Introduction
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.
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 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.”
* 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”. Little wonder that neither Acton nor Creighton were admirers.
* 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.”
Précis
Shortly after Mandell Creighton’s multi-volume History of the Papacy came out, fellow historian Lord Acton wrote to him to complain that he had pulled too many punches. Power is a great corrupter of men, he said, and historians had a responsibility to hold the Great and the Good to account, especially if none had dared do so in their lifetimes. (60 / 60 words)
Shortly after Mandell Creighton’s multi-volume History of the Papacy came out, fellow historian Lord Acton wrote to him to complain that he had pulled too many punches. Power is a great corrupter of men, he said, and historians had a responsibility to hold the Great and the Good to account, especially if none had dared do so in their lifetimes.
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