Geoffrey Elton

Sir Geoffrey Rudolph Elton FBA (born Gottfried Rudolf Otto Ehrenberg; 17 August 1921 – 4 December 1994) was a German-born British political and constitutional historian who specialised in the Tudor period. He taught at Clare College, Cambridge, and was the Regius Professor of Modern History there from 1983 to 1988.

1940s

 * The Act in Restraint of Appeals to Rome was a government measure, affected slightly by opposition from the church and not at all by parliament. A proposal to authorize the archbishops by act of parliament to dissolve the king's marriage was soon replaced by a comprehensive attack on papal jurisdiction in England. In Cromwell's hands, the preamble turned into an unhesitating statement of the theory which underlay the whole practice of Henry VIII and his government: the theory of the imperial crown of England sovereign within its own realm over both laity and church.
 * 'The Evolution of a Reformation Statute', The English Historical Revew, Vol. 64, No. 251 (April 1949), p. 195

1950s

 * English government has a special claim to be studied. It developed in comparative freedom from outside interference, producing a curious blend of decentralized and popular freedom with strong, efficient, and centralized administration.
 * Tudor Revolution in Government (1953)


 * The Reformation, then, was not the inevitable development of the text-books. Whether it would have come anyway it is idle to speculate; but it came in the 1530's simply because Henry's desire for his divorce was baulked by an international situation which made co-operation with the papacy impossible, and it came as it did because Thomas Cromwell produced a plan which achieved Henry's ends by destroying the papal power and jurisdiction in England and by creating in England an independent sovereign state. This policy was not present from the start; it had to overcome much caution and conservatism as well as fear of the consequences before its bold simplicity was permitted to develop. The Henrician Reformation reflects the ideas—one may say, the political philosophy—of Thomas Cromwell.
 * 'King or Minister? The Man Behind the Henrician Reformation', History, New Series, Vol. 39, No. 137 (October 1954), p. 232

1960s

 * [Replying to the criticism of J. P. Cooper] I hope to show that he has arrived at a mistaken view from partial, and partially misinterpreted, evidence. In a field in which things are far from clear or straightforward this is neither surprising nor shocking; it is more disconcerting to find that one who so readily chastises others for their supposed failings should himself be strangely inclined to inaccuracy in discussing other people's views and even in transcribing documents. A self-appointed hound of heaven ought to be more precise in his quest.
 * 'Henry VII: A Restatement' (1961)


 * Sir John Neale has shown how mistaken this view is: queen and Commons clashed frequently throughout the reign, but this did not prevent equally frequent co-operation. Secondly the conventional view supposes that serious conflict on the parliamentary stage is somehow normal: that "the Commons" misbehaved unless they opposed the Crown. This is nonsense. Parliament was part of the king's government, called to assist him by making grants and laws, but also designed to keep the Crown in touch with opinion and an accepted occasion for complaint and protest. It was, and is, a talking institution, a place for debate. The historian who supposed that debate must mean "inevitable conflict" had better investigate his subconscious.
 * 'The Stuart Century', Annali della Fondazione italiana per la storia amministrativa, 2 (1965), quoted in G. R. Elton, Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government: Papers and Reviews 1946–1972, Volume Two: Parliament/Political Thought (1974), p. 159


 * [O]nce...the early seventeenth century is treated as a sequence of events rather than the working out of a destiny – the parliamentary history of 1603–28 ceases to be the record of the "inevitable" accentuation of inherent strain and becomes comprehensible as a series of political crises, complicated by personality, in which the outcome may be identified but cannot be presumed from the start. In the context it is worth notice that James I's last Parliament was the only one in which Crown and Commons worked in a measure of harmony, and that even in 1628 the opposition leadership carefully avoided any proposals which could be read as an invasion of prerogative rights. The ineffectiveness of the Petition of Right, as futile a document as even constitutional struggles have ever thrown up, neatly demonstrates the absence of revolutionary strains in the difficulties encountered up to that point. Before Charles I's experiment in the 1630s, war was not so much inevitable as totally improbable; and the failure of Charles's government was not rendered "inevitable" by deep divisions in society or inherited stresses in the constitution, but was conditioned by the inability of the king and his ministers to operate any political system.
 * 'The Stuart Century', Annali della Fondazione italiana per la storia amministrativa, 2 (1965), quoted in G. R. Elton, Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government: Papers and Reviews 1946–1972, Volume Two: Parliament/Political Thought (1974), p. 160


