John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton

John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, first Baron Acton (1834–1902), was an English historian and Liberal politician. Born in Naples into a Catholic family of the Shropshire gentry, he was educated in Munich under the church historian Döllinger, sat in Parliament, edited Catholic periodicals and opposed the definition of papal infallibility in 1870 while remaining in the Church. Gladstone made him a peer in 1869, and in 1895 he became Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, where he planned the Cambridge Modern History.