Lectures on Modern History

Contents:

I. Beginning of the Modern State
II. The New World
III. The Renaissance
IV. Luther
V. The Counter–Reformation
VI. Calvin and Henry VIII.
VII. Philip II., Mary Stuart, and Elizabeth
VIII. The Huguenots and the League
IX. Henry the Fourth and Richelieu
X. The Thirty Years’ War
XI. The Puritan Revolution
XII. The Rise of the Whigs
XIII. The English Revolution
XIV. Lewis the Fourteenth
XV. The War of the Spanish Succession
XVI. The Hanoverian Settlement
XVII. Peter the Great and the Rise of Prussia
XVIII. Frederic the Great
XIX. The American Revolution

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An excerpt from the beginning of the:

INTRODUCTION
LORD ACTON AS PROFESSOR

It was announced in February 1895 that John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, first Baron Acton, had been appointed to the Chair of Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge in succession to the late Sir John Seeley, who had held the office for upwards of a quarter of a century. Of the achievements of Acton’s six years’ tenure of the post, the present volume, together with that forthcoming on the French Revolution, will form the chief, though not the only monument. To those who found in the teaching of the late Professor inspiration as well as knowledge, the Lectures now published will serve at once to heighten and to relieve the sense, still so fresh, of personal loss. To the many friends and scholars who had known him in other spheres or for a longer space, they will be a fitting memorial of Acton’s greatness in the realm of his unchallenged pre–eminence. Of all the previous occupants of the chair none is to be named with Acton for a career unique in interest, variety, and pathos.

Pathos indeed there was. The note was struck in the first phrases of the Inaugural Lecture. It was perhaps not unfitting that the severest rebuke to Anglican intolerance in the past should come from a man whose indignation knew no measure for the spirit of persecution within his own communion. Throughout those years at Cambridge, from the pregnant address “Fellow Students!” which prefaced his Inaugural, Acton bore the manner of one who was after many tempests “in the haven where he would be.” No one who reverenced so deeply the scholar’s calling could fail to be proud of this final if belated recognition of his rightful place as a scholar among scholars. But there were other things of which he was proud. His delight in finding himself a Cambridge man, his feeling for the College which adopted him and made him an Honorary Fellow, his interest in the young, even his pleasure in his rooms in Nevile’s Court, were the symbol of what he had lacked in early days, and of the fact, elsewhere noted by himself, that he never “had any contemporaries.” The result was seen in his willingness to take part in labours sometimes deemed beneath professorial dignity, and in that freshness of sympathy with which he would enter into the mind of the youngest pupils—provided only they recognised that History was a goddess, not a plaything. Perhaps also it was shown in his keen desire to know everything about people, for Acton’s interest in human beings was no less piercing than his love of books.