Introduction by Stephen J. Tonsor

The Legacy of an Education

By James C. Holland

How are we to understand the continuing interest in Lord Acton? He was, after all, remote from popular culture in his time: He was an aristocrat (the only child of the Duchess of Dalberg), an intellectual, a professor, and a Catholic whose thought often disquieted Church authority. Except to the rare observer of his occasional flash of brilliance in a social setting, he was not prominent in the popular mind. No, it is not owing to his public record that Acton lives on in our memories; rather, it is for his ideas that his name continues to be honored. Yearly, the name Acton appears hundreds of times in books, pamphlets, articles, and in learned and not-so-learned talks. The telling truth is that we must look to his highly exceptional education for the answer to the question, for it was his education that left him with a remarkable set of beliefs, at once fascinating and provoking to posterity.

There were a good half-dozen distinct and formative influences in John Acton's schooling: (1) an easy familiarity with the leadership and functioning of the ecclesiastical world; (2) a passion for history, books, and manuscripts; (3) behind-the-scene exposure to revolutionary changes in the historian's craft then underway in German universities; (4) personal entrée to vast, newly opening archival collections on the Continent; (5) training in a philosophy of history that led to his lifelong preoccupation with the history of freedom; and finally, (6) the fostering of a devout, non-dogmatic Christian faith. My purpose here is to argue that these elements in Acton's intellectual formation shaped the expanse of his intellect which, in turn, established his place in history.

The earliest distinctive feature in Acton's education, something that remained a constant throughout his formative years, was an easy familiarity with the clerical world. His uncle was a bishop, then a cardinal. In 1842, at the age of eight, he spent a few months as a student at Saint Nicholas de Chardonnet, near Paris, under the direction of Felix Dupanloup, later bishop. The next five years (1842–1847) were spent at Saint Mary's College, Oscott, near Birmingham, under Nicholas Wiseman, then bishop and soon to become the first Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster. Finally, after two years of study in Scotland (under still other clergymen), he went to Munich at the age of sixteen for nearly five years of university studies guided by the celebrated priest-historian, Ignaz von Döllinger. Acton was never intimidated or otherwise inhibited by cassocks, miters, red hats, or even the tiara.

It was while at Oscott that Acton discovered his passion for history. Wiseman had made the place an intellectual clearinghouse for English Catholics, especially clergy—particularly converts from the Oxford Movement. Years later Acton reflected on Wiseman and the atmosphere of the place: "We used to see him with Lord Shrewsbury, with O'Connell, with Father Mathew, with a Mesopotamian patriarch, with Newman, with Pugin, and we had a feeling that Oscott, next to Pekin, was a centre of the world."¹

From Oscott this eight-year-old child wrote exuberant letters to his mother: "I am going to write a sort of compendium of the chief facts, in history, for my own occasional reference."² He had signed an earlier letter, "Ceasar, Agamemnon, John Dalberg Acton".³ Soon he was complaining that he needed a private room. "When I get a room I shall study History very much. I intend to get several books about it."⁴ At once he commenced writing of a related passion: "As I mean to have a perfect library in my room, I should be much obliged to you to bring me from Paris some books of French literature. I should particularly like a good edition of the Histoire des Croisades, and the History of France. As to the present you promised me, I should very much like the Biographical Dictionary …"⁵ His letters became a veritable litany of appreciation for volumes received as gifts, spanning in subject the classical world, Saint Thomas More, and contemporary France. These modest gatherings at Oscott would become the nucleus of his vast and magnificent seventy-thousand volume personal library, now held as a special collection of the Cambridge University library.

After five years of rigorous studies in the classics, languages, literature, history, and religion, Johnny Acton was eager to move on from a place where he said that "memories are taxed too much." Also, Acton's stepfather, Lord Granville, an eminent Whig who had succeeded to the peerage in 1846, was not pleased with the limitations at Oscott.⁶ He believed that the boy needed improvement in Latin, Greek, English, mathematics, and history before applying to one of the Cambridge colleges where Acton's father and uncle had gone. Granville arranged for two years of private tutoring in Edinburgh in the home and under the direction of Dr. Henry John Charles Logan, a cleric and former vice president of Oscott. Johnny Acton called these years his "polar exile" passed in "a town that was built for study," the cold wind and short days offering few distractions from fireside, conversation, and books.

