John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton

John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, also known as Lord Acton, was an English Catholic historian, politician, and writer. He is well known for remarking in a letter to an Anglican bishop in 1887: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Acton was the only son of Sir Ferdinand Dalberg-Acton, 7th Baronet, and grandson of the Neapolitan admiral and prime minister Sir John Acton, 6th Baronet (who succeeded to the baronetcy and estates held by another branch of the Acton...See more

John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, also known as Lord Acton, was an English Catholic historian, politician, and writer. He is well known for remarking in a letter to an Anglican bishop in 1887: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Acton was the only son of Sir Ferdinand Dalberg-Acton, 7th Baronet, and grandson of the Neapolitan admiral and prime minister Sir John Acton, 6th Baronet (who succeeded to the baronetcy and estates held by another branch of the Acton family in Shropshire in 1791). From 1837 to 1869, he was known as Sir John Dalberg-Acton, 8th Baronet. Acton's father, Richard, married Marie Louise Pelline, the only daughter of Emmerich Joseph, 1st Duc de Dalberg, a naturalized French nobility of old German ancestry who served under Napoleon and represented Louis XVIII at the Congress of Vienna in 1814. After Sir Richard Acton died in 1837, she married the 2nd Earl Granville (1840). Marie Louise Pelline de Dalberg was the heiress of Herrnsheim, Germany. She became the mother of John Dalberg-Acton, born in Naples. See less