his fellow accused, in May 1848. However, he returned to London in June, where he still enjoyed important supporters including Sir Culling Eardley Eardley, chairman of the Evangelical Alliance. Risorgimento Following the revolutions of 1848 in the Italian states, Rome was in the hands of Italian nationalists who established the Roman Republic in February 1849. Achilli travelled there in early 1849 and continued his Protestant, anti-Catholic and pro-nationalist propaganda. On 24 June 1849 he married Josephine Hely, the youngest daughter of Captain James Hely, whose family he had befriended when in England. The Roman Republic fell in June 1849 when the French took the city and reinstated Pope Pius IX's political authority. Though French president Louis Napoleon had requested that the Pope grant an amnesty, Achilli was arrested by the Cardinal Vicar and imprisoned by the Inquisition, in the Castel Sant'Angelo, for preaching against the Catholic religion and taking part in revolutionary agitation. There Augustin Theiner attempted to reconvert him to Catholicism, to no avail. Lewis Tonna and other London evangelicals canvassed the French government in October 1849 and succeeding in effecting Achilli's release. England and controversy Achilli's evangelical supporters brought him to England and established him in an Italian chapel under the aegis of the Evangelical Alliance. A series of antagonistic pamphlets established itself between Eardley and prominent English Catholic Cardinal Wiseman, by turns defending and attacking Achilli. In the meantime, Achilli was accused of raping or assaulting four of his domestic servants and a further young woman. In 1850, Pius IX re-established the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in England and Wales (see Roman Catholicism in Great Britain:The Catholic Revival in the Nineteenth Century) and excited popular religious divisions. John Henry Newman was minded to repeat Wiseman's allegations, of sexual immorality and that Achilli had misrepresented his expulsion from the Catholic Church, in a lecture but first took legal advice, on 16 July, from his confidant James Hope-Scott for fear of a libel suit. Hope-Scott was reassuring, expressing the opinion that an action was possible but not probable and that the risk was worth taking. Newman delivered his lecture on 28 July 1850. In August, The Evangelical Alliance gave notice that they intended to support Achilli in a libel action against Newman. Newman's trial for libel Achilli offered a compromise but Newman felt that he could not admit any culpability. Such an admission would taint Wiseman and the