Herbert Butterfield observed that Acton left Scotland "a regular schoolboy Whig … brimming with cocksureness, and primed with ‘Macaulayism'."⁷ In fact two volumes of Macaulay's five-volume History of England had been published by that time, and by his own admission Acton read them four times!⁸ Doubtless this beginning of his political education—he discovered Burke there as well—pleased his Whig stepfather. Forget for a moment the flaws of the Whig theory of history; remember only its overarching story of liberty triumphing over tyranny in seventeenth-century England, of representative aristocratic institutions thwarting the best efforts of the Stuart kings to concentrate power. The sheer drama of this tale excited Johnny Acton's precocious mind and remained with him long after he discarded the exaggerations of Whiggery.

At the very time Acton applied for admission to three Cambridge colleges—the fall of 1850—there was a national upheaval over the formal restoration of the Roman Catholic hierarchy to England, which had been suppressed since the Reformation. His rejection by all three colleges was, in fact, not personal but the consequence of a surge in cultural anti-Catholicism. In retrospect, his rejection proved to be the greatest blessing of his life. Forced to look elsewhere for her son, Lady Granville contacted her relations in Munich, the Count and Countess Arco-Valley, who were close friends of the accomplished scholar, Ignaz von Döllinger. At once, Döllinger agreed to direct Acton's university studies and for the next four years the student was all but inseparable from "the Professor," as the great teacher would be known ever after.

These were the happiest years of Acton's life, these years of study and travel, when exciting things were happening in German universities and Continental libraries and archives. Through the influence of his two major professors—Döllinger and Peter Ernst von Lasaulx—Acton formed the core of the intellectual perspective that guided his efforts for the remainder of his years.

It was at Munich that he found emotional peace, so desperately desired, in the warmth of the Arco-Valley household, in their city residence, in their castle near Ried in Upper Austria, and in their country villa on Tegernsee, where Döllinger himself was a frequent guest. Acton fashioned an immediate, intense, and affectionate attachment to the Countess, whom he visited often and with whom he took long carriage rides in the country. She became a second mother, listening to his every care, filling a void occasioned by his natural mother's marriage to Lord Granville. Lady Granville's heavy duties as one of the principal hostesses during the English social and political seasons, left inadequate time for her son. Fifteen years later Johnny Acton married his cousin, the Countess's daughter, Marie.

Döllinger was himself the intellectual heir to an expansive Catholic scholarship in historical studies dating from the revolutionary reforms that Bonaparte imposed on the Germanies. After the 1803 Act of Secularization, there were no exclusively Catholic or Protestant states in the Holy Roman Empire. As a result, Catholic and Protestant scholars were thrust into one another's societies, for the first time having to labor side-by-side in universities, libraries, and archives. To the Protestant university at Tübingen in 1817 came the Catholic faculty in theology from Ellwangen. This was a development of momentous significance to Catholic intellectual life in the Germanies.

The ground began to shift in Catholic theological circles. Through the work of a few eminent theologians, including Johann Sebastian von Drey (1777–1853) and Johann Adam Möhler (1796–1838), German Catholic thought embraced the concept of history-sensitive doctrinal development. The touchstone of Drey's plea was continuity of belief within a framework of developing theological definition, while Möhler nurtured the idea of the Church as Christ living in history. That concept was the chief attainment of the Tübingen school. Möhler moved to the Munich faculty in 1835 through the efforts of Döllinger and was instrumental in turning Döllinger to historical studies as they pertained to theology. This was a fateful move, as Stephen Tonsor has written: "It was history which led him to the idea of the development of Christian doctrine and eventually into a position branded by his opponents as heretical."⁹

Döllinger was soon a prime advocate of the new school of historical theology, holding that the historical record, objectively examined and understood, would reveal the deceits and misconceptions of the ages as well as explain the "unfolding" of the doctrines of the Christian faith from earliest times. He believed that a knowledge of the interaction of history and theology afforded the surest means for dislodging time-honored errors and vindicating the essential claims of historic Catholicism. Döllinger never doubted the providential nature of history. Indeed, to his mind, the appearance of error in history, even evil itself, served but to stimulate further "unfolding" of doctrinal truth as a corrective. Acton recalled the intellectual atmosphere:

As an historian, Döllinger regarded Christianity as a force more than as a doctrine, and displayed it as it expanded and became the soul of later history. It was the mission and occupation of his life to discover and to disclose how this was accomplished, and to understand the history of civilised Europe, religious and profane, mental and political, by the aid of sources which, being original and authentic, yielded certainty.¹⁰

Acton attended Döllinger's lectures on early church history, the Middle Ages, the Church since the French Revolution, and the philosophy of religion. Significantly, the Professor also insisted that Acton study theology for three full years.

