John Acton, 1st Baron Acton
Posts in The Copybook credited to ‘John Acton, 1st Baron Acton’
In The Copybook
Posts in The Copybook credited to ‘John Acton, 1st Baron Acton’
In The Copybook
Two of the Victorian Age’s most distinguished historians locked horns over the question of whether historians should be nice.
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.