Thomas Sims

Named after his paternal grandfather, Thomas Sims was born at Llansamlet in Wales, near Swansea, on 23 May 1785, to John and Jemina Sims. His father died when Sims was only 16, while Sims was still studying at Colston's School, at the time under the leadership of the evangelical Anglican rector of St James' Church, Bristol, T. T. Biddulph. His grandfather, however, was a Bristol merchant who left not insignificant legacies to Sims and his three siblings when he died in 1804, enabling Thomas to proceed in 1806 as a 'pensioner' student to Queen's College, Cambridge. The noted evangelical scientist and mathematician, Isaac Milner, was Master of Queen's at the time, and in association with Charles Simeon, had turned it into a hotbed of evangelical Christianity. It is probably not a coincidence that Sims was resident and enrolled at Queens at the same time as Milner was completing the posthumous texts of his brother Joseph's magnum opus, The History of the Church of Christ (1794–1809), which contained (inter alia) what was then the major evangelical interpretation of the history of the Waldensians and 'true Christianity' in Italy.

Sims graduated in 1810 (BA 1810; MA 1813), and proceeded to take orders. He was ordained to the priesthood (13 June 1813) by John Fisher, Bishop of Salisbury. He did not enter a formal charge for some time, possibly because he was not financially pressed. He returned to Bristol and seems to have worked in the evangelical network there (particularly with John Hensman, the rector of St Andrew's Church, Clifton), appearing with Thomas Biddulph as one of the leaders of the Bristol network of the evangelical's party's preferred missions arm, the Church Missionary Society (CMS).

Just over the Bristol at the time was a major international trading port, and home to accumulated wealth and privilege built on centuries of trade (particularly the transatlantic slave trade). Linked by family ties to these circles, Sims left England in 1814 to attend the 'extremely active and fearless' Mary Chapman Henshaw (the widow of Captain Robert Henshaw and the daughter of Walter Chapman, the late evangelical prebendary of Bristol Cathedral), on her journey to join her sister Fanny (Frances, who was married to Bex pastor the Rev. Daniel Chuard) in Switzerland. Mary Henshaw was the type of person happened to be there at the turning of events. Travelling via Dover to Calais, in Paris Sims was present when they met Mary's old acquaintance, the Comte de Divonne, recently returned after the (first) defeat of Napoleon in a Paris expecting the imminent restoration of the French throne. They then travelled to Switzerland via Auxerre, St. Germaine and Poligny, staying in Nyon, in the canton of Vaud, the birthplace of Jean Guillaume de la Fléchère (John Fletcher), one of the most important theologians of the first generation of Methodism. Henshaw's father, the prebendary, had been close to the Wesleys in their Holy Club years, and she had known both Fletcher and his wife, Mary Bosanquet. Henshaw would continue to live at Charpigny near Bex until her death in 1834), active in missionary and Bible Society causes. Her house, like that of Mary Ann Greaves, indeed, became a reference point for the evangelical cause on the continent, in particular the reveil. (Latham 2010: 153-54)

Sims left Henshaw at Nyon, and continued on a form of anthropo-spiritual tourism (not unusual in his day) to Piedmont. In Geneva, he had 'discovered' that the Waldensians, with regard to whom he had been alerted in Milner's History, were still resident in Piedmont. Passing through Torino, on 15 September 1814 he met (through the Long banking family, who managed British government support for the Waldensians) J. H. Ferdinand Peyran, the longserving Waldensian pastor of Pramollo in Piedmont. Peyran was a core figure in mobilizing external support for improving the lot of the Waldensian communities in the valleys - his brother, Jean L. S. Rodolphe Peyran, was moderator of the Tavola, and it would be Ferdinand's appeal to the SPCK in London, for example, which would attract the interest of William Stephen Gilly.