When Acton arrived in Munich, the Professor was writing his church history, but his earlier three volumes on the Reformation (1846–1848) and his biography of Luther (1850) already reflected the new spirit. Though he lamented Protestantism's break with continuity and development, Döllinger portrayed Luther in heroic terms as a German national figure, something unheard of in earlier Catholic scholarship.

It must be remembered that both Döllinger and Acton were convinced that the new scholarship would sustain the claims of Catholicism in the end. But they also believed that painful admission of historic wrongdoing by church authorities at the highest level must first be acknowledged. However exciting the promise of the new learning, however esteemed its proponents, anxieties were aroused in powerful quarters. Church leaders feared that revelations of specific wrongdoing might well beget widespread scandal and confusion among the faithful masses. And the new learning itself, with its demand for free intellectual inquiry, was perceived as a threat to the very foundation of episcopal authority. Moreover, the atmosphere was exacerbated by the rise of a strident and intensely anticlerical Italian nationalism that threatened the continued existence of the eleven-centuries-old Papal States. Understandably, many ecclesiastical leaders viewed the new learning as but one more threat in a rapidly secularizing world.

Second only to Döllinger in influence among Acton's Munich professors was Peter Ernst von Lasaulx, under whom Acton studied Greek history and literature, aesthetics, art history, and the philosophy of history. For it was Lasaulx who introduced Acton to the history of ideas. Lasaulx viewed all history as an unbroken tale, a continuous flow, and he believed that religion drove the core impulse for human advancement through the rise and fall of civilizations. He put it this way:

All history is in the last analysis a history of religion; thus Christianity as the universal religion of the world has absorbed all prior national religions in so far as they contained truth. There is hardly one truth expressed in Christianity that according to its substance could not be found in the pre-Christian era.¹¹

Again we see the focus on history and historical process as the key to understanding both religious development and the claims of authority in religion. Fearful of the implications of his work, Rome consigned nearly all of Lasaulx's philosophical writings to the Index of Prohibited Books, notably his 1856 Philosophie der Geschichte, of which Acton later wrote, "since Schlegel, so brilliant a work has not appeared on the same field."¹² When Lasaulx died in 1861, Acton purchased nearly the entirety of his extensive library, especially prizing the many books annotated by his old professor.

A third historian who influenced significantly Acton's training in history was Leopold Ranke, who was in the vanguard of those scholars who benefited from the opening of archival collections. He believed that access to archives and stern scientific methodology made it possible to evoke the past with precision and certitude. Though unsuccessful, Döllinger had actually tried to bring Ranke to Munich from the University of Berlin. Yet it was Döllinger who developed ambivalent thoughts regarding the "scientific school," seeing the threat of secularization in a Trojan Horse. Acton, on the other hand, who came under Ranke's influence near the close of his Munich education, embraced the "scientific" regimen with the zeal of a convert.¹³

Such was the distinctive zeitgeist of Acton's education, and he immersed himself into this world fully and with stupendous energy. He appreciated that there was nothing comparable outside the German-speaking world. Moreover, for nearly three years following 1854, though no longer under formal instruction, Acton spent long periods with the Professor both in Munich and in travel, visiting archives and scholars of renown, deepening his knowledge, and expanding his enthusiasm for the new learning.

Let us now turn to the question, How did Acton's education shape his mature thought? What imprint did it have on the labors of his life? For the purpose at hand, I will consider four illustrations: (1) his achievements in journalism, (2) his dealings with church authority, (3) his friendship with William Ewart Gladstone, and (4) his conclusion that the historian, in writing history, must exercise moral judgment in redressing the crimes of history.