 * The history of England between 1603 and 1640 is not the history of a growing disease in the body politic, but of conflict – some of it healthy, some morbid – within a setting of agreed essentials: or rather it was this until the impatient attempt at a drastic solution on the king's behalf persuaded his opponents that the essentials were no longer agreed. Thus the prehistory of the civil war should certainly be read as the breakdown of a system of government. But it did not break down because it had been unworkable from the first... It broke down because the early Stuart governments could not manage or persuade, because they were incompetent, sometimes corrupt, and frequently just ignorant of what was going on or needed doing.
 * 'The Stuart Century', Annali della Fondazione italiana per la storia amministrativa, 2 (1965), quoted in G. R. Elton, Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government: Papers and Reviews 1946–1972, Volume Two: Parliament/Political Thought (1974), p. 161

1970s

 * We need to see the sixteenth-century in terms of its own experience, not as the prehistory of a later revolution. We need to regard even the reigns of the early Stuarts without the conviction that the only thing of moment in their history is the ultimate breakdown of government which we know was to come. If thereafter we want to investigate the causes of the civil war, we need to remember that no revolution of the size claimed for this one ever so readily stopped short and reversed itself.
 * 'Reviewed Work: The Causes of the English Revolution by Lawrence Stone', The Historical Journal, Vol. 16, No. 1 (March 1973), p. 207


 * If we are to get further, we need at this present no essays on the causes of the civil war, but studies of the political behaviour of all sorts of men in all sorts of institutions, unaffected by the historian's foreknowledge of the later event. In that way we may ultimately perhaps arrive at an explanation of the mid-seventeenth-century breakdown, but it will be less well tailored, less readily reduced to a list of preconditions, precipitants and triggers, less satisfactory to theorists of revolution. On the other hand, it might be real.
 * 'Reviewed Work: The Causes of the English Revolution by Lawrence Stone', The Historical Journal, Vol. 16, No. 1 (March 1973), p. 208


 * In history there are no authorities: history is a free study in which no man can claim rule, or credence for his mere ipse dixit, and in which the only true sin is to deny a hearing to views with which one happens to disagree.
 * 'Presidential Address: The Historian's Social Function' (1976)


 * I think now that in England under the Tudors (1955), attempting to restore him [Thomas Cromwell] to view and show him in a truer light, I made some rather extravagant claims for him, though I stand by the essence of my opinions there. I still think that Cromwell was the most remarkable English statesman of the sixteenth century and one of the most remarkable in the country's history. I still think that he instigated and in part accomplished a major and enduring transformation in virtually every aspect of the nation's public life. And I still think that he was largely responsible for the fact that the medieval heritage of common law and representative institutions remained at the heart of England's modern government, until very recent times.
 * 'Thomas Cromwell Redivivus', Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 68 (1977), quoted in G. R. Elton, Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government, Volume Three: Papers and Reviews 1973–1981 (1983), pp. 373-374


 * One of the things that you have to grasp about the English of the sixteenth century is that they were a confident nation. It would be an error to suppose that they were uncertain of themselves. Of course, they had no reason to be overconfident in the face of God... Though quite sure that life was short and miserable and dangerous, by and large they faced those dangers and those miseries often with pessimism, but rarely with despair... [The] more universal reaction was to accept man's fate and to confront it firmly. This made for confidence. In fact, the reign of Elizabeth was notable for chauvinistic arrogance.
 * 'Continent and Discontent on the Eve of Colonization', abbreviated and modified text of a lecture delivered in St Mary's College of Maryland (16 November 1977), quoted in G. R. Elton, Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government, Volume Three: Papers and Reviews 1973–1981 (1983), p. 337