Sims accompanied Peyran to Pinerolo in order to deliver the annual subsidy, using the occasion to learn much about the Waldensians, their history and condition. Visiting Massello and Torre, Sims was first hosted, and then accompanied on a trip to the parishes of the Waldensian valleys, by modérateur adjoint (assistant moderator) Pierre Bert. In Pomaretto, he met Ferdinand's brother, the moderator Jean L. S. Rodolphe Peyran. Experienced and well connected to evangelical voluntary bodies in England, Sims proposed that the Waldensians establish a Bible Society, which could draw on the existing international patronage of Bible Society leaders such as the Tsar and the king of Prussia, who, as allies of the Kingdom of Sardinia, could bring pressure to bear on the ruling House of Savoy. (Such patronage was needed - Sims later found that most bibles sent for the Waldensian population remained undistributed, as transport and customs costs rendered them too expensive for the Bible Society's normal self-funding approach to be used.) Sims also undertook to solicit missionary society help in assisting the Waldensian students to study abroad. (Villani 2014 proposes that by this Peyran could have understood either the CMS or the SPCK).

Returning to England ('probably in the early days of 1815', Villani 2014), via the Dauphiné and Nîmes, he encountered and appreciated the revivalist preaching of Felix Neff. The Waldensians, as they would for W. S. Gilly, became a guiding passion for Sims: as Bert noted, he developed 'un désir ardent de nous être utile' (Villani 2014: 111, fn 32). He contacted Waldensian churches in France and Germany to learn more, and (when persecuting recommenced in 1814) raised the condition of the Waldensian communities with leaders such as Zachary Macaulay (who printed his account in the Christian Observer), with Carl Steinkopff (Foreign Secretary with the British and Foreign Bible Society, BFBS), with the SPG, and with William Wilberforce, who agitated on his behalf for a reactivation of the 'Royal Bounty'. Sims also set about gathering support from Macaulay, Daniel Wilson (Bishop of Calcutta), the Huguenot community in London and others to refill the underlying trust funds which would enable this to happen. He considered it essential to avoid the perception that this was a purely private activity - the funds would be best distributed through the existing government channels, so as to avoid disruption by bureaucratic opposition in Italy itself. The interest of Wilberforce and British Parliamentary clique known as 'the Saints', was not lost on the ruling authorities in Piedmont: as Villani notes, 'in February 1816 the Savoy Foreign Minister Carlo Filiberto di Vallesa, Count of Montalto, mentioned Wilberforce among the "mighty protectors" that the «artifiziosi valdesi» ['manufactured'or 'affected' Waldensians] had in England' (Villani 2014: 115). While his fund-raising through official channels failed, Sims' campaign gained enough traction to ensure that British and other diplomatic actors (such as Algernon Percy and the Duke of Wellington at the Congress of Verona in 1822) pressed the rights and protection of the Waldensians with increasing insistence. (Villani 2014: 116)

It was in support of this first effort at restoring 'the subsidy' that Sims sat down and wrote his Brief Memoir Regarding the Waldenses (London: J. Hatchard, 1815), the funds from which would add to the committee's efforts and used to subsidize the schools in the Valleys. That it was of a piece with his larger missionary concerns can be seen by the fact that in the same year he published the anonymous piece, The Spirit of British Missions, which argued for a global civilizational mission which had fallen upon the British people. Peyran and Bert also contacted the BFBS directly, leading (at the urging of Antoine Monastier in Lausanne) to the foundation (in October 1815) of an affiliated Bible Society at Torre. Pierre Geymet, former moderator and sub-prefect of Pinerolo during the Napoleonic era, was elected as president, and his grandson, Pierre Bert, as secretary. The Valleys were now institutionally associated with 'Protestant International', leading increased funding, attention and a flow of resources such as bibles from affiliates in Geneva, Basel, Lausanne, and London.

