Professor Lord Acton: Introduction

That the Reverend Professor Sir Owen Chadwick, O.M. should be asked to reflect on Lord Acton's time at Cambridge is altogether fitting. He is emeritus professor of modern history at Cambridge and was formerly professor of church history there. Professor Chadwick has long commanded an easy familiarity with the considerable published writings of Acton; he has mastered vast quantities of the even more extensive Acton archives, held principally by Cambridge; he has known those who knew Acton; and, like Acton, he himself, from 1968 to 1983, was Regius Professor of Modern History. He can now look back over a distinguished, multifaceted career in that great university-at one point serving as Vice-Chancellor-where he received the highest academic and national honors as he lectured and published on wide fields, including that of Lord Acton's unique intellectual pilgrimage. In sum, Owen Chadwick comes to his subject blessed with many advantages, including that of knowing the Cambridge world from within.

Professor Chadwick's life at Cambridge began with his reading classics, then history, at St. John's. Ordination to the Anglican priesthood and reading history set the direction and tone of his labors thereafter. In this he would come to an intellectual simpatico of sorts with Acton, who, though not ordained-in fact, he was always very much a layman-nonetheless received his early education in seminaries at Paris under Dupanloup, at Oscott under Wiseman, and-outside the seminary-at Munich under the priest-historian, Döllinger. Indeed, one of Chadwick's early works, From Bossuet to Newman. The Idea of Doctrinal Development (1957), carried him into the depths of a subject that went to the heart of some of the fierce controversy surrounding the Acton circle prior to 1874.

In addition, the historical writings which have established Professor Chadwick's reputation are largely in those fields that attracted Acton: the papacy, the Reformation, the French Revolution, church and state, and, for want of a more helpful label, the history of ideas. In 1973 he was brought into a more personal association with the Acton family. Marcham Priory, near Abingdon, was then the home of Douglas and Mia (Marie) Woodruff. She was Acton's granddaughter, sensitive to the memory of her grandfather and keeper of the family archives. It became known that the massive collection of Acton's personal papers-principally in the form of correspondence-was to be sold by the heir, Richard Acton, now the 4th Baron. An American friar, Damian McElrath, O.F.M., had spent the better part of a year in prodigious effort bringing order out of chaos, and through him an American scholar-formerly one of his students at the Catholic University of America-had made an offer to buy the papers. Professor Chadwick and Dr. A. E. B. Owen of University Library, were successful in reaching an agreement with Richard Acton whereby the papers were sold to the university, which was in keeping with the desire of the Acton family. Within a few months, Harold Acton, hearing what had happened, sent his substantial collection of Lord Acton's letters to Professor Chadwick who added them to the much bigger collection. These acquisitions assured that Cambridge would remain the center for Acton studies.

On several occasions over the past twenty years Professor Chadwick's scholarship has focused on Acton. I should like to say a word about that body of literature, for it reveals important elements in Professor Chadwick's understanding of critical questions in Acton studies. In his Creighton Lecture, Acton and Gladstone (1975), a famous and durable friendship is examined, not uncritically; it was in this connection that Acton was tempted, quite uncharacteristically, even awkwardly, to cross the line by reaching for a high diplomatic post, unsuccessfully. But that was small matter given the scope and richness of the friendship itself, essentially intellectual in nature, as revealed in the nearly four hundred letters that survive, now being edited for publication. As Chadwick puts it, "They discussed everything." But, he asks, did the relationship have "consequence in British history and not only in English literature"? Perhaps not. Yet it did in fact contribute notably to the improved quality of life for English Catholics.

Acton, Döllinger and History (1986) was the topic of the annual lecture before the German Historical Institute in London. Here Professor Chadwick lays out the case that it was the nature of Acton's unique intellectual formation that resulted in bringing to Britain a perspective on the writing of history that was European rather than insular, that Acton himself broke with Döllinger's Catholic South German school as a consequence of his experiences with church authority and his ultimate commitment to moral judgment in history. There is made, in addition, a remarkable argument that Acton for all intents and purposes became significantly detached from Catholicism in the 1870's and 1880's, only to return to the fold, in a public sense, when he took up his duties at Cambridge in 1895, and following Cardinal Vaughan's wise yet extraordinary letter all but sanctioning Acton's earlier estrangement. Whatever the interpretation of the evidence in this regard, whatever the complexity of the political and intellectual turmoil he experienced during those years, we cannot doubt Acton's deep and abiding Christian faith or that in The Imitation of Christ he found a beacon through the darkness.

Harsh words from Sir Geoffrey Elton in 1986, in his Sir Herbert Butterfield Memorial Lecture, delivered at Queen's University, Belfast, stirred Chadwick's pen yet again. Professor Elton ventured on thin ice when he faulted Butterfield for giving so much of his time to Acton, whom he, Elton, pronounced an "unproductive monument" deserving "honourable oblivion." Would that Butterfield not have wasted his talent attempting to unravel "a bogus enigma." Butterfield, long held in esteem and affection by the younger Chadwick, had himself been Regius Professor and Master of Peterhouse, where rare was the student of Acton in those days who did not benefit from his generosity in time and penetrating queries.

