The Actons. Remarkable People

London: H.Hamilton. Very Good/Very Good. 1978. First Edition. Hard Cover. 8vo 024189977x Dust jacket complete, price clipped, fading to spine. Original cloth boards with bright gilt titling on spine. Previous owner's ownership label. Plates. 212 pages clean and tight. Like the Cecils, Darwins and Huxleys, the family of Acton has a dazzling pedigree in terms of achievement and intelligence with more than its share of statesmen, sailors, soldiers, scholars, writers, and men and women of outstanding personal character. Yet there is a difference, in that the Actons are an international dynasty, with many aristocratic links in Europe. The most spectacular Acton was perhaps the sixth baronet, Sir John, who at the end of the eighteenth century became not only Prime Minister of the Two Sicilies but commander of both the land and sea forces. Queen Maria Carolina was in love with him, but to no avail; at the age of sixty-three he obtained papal dispensation in order to marry his thirteenyear-old niece. The marriage turned out to be very successful, one son becoming a cardinal and another the faiher of the great historian Lord Acton. The Actons were of Saxon origin and came into prominence at the time of Charles I, although a Sir Roger had been a boon companion of Prince Hal and Sir John Oldcastle, alias Falstaff. The family was awarded a baronetcy for its Royalist support during the Civil War. Later there was a connection with Edward Gibbon. The Neapolitan branch included two admirals, one of whom as a young man commanded the Bourbon man o' war at Marsala when Garibaldi and his Thousand landed there in i 86o. Then there was the mercurial Laura Acton, who married Marco Minghetti, Prime Minister of Italy from 1873-6, and whose salon was the centre of cultivated Roman society. The American connection came with the marriage of Arthur Acton to Hortense Mitchell, a member of a prominent Chicago family; one of their sons is Sir Harold Acton, the distinguished writer and owner of a famous and beautiful villa, La Pietra, outside Florence. Peter Gunn traces the story of this brilliant family - exotic yet in a sense very British - with verve and affection. It is indeed remarkable that no such account should have been attempted before. .