Sims' short account was one written for Anglican tastes. It emphasized a non-Catholic apostolic Christian tradition, the importance of the British role (and particularly the Royal Bounty, and the negative educational impacts of its cessation), and even portrayed Waldensian ecclesiology as historically paedo-baptist and episcopalian. Taken up by the Christian Observer and other journals, its content was widely circulated even outside of the evangelical Anglican network. As the continent opened up after the cessation of the Napoleonic wars, a growing stream of visitors made a point of including the Valleys on their 'morally uplifting' tours. This included at least four in 1820: James Haldane Stewart (the evangelical and missions-oriented minister of Percy Chapel at the time, whose visit to the Continent was a standard prescription for those seeking to recover from a health breakdown in service), a Captain Pearson, Francis Cunningham and Gorges Lowther (a cadet of a well-connected Irish minor noble family later resident near Bath, who married into Huguenot circles). Lowther's pamphlet, Brief Observations on the Present State of the Waldenses and Upon Their Actual Sufferings was, in the vein of Sims' Brief Memoir, aimed at raising funds. With concerned supporters, such as the Quaker banker John Scandrett Harford, Wilberforce and Rev. Walter Trevelyan, they raised support for Waldensian students who went to study in Lausanne and Geneva. Support of this kind was often entrusted to other travellers, such as Major William Plenderleath, a member of a Bristol merchant / military family who on Sims' recommendation visited the valleys in 1821, bringing with him ideas regarding Sunday Schools and a Waldensian hospital, which gained some traction in later years.

Plenderleath returned to the valleys with Sims and Durbin Brice in the summer of 1823. Together they conducted an 'investigation' into elementary education in every single parish of the valleys, making suggestions for improving the Waldensian school system. Plenderleath handed to the Tavola some 270 francs raised among the English congregation in Rome, as an initial contribution to the proposed hospital, while interested Anglican clergy (including the high church Bishop, John Henry Hobart in New York, and the famed barrister-turned-missions promoter and millenarian Lewis Way of Stanstead) preached in its favour. It was also perhaps Way's close association (in his concerns for the status and evangelization of Europe's Jewish communities) with the Tsar Alexander I, that led to the Prussian soldier-ambassador Count Friedrich Waldburg-Truchsess committing Russian money to the hospital project. (The hospital was opened in Torre Pellice in April 1826).

This broader interest in the Waldensians in some ways caused Sims' work to be submerged in the later work of people such as W. S. Gilly, who succeeded in carrying through many of the projects which Sims had planned. Sims ceded the spotlight, preferring to support Gilly's work, as (for example) founding treasurer for what became The English Committee in Aid of the Waldensian Church Missions. Sims had taken up the role of Domestic Chaplain to the Duchess Dowager of Beaufort, but continued to write and support Waldensian causes. His key Waldensian contact, Jean Rodolphe Peyran, had died in 1823, it falling to Sims to publish the 'life and writings' volume so typical of nineteenth century commemoration. In 1826 he published a collection of Peyran's writings under the title of An Historical Defense of the Waldenses or Vaudois, Inhabitants of the Valleys of Piedmont. Pointing to the loosening hold of the Roman Church over faith and practice around the world, he reflected on the Waldensians of Peyran's time as a 'sign of the times', as a continuing witness to the survival of apostolic Christianity, and as the harbinger of the Reformation. For Sims, Peyran's suffering for the faith (he was a prisoner of Napoleon in Fenestrelle, not far from Pomaretto, between 1809 and 1813; and a key voice opposing the Catholic repression during the Restoration period) reflected the whole historic Waldensian experience.

The efforts of people such as Sims and Gilly both encouraged the Waldensians, and elicited further repression. in 1826, Leo XII approved the society of the Oblati di Maria Vergine, an order founded in part to proselytize among the Waldensians. Sims saw this as of a piece with earlier crusading, and published An Apology for the Waldenses (1827). The following year, he travelled again to the valleys, donating 20 pounds for the temple of Pomaretto, and commissioning a plaque in Latin in honor of Peyran. He organized for the French Bible Society to send more scriptures, and worked with his friend, the now moderator Pierre Bert, to publish a translation of the Scriptures into the patois of the valleys. The Gospels of Luke and John were (with considerable help by Colonel John Charles Beckwith and Bible Society funding) published in London in 1830, in a two-column French-patois bilingual edition.

