Geoffrey Elton

Sir Geoffrey Rudolph Elton (17 August 1921 – 3 December 1994) was a pre-eminent British historian of the Tudor period.

Elton was born in Tübingen, Germany as Gottfried Rudolf Ehrenberg. His parents were the scholars. In 1929, the Ehrenbergs moved to Prague, Czech Republic. In February 1939, the Jewish Ehrenbergs fled to Britain. Ehrenberg continued his education at a Methodist school in Wales, starting in 1939. After only two years, Ehrenberg was working as a teacher at the Rydal School and achieved the position of assistant master in Mathematics, History and German. While there, he took courses via correspondence at the University of London and graduated with a degree from the institution.

He focused primarily on the life of Henry VIII but made significant contributions to the study of Queen Elizabeth I.

Elton was most famous for arguing in his 1953 book The Tudor Revolution in Government that Thomas Cromwell was the author of modern, bureaucratic government which replaced medieval, household government. This change took place in the 1530s and must be regarded as part of a planned revolution. In essence, Elton was arguing that before Cromwell the realm could be viewed as the King's private estate writ large and that most administration was done by the King's household servants rather than separate state offices. Cromwell, who was Henry VIII’s chief minister, introduced reforms into the administration that delineated the King's household from the state and created a modern bureaucratic government. He shone Tudor light into the darker corners of the Realm and radically altered the role of Parliament and the competence of Statute.

By master-minding these reforms, Cromwell was said to have laid the foundations of England's future stability and success. Elton elaborated on these ideas in his 1955 work, the best-selling England under the Tudors.

His thesis has been widely challenged by Tudor historians and can no longer be regarded as orthodoxy, but Elton's contribution to the debate has profoundly influenced subsequent discussion of Tudor government, in particular concerning the role of Cromwell.

Elton was a staunch conservative both in politics (he was an admirer of Thatcher and Churchill) and in historical methods. He was a fierce critic of Marxist historians who he argued were presenting seriously flawed interpretations of the past. In particular, Elton was opposed to the idea that the English Civil War was caused by socio-economic changes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, arguing instead that it was due largely to the incompetence of the Stuart kings. Elton was also famous for his role in the Carr-Elton debate when he defended the nineteenth century interpretation of empirical, 'scientific' history most famously associated with Leopold von Ranke against Carr's views. Elton wrote his 1967 book The Practice of History largely in response to E. H. Carr's 1961 book What is History?

Elton was a strong defender of the traditional methods of history and was appalled by postmodernism, which he termed the "intellectual equivalent of crack". Elton saw the duty of historians as empirically gathering evidence and objectively analyzing what the evidence has to say. As a traditionalist, he placed great emphasis on the role of individuals in history instead of abstract, impersonal forces. For instance, his 1963 book Reformation Europe is in large part concerned with the duel between Martin Luther and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Elton objected to cross-disciplinary efforts such as efforts to combine history with anthropology or sociology. He saw political history as the best and most important kind of history. Elton had no use for those who seek history to make myths, create laws to explain the past and produce theories such as Marxism.

Elton taught at the University of Glasgow and from 1949 onwards at Clare College, Cambridge University and was the Regius Professor of Modern History there from 1983 to 1988. He was knighted in 1986. Elton worked as publication secretary of the British Academy from 1981 to 1990 and served as the president of the Royal Historical Society from 1972 to 1976. Elton was a superb literary craftsman, whose command and skill at English is all the more remarkable for someone who did not learn English until he almost was in his twenties. Elton intensely identified himself with his adopted country, and this very much influenced his writings. As a scholar, he was popular with the students at Cambridge, but many of his colleagues disliked him. Elton was a very professional scholar and a formidable man with little time for those who failed to meet his exacting standards.