 * God was English, though – since God was not always kind – this did not mean that everything was always going well. But ill fortune did not affect the national conviction of the superiority of the English, a visible hallmark of the century. It is found, for instance, in Richard Morison's writings in the 1530s, perhaps the first sign of this kind of thing; it is fully ripe in John Foxe and in similar writers of the Elizabethan era. God has singled out the English for his own, as the true elect nation. Morison, for instance pointed out that the English ate beef while the French lived on broth and vegetables, a plain proof of English superiority. And this was the view of a man who, I ought to emphasise, had lived many years abroad. We are not taking about ignorant men; we are talking about men who, having seen both sides, were (and I do not know that they were necessarily wrong) content to believe that the country they had been born into was especially blessed. That conviction is very marked among the Elizabethans and Jacobeans... The convictions I speak of are found widely diffused in popular consciousness, among the aristocracy, the gentry and the people at large, whether travellers or stay-at-homes. They might dislike one another, trouble one another, and be discontented with one another, but relative to the foreigner, relative to the poor and depressed subjects of supposedly despotic powers, they knew themselves specially favoured... The English thought England was good and elsewhere was inferior.
 * 'Continent and Discontent on the Eve of Colonization', abbreviated and modified text of a lecture delivered in St Mary's College of Maryland (16 November 1977), quoted in G. R. Elton, Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government, Volume Three: Papers and Reviews 1973–1981 (1983), p. 338


 * There are those who would deny a distinction between England and the continent of Europe, alleging that the island is in every respect – politically, socially, culturally – a part of Europe. This is an opinion that could be held only by those whose knowledge of the continent is derived from books and from visits; anyone who has actually ever lived there knows how fundamental those differences are. Or perhaps one should say, how fundamental they were; possibly they have in the last thirty years been disappearing together with an England that was real, and apparently unchangeable, at any rate down to 1939.
 * 'England and the Continent in the Sixteenth Century', introduction to Derek Baker (ed.), Reform and Reformation: England and the Continent (1979), quoted in G. R. Elton, Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government, Volume Three: Papers and Reviews 1973–1981 (1983), p. 305


 * The political institutions of England were peculiar. In a manner quite unknown elsewhere, its monarchy combined high prerogative claims and exceptionally effective government with the absence of coercive power and an instinctive regard for the supremacy of the law. Its Parliament uniquely combined co-operation in government with the satisfaction of the subject's needs: no other representative institution in Europe was so firmly integrated into the monarchical system of government, so thoroughly organised for routine business, so flexibly able to accommodate all interests. In England taxes fell most heavily on the wealthier part of the nation, an oddity which provides perhaps the most striking contrast of all to European custom – which in this respect was to grant exemption to the powerful. English law, notoriously, was very different indeed... And these, and other, distinctions appear not only to the eye of the historian; they were very visible also to observers of the day. By the side of the often bemused and rarely commendatory reports of visitors from abroad there grew among Englishmen a strident selfconsciousness of separateness, from Richard Morison's "English hands and English hearts" peculiarly able to win against all odds, through John Aylmer's God who is English, to John Foxe's elect nation.
 * 'England and the Continent in the Sixteenth Century', introduction to Derek Baker (ed.), Reform and Reformation: England and the Continent (1979), quoted in G. R. Elton, Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government, Volume Three: Papers and Reviews 1973–1981 (1983), p. 307


 * The absolute differentiation of England from the continent was achieved in the aftermath of the great transformation which we call the Henrician Reformation, and it was in the end achieved with conscious recognition and even deliberation.
 * 'England and the Continent in the Sixteenth Century', introduction to Derek Baker (ed.), Reform and Reformation: England and the Continent (1979), quoted in G. R. Elton, Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government, Volume Three: Papers and Reviews 1973–1981 (1983), p. 308