Acton began his career in journalism as soon as he returned to England early in 1858. Filled with the treasure of the new learning, he was eager to return home to raise the intellectual level of his co-religionists. For this purpose he acquired controlling interest in a modest Catholic journal, the Rambler, explaining to the Professor:

It will give me a position and an influence among Catholics which I hope to use well … I reflected also that it was an opportunity of doing great good which I was most fortunate to obtain that from my knowledge of persons abroad … that it was a capital means of turning my German studies to account.¹⁴

From February 1858, until April 1864, Acton was engaged as owner, manager, and writer for two successive journals, the Rambler until May 1862, then the Home and Foreign Review until April 1864. Joined by others, including John Henry Newman, he and his literary partner, Richard Simpson, a convert from the Anglican priesthood, who, unlike Acton, was blessed with a marvelous sense of humor, set about probing and prodding a host of subjects ranging from education and literature to history and theology. At the same time they insisted on free intellectual inquiry as the surest path for reaching truth, whatever the topic.

Troubles soon arose from two quarters. In an age of narrow sectarian animosities, ecclesiastical authority did not take kindly to open positions openly arrived at, especially by laymen; the Rambler circle soon found itself personna non grata in Catholic power centers stretching from London to Rome. Even more disheartening was the response of the great mass of the laity, who did not seem even to grasp the message, and in a dark hour of a particular controversy Acton counseled Simpson:

It seems absurd for me to take the prudent line, considering my insufficiently disguised contempt for every unscientific method of treating literary and political and ecclesiastical matters, but I have learnt by experience the uselessness of addressing people in a tone they do not understand, and supposing knowledge which does not exist.¹⁵

After six years crowded with conflict, misunderstanding, and mounting tension between the journals and church authority, and facing imminent censure by that authority, Acton decided to abandon the effort. Both heart and mind were revealed in bidding his readers farewell:

It was but a partial and temporary embodiment of an imperishable idea—the faint reflection of a light which still lives and burns in the hearts of the silent thinkers of the Church.¹⁶

It remained for the astute Protestant skeptic, Matthew Arnold, to note the profound accomplishment of the Acton circle when he wrote of the Home and Foreign, "perhaps in no organ of criticism in this country was there so much knowledge, so much play of mind."¹⁷ The genesis of that knowledge and "play of mind," its precise tone and substance, can be traced to Munich.

Both the Rambler and the Home and Foreign Review were frequently at odds with the preferences of ecclesiastical authority on issues relating to education, history, theology, and the principle of free intellectual inquiry. But far and away the most substantive illustration of Acton's dealing with church authority centered on his prominent role in the Vatican Council of 1869–1870, best remembered for its definition of the doctrine of papal infallibility. Acton—and Döllinger with him—were much opposed to the proposed doctrine on historical grounds that have yet to be refuted. Through scholarship and personal influence, they worked mightily to prevent its being approved by the bishops. Armed with vast learning and access to those in high places, both academic and political, the two men brought their full weight to bear on behalf of the bishops who opposed the doctrine.

Acton, just raised to the peerage through the efforts of his friend, Gladstone, went to Rome to assist the efforts of the 140 prelates of the Minority, as they were called. This is an extraordinary story that is little known today. A young layman of thirty-five organized the bishops, provided them with historical arguments against the definition, boosted their morale and courage time and again, even on occasion admonished them to hold firm in the face of intense pressure to relent. All the while he conducted an aggressive correspondence with high political authorities in Austria, France, Italy, Prussia, and above all, England, in an effort to bring governmental intervention to prevent promulgation. But it all came to naught as nearly the entirety of the opposition crumbled by the end of the Council, and the governments failed to act. Though he was more fortunate than the Professor, who was eventually excommunicated, it was a crushing blow for Acton, revealing to him the futility of his earlier hopes for bringing intellectual reform to the Church. But that is another story that lies beyond our purpose here.Writing to Lord Clarendon, British Foreign Secretary, Odo Russell, Britain's observer at Rome, had this to say about Lord Acton's role at Vatican I:

The strong ties that now unite the leading theological minds of England, France, Germany, Hungary and Austria are due to Lord Acton's personal influence, profound knowledge, great talents and high virtues. Without his personal intervention the bishops of the opposition could scarcely have known each other. Without his knowledge of language and of theology the theologians of the various nations represented in the Council could not have understood each other, without his talents as a leader they could not have remained united amongst each other and without his high virtues they could not have accepted and followed the lead of a layman so much younger than any of the Fathers of the Council.¹⁸

Had Russell known Acton better, he might well have added that it was, in fact, Acton's Germanic learning that made possible his role at the Council.