Villani proposes that by 1830 Sims was increasingly drawn into his many other commitments, affirmed that the work of Gilly, Beckwith and others would finish what he had started. He was closely involved in anti-slavery campaigns and Sunday School and educational ventures for the lower classes (for instance, in the teaching activities of the Sunday school in St. Paul's Cray, in Kent), and in the Church of England Tract Society of Bristol (founded in 1811 by the Reverend John Bull), for which he published a whole series of booklets on history, morals and theology. He also published in French (for continental distribution, both in France and in the valleys) Anglican liturgical and devotional materials. In all of this he had in mind the elementary schools of the valleys, for which his publications provided religiously-aligned materials which supported his conception of the Waldensian way. His historical texts were later compiled and reedited under the title of History of the Christian Church (1846), and went through a number of editions. His short biographies of Jean-Frédéric Oberlin and Auguste Louis, Baron de Staël-Holstein, demonstrated both his connection to French evangelical circles, and his conviction that evangelical piety went hand in hand with transformative economic and social work which benefitted whole communities, including the poor. As Villani notes, too, they are continuous with his missionary impulse, and his belief that, with the deepening of educational culture in the valleys, 'the Waldensians [could] aspire to leave the valleys to fight the anti-Christian doctrines of the Catholic Church'. [Villani 2014: 136]

Sims was also caught up - on behalf of the Evangelical Party - in national attempts to reform the Church of England. As Thomas Chalmers did in Glasgow, Sims' work Lay-helpers: Or, a Plea for the Co-operation of the Laity with the Clergy (1831) sought to extend the voluntary principle in the pastoral/ parish life of a Church struggling with population growth, urban poverty and crime, and their related 'evils'. He promoted the establishment a greatly expanded number of a new type of episcopal see (A Model of non-secular Episcopacy: including Reasons for the Establishment of Ninety-four Bishopricks in England and Wales, 1832) freed from political appointment and activity. and as a means towards “democratizing” the Church. Villani proposes that in the background of his thought was his understanding of the Waldensian model and its historic roots. (Villani 2014: 137, 140) In 1835, the Peel government established the Ecclesiastical Commissioners for England, a move made permanent under the successive government.

In December 1839 Sims became rector of St. Swithun's, Winchester, the responsibilities for which considerably constricted his publishing activity to articles in journals such as the Church of England Family and School Magazine. It was in Winchester, on 25 October 1841, that Canon George Frederick Nott died. Nott was an Anglican minister with many cultural interests: he had spent most of his life in Italy, was 'a refined and voracious bibliophile' and 'an avid collector of antiquities' (Villani 2014). When the SPCK turned down a proposal from Nott's executors to publish his revised edition of the Book of Common Prayer in Italian, Sims bought both the copyright and the pre-printed edition and donated these to the Prayer-book and Homily Society (PBHS). He was convinced that the Anglican liturgy could provide the Waldensians and reformist Catholics with a helpful bridge into a reformed, Protestant spirituality which was at the same time recognizably liturgical and 'apostolic'. It was continuous with Beckwith's (ultimately failed) attempts in the valleys to induce the Tavola to adopt a more episcopal form, by (for instance) appointing the Moderator for life. The BoCP was seen by Gilly, Sims and Beckwith, in short, as an evangelistic tool. In Beckwith's famous challenge to the Tavola, "either you will be missionaries or you will be nothing". Pierre Bert had already proposed the construction of a dedicated Waldensian liturgy. The Tavola, however, decided on a Swiss model for its liturgy, rather than adopting the Book of Common Prayer, though Anglican influence could be found in the revised edition of 1842. Too much change in this direction was clearly feared - by both Swiss-educated 'presbyterian' constituents within the Waldensian community, and by Catholic and Savoyard authorities outside the valleys - as a British take-over.

