Hugh Dyke Acland

Hugh Dyke Acland was born on 10 March 1791, to Sir Thomas Dyke Acland, 9th Baronet Acland of Killerton and Holnicote, and Henrietta Anne nee Hoare. Henrietta was a daughter of Sir Richard Hoare, 1st Baronet of Barn Elms, a partner in the City of London banking firm C. Hoare & Co. Hugh's older brother, Thomas Dyke succeeded as 10th Baronet (1787–1871), while both his widowed mother and his sister (Henrietta) married into the wealthy and noble Fortescue family (also of Devon). Like his older brother Hugh was educated at Harrow School, and then Oxford (though at St. Mary's Hall attached to Oriel, rather than Christ Church) (B.A. 1821).

On 12 Jun 1817 Hugh married Ellen Jane (nee Woodhouse) (1783–1870), the widow of Reverend William Robinson, and one of the daughters of the Dean of Lichfield Cathedral, the Very Rev. John Chappel Woodhouse. After the death of Ellen's two infant daughters, the Woodhouse family commissioned one of England's leading sculptors, Francis Chantrey, to commemorate their loss. Exhibited at the Royal Academy Art Exhibition of 1816, the memorial was 'a sensation'. Hugh and Ellen Jane had one child together: Hugh Woodhouse Acland (1818-1851). Dean Woodhouse was both pious and scholarly - and his interest in the Book of the Revelation a recurrent theme in his publications. His well-received 1805 treatment, The Apocalypse, interpreted the place of the Waldensians in history not as one of the 'two witnesses', but as evidence of the unsealing of the 'fourth seal':

Rev. 6: 7 When the Lamb opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature say, “Come!” 8 I looked, and there before me was a pale horse! Its rider was named Death, and Hades was following close behind him. They were given power over a fourth of the earth to kill by sword, famine and plague, and by the wild beasts of the earth. (NIV)

'Of the witnesses in the early part of this history,' wrote Woodhouse:

we have received but imperfect accounts: and these come down to us in a very suspicious form, being transmitted chiefly in the writings of their enemies. What therefore is said in their praise, we may admit; of other parts we may doubt. It appears probable, that the Valdenses, so early as in the seventh century, had retreated to the valleys of Piedmont; there to profess and exercise a purer religion than was permitted to them elsewhere. (Woodhouse 1805: 198).

The Reformation was thus the end point, rather than the beginning, of a pure protestant witness against the 'mother of harlots, and abominations of the earth', the Church of Rome. (Woodhouse 1805: 381)

This sort of interpretation was increasingly logical for Britons, caught up in the seemingly interminable war with Napoleon. The expulsion of the Huguenots and Protestants under Louis XIV, and the subsequent Revolution had 'destroyed religion' in France. 'That the papal states were being occupied and war was being waged at the same time against the Turk (Gog and Magog) in Egypt and Syria was taken as a sign that the conversion of the Jews and the millennium were not far behind.' (Misner 1973: 377) Drawing on 17th and 18th century works, such as Joseph Mede's Clavis Apocalyptica (1665), the Dutch theologian Kempe Vitringa, and no less a figure than Thomas Newton (Bishop of Bristol and Dean of St Paul's), Woodhouse came to the conclusion that the Waldensians were a sign that the war in heaven had been poured out as predicted in the Bible. 'Whether all these impure seducing spirits [predicted in the Book of the Revelation] are already come into the world, I take not upon me to pronounce', wrote Woodhouse, 'but the production of the first, the spawn of the dragon, seems already apparent. The proud, immoral, atheistical notions, which in the eighteenth century have been published by popular writers, and propagated by secret clubs and associations, and which have mainly assisted the revolution in France, and the attempt of its rulers to annihilate Christianity in the world, have much the appearance of being such.' (Woodhouse 1805: 408) While Britain won the war against the Revolution and Napoleon's Empire, the restoration of Catholic powers and their repression of Protestants on the Continent, in the context of British support for the Greek bid for independence, called for action from the Protestant powers of Europe, in particular Britain.