The Acton-Gladstone relationship began in 1861 when Gladstone read Acton's article on the causes of the great American Civil War. Gladstone was moved by what he read, expressing his appreciation in a letter to Acton, who was Gladstone's junior by a quarter century. What followed, for thirty-seven years, was one of the great intellectual companionships of the Victorian era. Gladstone, that most deliberate and durable of politicians, and Acton, the supreme student of the history of ideas, met on the common ground of insatiable curiosity.

Acton was now the mentor, receiving endless queries from the most powerful man in British public life. Their dialogue roamed the universes of antiquity, literature, history, philosophy, politics, theology, and more. From time to time Acton would despatch boxes of books from his enormous library or provide exhaustive lists of authorities to be consulted. Indeed, on occasion Gladstone had to beg off his heavy assignments so as to have time to conduct the affairs of Her Majesty's government. But he never tired of expressing his great gratitude for receiving the benefits of Acton's awesome and seemingly inexhaustible learning. Owen Chadwick sums up their relationship in this way: "They discussed everything. To Gladstone he was a sage with the highest of ethical ideals, in religion, politics or private life …" Then, quoting Acton's favorite child, Mamy, Chadwick goes on to say: "Gladstone once told Acton to his face that he trusted him ‘more entirely than any other man.'"¹⁹ Of all the interests they shared and discussed, none approached in magnitude the interplay between religion and politics, which is precisely where Acton would focus his powers.

Evaluation of Acton's commitment to moral judgment in history is more complex. Ever since his student days at Oscott, nothing so attracted his energies as the study of history. It became for him the essential path to understanding humankind in all of its triumph and tragedy. At Munich he discovered that history was a science in methodology, that if properly pursued could reveal the hidden truths of the ages, secular and divine. Little by little he came to appreciate that the universal threat to unfolding truth in history was the corrupting propensity of power, all power, to skew its errors and conceal its crimes. To Gladstone's daughter, Mary, he wrote in 1881:

Being refused at Cambridge, and driven to foreign universities, I never had any contemporaries, but spent years in looking for men wise enough to solve the problems that puzzled me, not in religion or politics so much as along the wavy line between the two.²⁰

It was along that "wavy line" between religion and politics that Acton discerned the history of freedom unfolding down through recorded time. He understood with utter clarity that freedom—that "delicate fruit of a mature civilization"—cannot exist without the restraint of power, both in church and state. For him, the ultimate requisite for the existence of freedom was the sanctity of individual conscience.

The concept of an emerging "reign of conscience" became the centerpiece of Acton's commitment to moral judgment in history. From his Munich professors and others he learned that there is meaning and certitude in history. His own Christian faith, powerfully shaped by his Munich years, was deep, devout, and informed by history; it sustained him through the many public and private crises of his life. Döllinger had shown that Christianity is a body of thought in time and place, embodied in an institutional church whose teachings and authority have been shaped by historical forces. Thus, the progression of Acton's thought was as inevitable as it was relentless: Revelation has removed ambiguity from the moral arena; crime can no longer take refuge in ignorance; it therefore follows that all criminal behavior must be summoned before the magistrate of impartial history. Only thus can the tireless, corrupting propensity of power be held in check and the reign of conscience be secured.

Acton concluded that no individual or institution is exempt from the historian's dispassionate scrutiny, that no office holder is sanctified by the office held, and that no concealment of wrongdoing, however sacred the cause being served, is to be spared exposure and censure. Though long recognizing that he was isolated in his essential position, Acton never compromised the message. He put it forcefully in his Inaugural Lecture as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge in June 1895:

The historians of former ages, unapproachable for us in knowledge and in talent, cannot be our limit. We have the power to be more rigidly impersonal, disinterested and just than they; and to learn from undisguised and genuine records to look with remorse upon the past, and to the future with assured hope of better things; bearing this in mind, that if we lower our standard in history, we cannot uphold it in Church or State.²¹

Yet the most eloquent utterance of his position was given in November of that year, when he addressed, in the privacy of his rooms in Trinity's Nevile's Court, the Cambridge Eranus, a select society numbering not more than twelve. Professor Lord Acton recalled his prodigious labors years earlier in libraries and archives, and he spoke of justice and hope and the writing of history:

There is no other way to compel assent, or to crush interest and prejudice.

To renounce the pains and penalties of exhaustive research is to remain a victim to ill informed and designing writers, and to authorities that have worked for ages to build up the vast tradition of conventional mendacity.