Sims resigned his post at St. Swithun's in 1843, and lived in London with his sister Elizabeth. In the following years he moved to Cadoxton in Glamorganshire where as early as 1822 he had rented properties (on the island opposite Barry) and where he had long owned a farm in Buttrills. He returned to writing about Italy, in 1864 publishing Visits to the Valleys of Piedmont; Including a Brief Memoir Respecting the Waldenses. It was his first book in twenty years, and his last. He had not achieved as much as perhaps he had projected, but the Waldensian church by the end of the 1850s had indeed taken Beckwith's challenge to heart, and broken out of the valleys in a significant 'Italian turn'. In 1859 the Theological School moved to Florence and there the Société des Traités religieux pour l'Italie was transformed into an international and inter-denominational publication society, on the initiative of Jean Pierre Revel (moderator and pastor) and two Free Church of Scotland ministers, Robert Walter Stewart and John McDougall (active in Livorno and Florence). In 1860 the Waldensians set up a specific "Evangelization Committee" for the Italian churches that were to be formed, leaving the Tavola with the task of administering the churches in the valleys. (Villani 2014) Sims was thrilled by reports that 'fifty missionaries' were now traveling the length and breadth of Italy to spread the pure Waldensian gospel, and concluded his Visits to the Valleys of Piedmont with the hope that the wealthy in England would continue to support the cause of Italian evangelization. (Villani 2014)

Almost simultaneously with the release of his latest book, Sims died in Cadoxton on 23 December 1864, and was buried in the churchyard of St. Cadoc's, Barry, in Glamorgan, Wales. He left donations to the Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews and to the missionary societies of the Moravian Brethren.

Mark Hutchinson

Note:

This entry has largely drawn on the excellent work of Stefano Villani, with the intention of bringing his work on Sims into English. Additions/ alterations have been made to update the information. See Dr Villani's work, Making Italy Anglican (OUP, 2022), which is the authoritative work on the area.

Sources:

• ACAD - Alumni Database, Cambridge University https://venn.lib.cam.ac.uk/Documents/acad/2018/search-2018.html, accessed 28 April 2021.

• Clergy of the Church of England Database, https://theclergydatabase.org.uk, accessed 28 April 2021.

• Latham, Jackie E. M. (2010). 'A Zealous Evangelical Missionary. Mary Ann Greaves in Europe 1814–1824', Journal of Religious History 34.2 (June): 142-157.

• Peyran, Jean Rodolphe, An Historical Defence of the Waldensians or Vaudois, introd. by Thomas Sims (London: C&J Rivington, 1826).

• Pilone, Luca and Sara Pasquet, 'Ferdinand Peyran', Dizionario Biografici dei Protestanti in Italia online, https://www.studivaldesi.org/dizionario/evan_det.php?secolo=XVIII-XIX&evan_id=516, accessed 28 April 2021.

• Seeley, L. B., Reports of the British and Foreign Bible Society: With Extracts of Correspondence Etc. ; Reprinted from the Original Reports, vol. 7, 1822.

• Sims, Thomas, Brief Memoir Regarding the Waldenses (London: J. Hatchard, 1815).

• Sims, Thomas, An Apology for the Waldenses; ... to which is added an appeal to several European governments in their behalf (London, 1827).

• Villani, Stefani (2014). 'Dal Galles alle Valli: Thomas Sims (1785-1864) e la riscoperta britannica dei valdesi', Bolletino della Societa' di Studi Valdesi 215 (December): 103-171.

• Way, Lewis, The household of faith: a sermon, preached to the English congregation, assembled at Rome, Sunday, 6th April, 1823, for the benefit of the primitive church of the Vaudois, or, ancient Albigenses and Waldenses, London : [Printed for J. Hatchard and Son], 1823