Richard Poppleton

Richard Poppleton was born in 1790 at Boston, Lincolnshire, the son of Thomas Poppleton and Ester née Broderick. Nothing is known of his early education or training, but by about 1810 he had settled in Messina, Sicily, where he established himself as an English merchant and remained active for more than four decades.

From the outset of his residence in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, Poppleton operated within, and on the margins of, the small Protestant and anglophone networks of eastern Sicily. Alongside his commercial activity, he engaged in sustained and deliberately cautious efforts to circulate Protestant scriptures under Bourbon rule, where the possession and dissemination of non-Catholic Bibles was closely monitored and frequently prohibited.

Between 1810 and 1854, and particularly over a period of more than twenty years, Poppleton maintained regular correspondence with the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS) in London. In these communications he requested that Bibles be sent to him in small, unobtrusive consignments, designed to evade the scrutiny of customs officials and the Bourbon police. His method of distribution was notably discreet: he would board English merchant vessels in the harbour of Messina under various pretexts and retrieve the books directly from captains’ cabins, thereby bypassing customs inspection. Once ashore, the volumes were either placed with trusted local booksellers or distributed personally during his travels around Sicily on commercial business.

This activity, described by contemporaries as a “risky sport,” required constant vigilance. Poppleton reportedly suspended or reduced distribution whenever police surveillance intensified, resuming only when conditions appeared safer. Despite these interruptions, he continued his Bible distribution for decades, making him one of the more persistent, if understated, figures in the informal Protestant missionary economy of Bourbon Sicily.

In 1831 Poppleton married Baroness Maria Rosa Marino in Messina, thereby forming a notable alliance between a British Protestant merchant and a member of the local aristocracy. Together, they would have The marriage appears to have reinforced his social standing within the city, though it did not remove him from official suspicion. His brother, Thomas Poppleton, who also resided in Messina as a wine-shop owner, was similarly subject to police monitoring, reportedly because of suspected anti-Bourbon sympathies.

Poppleton remained a visible figure within Messina’s Protestant circles during the politically volatile years of the Risorgimento, including 1849, when revolutionary upheaval and the short-lived Roman Republic heightened Bourbon sensitivity to dissent and foreign influence. His continued presence at this time suggests both caution and resilience in navigating an increasingly unstable political environment.

He died in Messina on 31 August 1854, during a severe cholera epidemic that claimed many lives in the city. His death brought to an end a long career that combined commercial enterprise with quiet religious activism conducted under persistent political constraint.

Sources

• Caglioti, Daniela Luigia, Vite parallele: una minoranza protestante nell’Italia dell’Ottocento (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2006).

• Cerrito, Gino, ‘Appunti sulla diffusione del protestantesimo in Sicilia dopo l’Unità’, Bollettino della Società di studi valdesi, no. 144 (1963)

• D’Angelo, Michela, ‘Comunità anglicane in Sicilia nella prima metà dell’Ottocento’, Bollettino della Società di studi valdesi, no. 169 (1991)

• Ferrara, Roberto, Movimenti evangelici in Sicilia dal Risorgimento al fascismo (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino Editore, 2007).

• Spini, Giorgio, Risorgimento e Protestanti (Torino: Claudiana, 1988)

• Spini, Giorgio, Studi sull’evangelismo italiano tra Otto e Novecento (Torino: Claudiana, 1994)