Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 01.djvu/81

Acton At this date Eliza Acton was living at Snowdon House, John Street, Hampstead, and there, after much illness, she died in February 1859.

[Clarke's History of Ipswich, p. 445; Gent. Mag. 1859; Suffolk Garland; private correspondence.]  ACTON, HENRY (1797–1843), unitarian divine, was born at Lewes, Sussex, 10 March 1797, where his father was parish clerk at St. John's. He was apprenticed in his sixteenth year to Mr. J. Baxter, a Lewes printer, and became a member of a literary society in the town, where his papers were much admired. The two unitarian congregations of Southover and Ditchling agreed to give him 50l. a year jointly (a grant of 10l. being added from the Unitarian Fund) for serving their chapels on alternate Sundays with a fellow-apprentice, William Browne; and his indentures with Mr. Baxter, the printer, being set aside by arrangement, he placed himself as a student, in 1818, under Dr. Morell, the Brighton minister, then head of his flourishing academy at Hove. Acton studied Greek, Latin, and mathematics at Hove, and walked to one or other of his small congregations on Sundays, returning, on foot, the same day. He became minister at Walthamstow in February 1821, and in 1823 co-pastor with the Rev. James Manning at the more important unitarian church known as George's Meeting, Exeter. There he married, became second master of a proprietary classical school at Mount Radford in the neighbourhood, and made himself prominent as an untiring worker till his death, from apoplexy, on 16 Aug. 1843, in his forty-sixth year. He published many sermons, pamphlets, lectures, and statements, of which a full list is given in James's ‘Memoir’ (p. xcvii). They were delivered by him at various intervals from 1823, some in controversy with Phillpotts, Bishop of Exeter. Acton also established and edited ‘The Gospel Advocate,’ of which four volumes appeared. He was an effective preacher, and had overcome the disadvantages of his defective education. He left a widow and six children.

[James, Memoir and Sermons; Christian Reformer, x. 604, 665, 755; Minutes of the Unitarian Fund, 3 Aug. 1818.]  ACTON, JOHN (d. 1350), writer on the canon law, is stated by Leland to have been educated at Oxford, and to have taken there the degree of LL.D. In 1329 he was ‘provided’ by the pope to a canonry and a prebend in Lincoln Cathedral, but some years appear to have elapsed before he actually obtained these preferments. In 1343 he is found holding the prebend of Welton Ryval (, Fasti, ii. 233). In his books he is described as canon of Lincoln. He died in 1350. His name is variously spelt Achedune, De Athona, Athone, Aton, and Eaton.

Acton's chief work was a commentary on the ecclesiastical ‘constitutions’ of Otho and Ottobone, papal legates in England in the thirteenth century. These ‘constitutions’ formed for many years the English canon law, and Acton's full and learned notes were held by the lawyers of his own time to be invaluable in their interpretations. Very many manuscript copies of Acton's commentary are in the college libraries at Oxford. One is in the Cambridge University Library, and another among the Lansdowne MSS. at the British Museum. Acton's work was printed for the first time in 1496 by Wynkyn de Worde in William Lyndewood's ‘Provinciale.’ Sir Henry Spelman made use of Acton's commentary in his ‘Concilia.’ Many of his notes are translated in Johnson's ‘Collection of Ecclesiastical Laws,’ 1720, and are referred to in ‘Otho's Ecclesiastical Laws,’ translated by J. W. White in 1844. In the library of All Souls College is a manuscript entitled ‘Quæstiones et notabilia Johannis Athonis (Actoni) supra dictas constitutiones’ [i.e. Ottonis et Ottoboni], which appears to be an epitome of Acton's larger work. Another manuscript, entitled ‘Summa Justitiæ,’ attributed to Acton, is in Corpus Christi Library at Cambridge. Pits gives the name of a few other legal books ascribed to Acton, but nothing is now ascertainable of them.

[Tanner's Bibliotheca Britannico-Hibernica; Coxe's Cat. MSS.; prefaces to Lyndewood's Provinciale.]  ACTON, JOHN FRANCIS EDWARD, sixth baronet (1736–1811), prime minister of Naples under Ferdinand IV, was descended from an old family who from the beginning of the fourteenth century were possessors of Aldenham Hall, Shropshire. His father, the son of a goldsmith in London, while accompanying the father of Edward Gibbon the historian as physician, stayed a few days at Besançon, where, finding a favourable opening for his profession, he settled permanently and married a French lady; and there Sir John Acton was born in 1736, the date of his baptism being 3 June (, The Sheriffs of Shropshire). Under the auspices of his uncle he entered the naval service of Tuscany. While captain of a frigate in the joint expedition of Spain and Tuscany against Algiers in 1775,