Sir Geoffrey Rudolph Elton (17 August 1921 – 3 December 1994) was a German-born British historian, who specialized in the Tudor period.
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Elton was born in Tübingen, Germany as Gottfried Rudolf Ehrenberg. His parents were the Jewish scholars Victor Ehrenberg and Eva Dorothea Sommer. In 1929, the Ehrenbergs moved to Prague, Czech Republic. In February 1939, the Ehrenbergs fled to Britain. Ehrenberg continued his education at Rydal School, a Methodist school in Wales, starting in 1939. After only two years, Ehrenberg was working as a teacher at Rydal 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 in Ancient History in 1943. Ehrenberg enlisted in the British Army in 1943. He spent his time in the Army in the Intelligence Corps and the East Surrey Regiment, serving with the Eighth Army in Italy from 1944 to 1946. During this period, Ehrenberg anglicised his name to Geoffrey Elton. After his discharge from the army, Elton studied early modern history at the University of London, graduating with a PhD in 1949. He took British citizenship in 1947.
Elton focused primarily on the life of Henry VIII but made significant contributions to the study of Queen Elizabeth I.
He 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 from 1532 to 1540, 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, which went through three editions after its first appearance, and his Wiles Lectures, which he published in 1973 as Reform and Renewal: Thomas Cromwell and the Common Weal.
His thesis has been widely challenged by Tudor historians and can no longer be regarded as an 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 admirer of Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill. He was also 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 16th and 17th centuries, arguing instead that it was due largely to the incompetence of the Stuart kings.[1] 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 E. H. Carr's views. Elton wrote his 1967 book The Practice of History largely in response to Carr's 1961 book What is History?.
Elton was a strong defender of the traditional methods of history and was appalled by postmodernism, once intoning on the subject: '...we are fighting for the lives of innocent young people beset by devilish tempters who claim to offer higher forms of thought and deeper truths and insights - the intellectual equivalent of crack, in fact. Any acceptance of these theories - even the most gentle or modest bow in their direction - can prove fatal.'[2] Although ex-pupils of his such as John Guy claim he did embody a "revisionist streak," 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, to create laws to explain the past, or to 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. Pupils include John Guy and Diarmaid MacCulloch and 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. He married a fellow historian, Sheila Lambert, in 1952.
He was the brother of the education researcher Lewis Elton and therefore the uncle of Lewis's comedian and writer son, Ben Elton.
Geoffrey Elton edited the second edition of the influential collection, The Tudor Constitution. In it, he supported John Aylmer's basic conclusion that the Tudor constitution mirrored that of the mixed constitution of Sparta.