against the pamphlet’s publishers but allowed Dr. Newman’s name to be substituted; he must now answer for twenty-six years of his life and twenty-three charges.
Charge by charge, the Attorney-General picked the case apart. The seventh, concerning Rosa di Allessandris in February 1831 and a finding of guilt in September 1833, the twelfth, set in the sacristy of the church of Gradi, and the twentieth, alleging eighty scudi of hush money to Rosa’s father, were all unproved; Lord Campbell noted that places but not names appeared in the document. The eighth charge, a chaste and unmarried woman in July 1834, failed because Achilli left Viterbo in 1833 and did not return until November 1834. The ninth, involving Vincenza Cucira in 1833, failed because in 1836 he preached Lent sermons at Capua and held a patent to confess there. The thirteenth alleged he spoke against the eucharist, confession, absolution, and chastity at Rome, Capua, Naples, and Malta, corrupting Louisa di Centus, Rosa di Allessandris, and the women Valenti and Principe—yet its dates made him debauch them first and corrupt them years later. The twenty-first concerned the Neapolitan police archives; the document came from an individual, not the fountain head, and was ruled inadmissible. On the infidel charge, disbelief in transubstantiation and human absolution should increase rather than diminish; he compared Achilli’s struggle to Luther’s gradual conviction and asked whether Dr. Newman was suddenly converted. The charge that Achilli was deprived of his lectureship in 1826 failed: he had no appointment until 1827 and held it until 1833. The fifth charge, of a scandalous friar in 1827, was rebutted by later trusts—accompanying the provincial on visitations, appointment as visitor of the convent at Nepi in 1835, Lent sermons at Rome, appointment in 1837 as confessor to Louisa de Bourbon, Duchess of Saxony, election as prior of the Dominican convent, and letters of secularization applied for in 1835 and completed in 1839. On Eleanor Valenti, the sixth charge of 1 February 1831, she gave no date, a Roman Catholic gentleman’s name was concealed by Mr. Harting, and she said her curate told her to come “for the good of holy mother church and the honour of God,” though she told no one but her confessor. The Italian witnesses were birds of passage, their stories full of coincidences.
Malta, the English Servants, and the Inquisition Document
Resuming, the Attorney-General addressed the Malta affair: it would be unfair to infer complicity from the hasty statement of an angry man, and the jury should ask whether charges might be trumped up to destroy Achilli. The Earl of Shaftesbury, having arrived, was examined by Cockburn; he repeatedly began to repeat his former narrative and was interrupted by Lord Campbell. Asked for the other reasons moving the committee to dismiss Achilli, Shaftesbury said they feared a great scandal to the college and to the branch occupied by missionary reformed priests, and to the interests of the Protestant religion; they therefore cut the Gordian knot, acting on rumour rather than any charge actually before them, and determined to break up the whole thing. The Attorney-General said this showed the serious charges in the justification had entirely failed. He turned to Achilli’s conduct in England: three servants in succession, one alleging liberties and two alleging seduction, and a fourth case, with no complaint made to Dr. or Mrs. Achilli in any of them. Jane Legge was delivered up to the jury’s reprobation; Harriette Harris was dismissed for being dirty, a circumstance she would resent; Sarah Wood’s candour was discounted because she came from the House of Mercy. Mrs. Logan complained of expense from her sister’s child’s birth but never applied to Achilli for contribution; he let his servants go at large and offered no hush money, acting as an innocent man. The alteration in the law of bastardy, he argued, showed how easily such charges are trumped up without corroboration. As for the document from the Holy Inquisition, admitted by Lord Campbell only as proof that such a judgment existed, not of the facts, he called it the first time such a judgment had been received in an English court and hoped it would be the last. In 1851 Mr. Harting had gone to Rome and communicated with the authorities; an individual desirous of mystery obtained a copy, revealed as Monsignore Talbot, the Pope’s private secretary. The office was secret, no examination against the original had occurred, and the document stated that the superior of the order of preachers paid a woman fifty crowns in compensation for her seduction—but the superior was never produced. The pleas were placed on record on 12 February 1852, founded on the document, which was then produced as proof. The judgment was perpetual suspension from cure of souls and preaching and repair to a stricter house; but in 1839 Achilli had ceased to be a monk, so how could the sentence be carried out? The confessions of indecent behaviour in the document were, he said, a gross and scandalous fabrication, and Achilli had completely absolved himself. He anticipated a verdict vindicating Achilli and condemning Dr. Newman, and presented him as a man called to answer charges over a considerable period under unprecedented difficulties. The jury retired for nearly half an hour.
The Two Converts and the Question of Belief
What gives the trial its grip is that neither principal is a neutral figure. Achilli had been a Dominican monk and professor of philosophy, imprisoned by the Roman Inquisition, who escaped and arrived in England at the start of 1850 to preach at an Italian Protestant chapel near Golden Square. Newman had been a distinguished Oxford graduate and clergyman of the established church before his conversion to Rome, and his pamphlet took the form of lectures addressed to the Brothers of the Oratory. Each man, in Cockburn’s phrase, had abandoned his original faith, and the jury held views opposite to his client’s. The prosecution insisted this was a slander case, not a religious controversy; the defence warned of prejudice on both sides. Yet the credibility of a convert — whether Achilli left Rome from conviction or was expelled, whether his Protestant zeal was genuine or sordid — became the real subject. Cockburn argued that converts are almost invariably influenced by sordid motives; the Attorney-General compared Achilli’s gradual struggle to Luther’s. Even the Inquisition’s decree, produced to show Achilli had been sentenced to perpetual deprivation of ecclesiastical functions, was admitted by Lord Campbell only as proof that such a judgment existed, not as evidence of the facts behind it.
What the Verdict Leaves Standing
Lord Campbell’s summing up is the report’s quiet centre of gravity. He refused the notion that the credit of the Protestant religion was at stake, though he allowed that Achilli’s character was deeply at stake; he said Newman had acted rashly and recklessly, but that no obloquy attached to a man who renounced his emoluments once he found he did not belong to the true church. He found Eleanor Valenti’s charge uncorroborated, thought the Corfu evidence unclear, and observed that it was extraordinary Mr. Reynolds should allege Achilli had cohabited for weeks and months with a woman said to be a common prostitute while being seen familiar with her by day. On Malta he held there could be no doubt Achilli sent Zaccharis away, and the jury must say with what motive. The Earl of Shaftesbury, examined late, conceded the committee had acted on rumour rather than any charge actually before them, cutting the Gordian knot by dismissing Achilli. The jury retired for nearly half an hour. The pamphlet’s own title page — with its sneer at “the Apostate Catholic Priest” and “the Oxford Puseyite” — shows how the case was sold to readers, and the report remains a document of what a Victorian courtroom could do with a man’s whole life when theology and scandal arrived together.
