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.

Acton insisted he had no respect for the waspishness of a Thomas Carlyle, and conceded that Creighton was better in practice than theory: but he warned that the historian who turns a blind eye to great crimes out of humility opens the door to the historian who does it out of bias, and however unwittingly robs History of all value.

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