The phrase "absolute power corrupts absolutely" was coined by the 19th-century British historian and moralist John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, known as Lord Acton. He expressed this in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887, stating: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men." Though Lord Acton formulated the phrase, the idea had been previously expressed by others, such as William Pitt the Elder in 1770, who said, "Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it," and the French politician Alphonse de Lamartine in 1848 with a similar sentiment.