By going on from book to manuscript and from library to archive, we exchange doubt for certainty, and become our own masters. We explore a new heaven and a new earth, and at each step forward, the world moves with us.²²

In the end it was his hopeful vision of the ascendancy of truth in history—itself rooted in his rarefied education—that secures Acton's place in the pantheon of high intellects.

James C. Holland, a member of the Acton Institue Advisory Board, is Professor of History at Sheperd College. Among his published works are Decisive Decade: Lord Acton, 1864-1874(Louvain University Press, 1970) and The Correspondence of Lord Acton and Richard Simpson(Campbridge University Press, 1971-1975).

Notes:

1. Acton, quoted in Wilfrid Ward, The Life and Times of Cardinal Wiseman, 2 vols. (London, 1897), 1:348–349.
2. Acton to Lady Leveson, Friday, n.d., quoted in Selections from the Correspondence of the First Lord Acton, edited by John Neville Figgis and Reginald Vere Laurence (London, 1917), 2.
3. Acton to Lady Leveson, February 15, 1844, ibid.
4. Acton to Lady Leveson, n.d., quoted in James C. Holland, “The Education of Lord Acton”, unpublished doctoral dissertation (Catholic University of America, 1968), 26.
5. Acton to Lady Leveson, n.d., ibid., 26.
6. Granville thought that he was educating a future political leader for the Whig establishment and was concerned that Acton’s education prepare him accordingly. He pushed the move to Edinburgh, which became one more complication in their lifelong strained relationship. In his forthcoming biography, Roland Hill argues persuasively that Acton’s recurring bouts with loneliness stemmed from his mother’s second marriage, a union that Hill believes stripped Acton of the emotional nourishment that he craved and rarely received.
7. Herbert Butterfield, “Acton: His Training, Methods and Intellectual System,” in A. O. Sarkissian, (editor), Studies in Diplomatic History and Historiography (London, 1961), 170.
8. Acton to Lady Granville, 21 May [1848], CUL Add. 8121(7)/494.
9. Stephen J. Tonsor, “Lord Acton on Döllinger’s Historical Theology,” Journal of the History of Ideas, XX, No. 3 (June-September 1959), 331.
10. Acton, “Döllinger’s Historical Work,” English Historical Review, 5 (1890), reprinted in Selected Writings of Lord Acton, 3 vols., edited by J. Rufus Fears (Indianapolis, 1985–1988), II, 419.
11. Quoted in Friedrich Engel-Janosi, “The Historical Thought of Ernst von Lasaulx,” Theological Studies, XIV, No. 3 (September 1953), 385.
12. Lord Acton, “Mr. Buckle’s Philosophy of History,” The Rambler (August 1858), reprinted in Fears, op. cit., III, 449.
13. Butterfield, op. cit., 188.
14. Acton to Döllinger, 17 Feb 58, in Ignaz von Döllinger, Briefwechsel mit Lord Acton 1850–1890, 3 vols. Edited by Victor Conzemius (Munich, 1963–1971), I, 128.
15. Acton to Simpson, 5 February 1859, The Correspondence of Lord Acton and Richard Simpson, edited by Josef L. Altholz, Damian McElrath, and James C. Holland. 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1971–1975), II, 42.
16. Acton, “Conflicts with Rome,” The Home and Foreign Review (April 1864), reprinted in Fears, op. cit., III, 259.
17. Matthew Arnold, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” Essays in Criticism (London, 1928), 20, quoted in Josef L. Altholz, The Liberal Catholic Movement in England (London, 1962), 206.
18. Russell to the Earl of Clarendon, 18 June 1870, Noel Blakiston (editor), The Roman Question. Extracts from the Despatches of Odo Russell from Rome 1858–1870 (London, 1962), 446.
19. Owen Chadwick, Acton and Gladstone. The Creighton Lecture in History 1975 (London, 1976), 29; Acton to Mamy, 23 May 1898, CUL Add MS, Acton, Box 22.
20. Acton to Mary Gladstone, 3 June 1881, in Herbert Paul (editor), Letters of Lord Acton to Mary, Daughter of the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone (London, 1904), 104.
21. “The Study of History,” reprinted in Fears, op. cit., II, 552.
22. “Notes on Archival Researches 1864–1868,” edited by James C. Holland, in Damian McElrath, James C. Holland, W. Ward White, and Sue Katzman, Lord Acton. The Decisive Decade: 1864–1874 (Louvain, 1970), 139–140.