![]() He was returned to the House of Commons that same year as member for the Irish Borough of Carlow and became a devoted admirer and adherent of Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone. In 1859, Acton settled in England, at his country house, Aldenham, in Shropshire. A year later, he was attached to Lord Granville's mission to Moscow as British representative at the coronation of Alexander II of Russia. In 1855, he was appointed Deputy Lieutenant of Shropshire. Among his friends were Montalembert, Tocqueville, Fustel de Coulanges, Bluntschli, von Sybel and Ranke. Through extensive travels, Acton spent much time in the chief intellectual centres reading the actual correspondence of historical personalities. Portrait of John Acton by Franz Seraph von Lenbach, circa 1879. In politics, he was always an ardent Liberal. He was a master of the principal foreign languages, and began at an early age to collect a magnificent historical library, which he intended to use to compose a "History of Liberty". Döllinger inspired in him a deep love of historical research and a profound conception of its functions as a critical instrument in the study of sociopolitical liberty. He was denied entry to the University of Cambridge because he was a Catholic, and subsequently went to Munich where he studied at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and resided in the house of Johann Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger, the theologian and forerunner of the Old Catholic Church, with whom he became lifelong friends. He was raised as a Roman Catholic, and was educated at Oscott College, under the future-Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman, until 1848. She became the mother of John Dalberg-Acton who was born in Naples. Marie Louise Pelline de Dalberg was heiress of Herrnsheim in Germany. Subsequent to Sir Richard Acton's death in 1837, she became the wife of the 2nd Earl Granville (1840). His grandfather's eldest son, Richard, who was his father, married Marie Louise Pelline, the only daughter and heiress of Emmerich Joseph, 1st Duc de Dalberg, who was a naturalised French noble of ancient German lineage who had entered the French service under Napoleon and represented Louis XVIII at the Congress of Vienna in 1814. John Acton's grandfather was a member of a younger line of the family which had transferred itself to France and, subsequently, to Italy, but, subsequent to the extinction of the elder branch, he became the patriarch of the family. The estates had previously been held by another English branch of the Acton family. John Acton's grandfather succeeded to the baronetcy and family estates in Shropshire in 1791.
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