Main Text

In 1887, historian Mandell Creighton published the third volume of his monumental study of the Papacy. Fellow historian Lord Acton, a Roman Catholic troubled by the recent declaration of Papal Infallibility, criticised him for being too soft on the crimes of the Popes: the historian who easily excuses the tyrants of the past, he warned, may also hire himself out to excuse the tyrants of the present.

abridged by Louise Creighton

Précis
In a letter to fellow-historian Mandell Creighton, Lord Acton scolded him for being too soft on the Great Men of the past. Popes and Kings, said Acton, cannot be allowed to do things that ordinary people would be severely punished for; more power should bring with it more accountability, not less, especially as the powerful tend to be unscrupulous characters, and power is itself a corrupting possession. Acton ended by assuring Creighton that his criticism was kindly meant.

You say that people in authority are not to be snubbed or sneered at from our pinnacle of conscious rectitude.⁠ I really don’t know whether you exempt them because of their rank, or of their success and power, or of their date. But if we might discuss this point until we found that we nearly agreed, and if we do agree thoroughly about the impropriety of Carlylese⁠ denunciations and Pharisaism in history, I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favoured presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption, it is the other way, against holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.⁠ Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.

The inflexible integrity of the moral code is to me the secret of the authority, the dignity, the utility of history. If we may debase the currency for the sake of genius or success or reputation, we may debase it for the sake of a man's influence, of his religion, of his party, of the good cause which prospers by his credit and suffers by his disgrace. Then History ceases to be a science, an arbiter of controversy, a guide of the wanderer; it serves where it ought to reign, and it serves the worst cause better than the purest.

Of course I know that you do sometimes censure great men severely; but the doctrine I am contesting appears in your preface. I am sure you will take this long and contentious letter⁠ more as a testimony of hearty confidence and respect than of hostility, although as far as I grasp your method I do not agree with it. Mine seems to me plainer and safer.

Footnotes

Footnote

Conscious rectitude

The offending passage may be found in the Preface to Volume III of Mandell Creighton’s five-volume magnum opus A History of the Papacy During the Period of the Reformation (1882-94): I have tried to deal fairly with the moral delinquencies of the Popes, without, I trust, running the risk of lowering the standard of moral judgment; but it seems to me neither necessary to moralise at every turn in historical writing, nor becoming to adopt an attitude of lofty superiority over anyone who ever played a prominent part in European affairs, nor charitable to lavish undiscriminating censure on any man. All I can claim is, that I have not allowed my judgment to be warped by a desire to be picturesque or telling.

Footnote

Carlylese

A reference to Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), known for his many pithy remarks as well as his industrious labour as a historian and mathematician. He subscribed to the great men view of history, that men of power and intellect not only do but should shape our world. The history of the world is but the biography of great men he declared in Heroes and Hero-Worship (1841), and in Chartism (1840) he reduced all noble protests, including The Peterloo Massacre, to the inarticulate plea of the working man to be governed by his betters. Guide me, govern me! I am mad, and miserable, and cannot guide myself! Surely Carlyle went on of all rights of man, this right of the ignorant man to be guided by the wiser, to be, gently or forcibly, held in the true course by him, is the indisputablest. Neither Acton nor Creighton was an admirer.

Footnote

Corrupts absolutely

This is one of the most famous aphorisms in politics. When Sir Sultan Mahomed Shah, Aga Khan III (1877-1957), expressed his bewilderment at the sudden spread of white-race superiority in English society around the turn of the twentieth century, novelist W. Somerset Maugham invoked this same phrase. “I am not satisfied with the explanation which the Aga Khan gives” he wrote. “I think it is to be sought rather in that hackneyed, but consistently disregarded aphorism of Lord Acton’s: Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Footnote

Contentious letter

The strength of Acton’s feeling had certainly taken Creighton aback. Now he sends me a review Creighton complained to his publisher, with gentle remonstrance, which reads to me like the utterances of a man who is in a furious passion, but is incapable of clear expression. Perhaps that is because Acton was not really attacking Creighton: his target was an imaginary historian who might take Creighton’s method too far, the historian who for religion, for party or for a good cause is willing to hire himself out to the Powerful by suppressing uncomfortable facts. It was Creighton’s misfortune that his mildness awoke a slumbering grievance.

Author Details

By Lord Acton
John Acton, 1st Baron Acton 1834-1902
Source
As abridged in
Life and letters of Mandell Creighton, sometime Bishop of London Vol. I (1904) by Louise Creighton (1850-1936). Louise was Mandell’s wife. The offending passage came in the Preface to A History of the Papacy During the Period of the Reformation Volume III (1887), by Mandell Creighton (1843-1901).
Additional information from
Chartism (1840) by Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) and The Memoirs Of Aga Khan (1945), by Sir Sultan Mahomed Shah, Aga Khan III (1877-1957), with an introduction by W. Somerset Maugham.

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See Also

Leo Tolstoy shared Lord Acton’s poor view of history’s ‘Great Men’, but he did not believe they should be held to account for their actions: he believed that they weren’t really responsible for them. See Not-So-Great Men.