Chadwick's response came in "Acton and Butterfield" which appeared in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History in July, 1987. Cambridge of the 1930's, he wrote, the Cambridge of the young Butterfield, was yet under the inspiration of Acton with its "grand design of a world history by various authors." It was in fact that European outlook of Acton already alluded to, namely, that Britain must see its history in the larger context of Europe, that so captured the energies of that time and place. Acton was, after all, by virtue of his lineage and German education, "the first big, technically equipped, European historian writing in the English language." The new generation at Cambridge, enamored of the cosmopolitan stance, was preparing to break with Whig-centric patterns of thought explaining the course of national experience.

Butterfield was much drawn to Acton for other reasons as well: his pursuit of the history of freedom, defined in terms of the protection of minorities and the sanctity of individual conscience; his fascination with archival collections as the vehicle for validating truth in the writing of history; his extensive correspondence, a veritable record of his life and thought; and his conflict with papal authority, including lower hierarchical authority, for which Butterfield, a devout Methodist, felt little affection. Only in the matter of moral judgment in history was there a chasm in sentiment that strained and puzzled Butterfield to the end, leaving him to speculate-for he did not have access to the then inaccessible personal papers-that Acton was "a wounded hero, a hurt lion, with painful inner scars." Lacking documentary proof, he was intuitively close to the mark. With this defense of his old friend, Chadwick not only carried the day, he widened appreciation of Acton's intellect as one of the treasures of Occidental culture.

I have kept for last mention of Professor Chadwick's article, "Lord Acton at the First Vatican Council," which appeared in the Journal of Theological Studies (1977). For I am convinced that it was Acton's experience at the Council, more than all the rest, that fixed his mind on the corrupting influence of power and the necessity for moral judgment from the pen of historians. As early as 1857, during their visit to Rome, he and Döllinger were shocked by the deplorable state of historical studies there, the carelessness and worse evinced toward the integrity of archival evidence; indeed, Acton held that it was the turning-point in the life of his "Professor". For Acton himself it marked the start of his thinking on mendacity in the writing of history, meaning, in his mind, the conscious distortion of historical record to serve ulterior purpose, nearly always in association with the exercise of power.

In reading Professor Chadwick on Acton's role at the Council one experiences anew that extraordinary episode in which a Catholic layman exerted herculean effort to galvanize hierarchy and statesmen against a dogmatic pronouncement he and Döllinger knew to be unsound historically. It was the manner of his failure that confirmed in his mind as never before the enormity of mendacity, deliberate and happenstance, in historical writing. Four years later, in his debate in the Times with Gladstone over the implications of papal infallibility, he restated things which prompted Cardinal Manning to force the issue with his old nemesis. That Acton escaped excommunication was owing to the wisdom of his own bishop, Brown, who cut off the pursuit, but the wound remained open for twenty years. Then in 1895, on the news of Acton's Cambridge appointment, Cardinal Vaughan wrote an extraordinary letter of reconciliation:

So we come now to marking the centennial of Acton's professorship. But how did it come about, this appointment of a Roman Catholic-the first since the Reformation-who had no academic experience, and who could claim not a single published volume to his credit at age 61? Lord Rosebury had his reasons; men at Cambridge University had their reasons; and Acton's friend, Gladstone, had his doubts. The six years Acton passed there were all but the happiest of his life; that distinction belongs to his student years at Munich with Döllinger, amidst the excitement of revolutionary times in the life of the mind. There too, from abandoned monasteries and a hundred bookshops he began assembling his personal library that would eventually reach 70,000 volumes, now preserved in University Library.

A final word. So much of the debate over Acton has centered on his commitment to moral judgment in history. I have tried to suggest, perhaps inadequately, that the genesis of that train of thought can be found in his 1857 travels to Rome. It was with him in the 1850's, deepened during his archival tour in the 1860's, and came to fruition in the 1870's. Yet it was at Cambridge that he gave it definitive and final expression, in May, 1897, in the privacy of his Trinity rooms in Nevile's Court, where he addressed a select society, the Eranus, which never numbered more than twelve members. Professor Lord Acton delivered a prepared paper on his archival tour of thirty years earlier, full of that backstairs knowledge for which he was famous, revealing time and again the threats to truth's survival and need for eternal vigilance:

It is time to turn to Professor Chadwick, who has evoked with skill and feeling the story of the very complex man who arrived at the University in June, 1895. Professor Chadwick has honored this commemorative occasion by preparing a carefully researched essay on Acton and his career at Cambridge, which is at the same time a synthesis of his work on Acton over many years. But this essay is much more. Through it we see for the first time the human side of Acton at Cambridge-through his association with colleagues, students, and others. We can almost hear the gossip reported and enjoy Acton's excitement in relating some hidden tidbit of history.

Professor Chadwick has gotten beyond but not neglected the heavy questions. Here he portrays Acton as the poet of history, the man who established history as a respected discipline at Cambridge, and the great talker, the historian with a wonderful ability to make narrative history exciting. Chadwick provides splendid examples of the conspicuous contrast between Acton's insistence on objectivity and accuracy and his use of superlatives. Scholarship on Acton has been so often beset by the serious-minded that we seldom encounter, except perhaps in the rare recollections of a Lord Bryce or a Lord Morley, Acton as the glittering conversationalist. In the pages that follow Professor Chadwick also brings the fruits of a life devoted to historical studies to the larger issues of Acton's thought on the role of conscience, the historian as magistrate, the corrupting influence of power, and human progress.

What follows is profound and delightful history marking the centennial of Acton's appointment to the Regius Professorship. So let us return to the Senate House at Cambridge, James Gibbs' lovely Palladian palace, where on March 16, 1995, Professor Chadwick spoke on Professor Lord Acton.