Living in the Deanery at Lichfield with the ageing Dean, then, it is perhaps not surprising that his son-in-law, Hugh Dyke Acland became a chief spokesman for the Waldensian case, in the Church of England circles centred on the Cathedral. At some time in the early 1820s, he visited the Waldensian valleys in Piedmont, making the sketches which accompanied his later works on their history. As he notes in his 'compendious history', 'The sketches were made on the different spots represented by them, and I pledge myself to their fidelity.' (Acland 1827: xx) In 1825, Acland summarized the available English language sources in a Brief Sketch of the History and present Situation of the Valdenses, in Piedmont. The response of the reviewer in The Gentleman's Magazine was straight to the point: 'Why not petition Government for toleration of Protestants in the energetic form of the Slave trade emancipation?' (Gentleman's Magazine 1826) The suggestion was not merely a reference to social mobilization - in the end, the British Navy was put into action to repress slavery throughout the Empire. This was not a distant reality to the Acland family. His brother, (1793-1828) would die of 'blackwater fever' while commanding the HMS Helicon off the Cape of Good Hope while serving under Governor Richard Bourke. His nephew, another Charles Acland, would die 'In the cause of humanity', his memorial reads: '[he] exposed his life to the deadly influence of African fever; and so died, full of faith and hope; and devout affection, May 10th, 1837, off the bight of Benin' while on anti-slavery service with the Royal Navy. Both uncle and nephew were also subjects of Chantrey memorials in the Baronetcy's home church, All Saints Church, Selworthy.

Two years after his brief sketch, Acland returned to the lists, releasing 'Compendious History' which embedded an English translation of Arnaud's Histoire de la glorieuse rentrée des Vaudois dans leurs vallées (Kassel: 1710) in an edited framework which 'completed' those elements which Arnaud had not addressed. In his marshalling of apocalyptic scholarship, Acland noted that no particular interpretation could be final, but that 'we have already sufficient for the supposition, that the Vallenses or Vaudois have been in some degree connected with one or more of the prophecies in question.' (Acland 1827: xvii) Bishop Thomas Newton, an avid editor of Milton, and author of the influential and much re-published Dissertations on the Prophecies, which have remarkably been Fulfilled, and at this time are Fulfilling in the World (1758) was convinced that the Waldenses were 'the true witnesses' in the book of the Revelation, 'and, as I may say, the Protestants of this age [ie. the Middle Ages]'. (quoted in Acland 1827: xvii) It was not coincidence that W. S. Gilly had 'lately introduced the general knowledge of a pure and primitive church in the Alps, contiguous to spots much visited by our countrymen', revealing that the oppression in the West by the Pope at the same time as it became apparent in the East by the 'Mahometans' (presumably against the Greeks). In filling out Arnaud's account, he drew particularly on Jean Léger's Histoire générale des Églises évangéliques des vallées du Piémont ou vaudoises (Leiden: 1st edition 1559, expanded edition 1669), a book he refers to as 'the most valuable history of his countrymen, the Vaudois'. (Acland 1827: xxi) Léger, of course, had been a witness to the pasque piemontesi of 1655, and so was a direct link to the sanguinary history which had prompted Cromwell and others to take a direct interest in the affairs of Protestant minorities on the Continent. Other sources include Allix and Mosheim, which he uses to bridge the gap to Claude of Turin, and thence to the earliest records of the 'Vallenses' in France, in order to demonstrate the continuity of 'a primitive [and indeed apostolic] church which has never deserted the pure doctrine of Christ'. (Acland 1827: 239)

Acland died on 24 March 1834. He was buried in Lichfield Cathedral, while Ellen Jane remarried - to Richard Hinckley of Beacon Hill estate. She outlived both her third husband and her son, Hugh, and was buried beside them in the grounds of Christ Church, Lichfield, a church built on ground donated by the Hinckleys for that purpose.

Sources

Acland. H. D. (1827). The glorious recovery by the Vaudois of their Valleys, from the original, by Henri Arnaud, their commander and pastor, with a compendious history of that people, previous and subsequent to that event. London: John Murray, Albemarle-Street.

Gentleman's Magazine (1826). Review: A brief Sketch of the History and present Situation of the Valdenses, in Piemont, commonly called Vaudois, London: Chatto & Windus, The Gentleman's Magazine: and historical chronicle 1 September 1826: 241.

Mede, Joseph and John Worthington (ed.). (1665). The works of the pious and profoundly-learned Joseph Mede, B.D., sometime fellow of Christ's College in Cambridge, London: 1665

Misner, Paul (1973). 'Newman and the Tradition concerning the Papal Antichrist', Church History 42.3 (Sep., 1973): 377-395.

Woodhouse, John Chappel (1805). The Apocalypse or Revelation of Saint John: Translated with Notes Critical and Explanatory: To Which Is Prefixed a Dissertation on the Divine Origin of the Book in Answer to the Objects of J. D. Michaelis, London: J. Hatchard.