1980s

 * Prolonged involvement with Parliament has in the end convinced me that the customary concentration on it as the centre of public affairs, however traditional it may be, is entirely misleading. This is a message, it seems to me, that needs to be absorbed into the general history of England.
 * The Parliament of England, 1559-1581 (1986)

1990s

 * We historians are, in a way, fighting for our lives. Certainly, 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.
 * On postmodernism; Return to Essentials (1991)


 * One of the chief tests of the quality of historical work lies in its readability. History, even serious history, is interesting, and the historian who makes it dull deserves the pillory.
 * Return to Essentials (1991)


 * Among the educated upper classes a new phenomenon made its appearance – the Englishman who, so far from despising all who are not English, will offer praise only to "any country but his own". In the Stalin era we have become so familiar with this type of high-minded protest that we do not seem to realise how new it was in the age of Charles James Fox, well-endowed scion of the ruling order who chose to worship Robespierre from afar. As George Canning soon pointed out in one of his contributions to the propaganda published in the Anti-Jacobin, such "friends of humanity" would refuse even sixpence to a "needy knife-grinder" who admitted that his torn breeches testified to an ale-house brawl and not to the oppression of the poor; only kicks were suitable for wretches whom "no sense of wrong can rouse to vengeance". For the first time the passions of high-minded anti-patriotism sounded their tin trumpets. The wars made certain that the existing order would face serious military and economic problems but could ignore the claims of moral outrage; generally speaking, the English, explaining that they would never be slaves, remained patriotic. But there was that small band of harbingers who saw virtue only abroad.
 * The English (1992), pp. 197-198

Quotes about Geoffrey Elton

 * It is now nearly twenty years since Sir Geoffrey Elton revived and restated Seeley's dictum in the book called Political History: Principles and Practice (1970), one of the most reflective (if I may presume to say so) of all my predecessor's writings: reflective, that is, in the layered depth of the categories and definitions of political history which it acknowledges and deploys, seeing politics as the active expression of a social organism, those dynamic activities which arise from the fact that men create, maintain, transform and destroy the social structures in which they live. But it was also a pugnacious book, pouring scorn on those who supposed that political history was a spent force, "a very old-fashioned way of looking at the past".
 * Patrick Collinson, ‘De Republica Anglorum: Or, History with the Politics Put Back’ (November 1989), quoted in Patrick Collinson, Elizabethan Essays (1994), p. 8


 * Geoffrey Rudolph Elton is now, of course, the prime moving force in Tudor history, and is likely to remain so. By dint of his enormous output, his scholarly rigour, his forceful personality and his unflagging vigour in debate he has imposed his own reconstruction on much of the period and certainly the earlier half of it.
 * John Kenyon, The History Men: The Historical Profession in England since the Renaissance (1983; rev. edn. 1993), p. 219


 * The Tudor Revolution was based on an intensive re-examination of all the documentary material for the 1530s, of which Elton is still the master... Elton's approach has been described as teutonic; it has been said that of all English historians his attitude is most akin to that of the great German nineteenth-century masters... On the basis of his intense documentary research Elton argued that modern methods of government had their beginning not under Edward IV or Henry VII but Henry VIII, and even then they were not the creation of the king but of his secretary, Thomas Cromwell... Since then the machine has ground relentless on, and those who have thrown themselves in the path of the juggernaut have been crushed or swept aside. Elton admits that his original contention that Cromwell's Revolution was as significant as the Revolution of 1688 was overstated, but a slight retreat on that front has only enabled him to advance on others. He has emerged substantially unscathed from a full-side confrontation with two of his leading critics, Penry Williams and G. L. Harriss...while engaging in subsidiary contests with two of the most formidable controversialists, J. P. Cooper and Lawrence Stone.
 * John Kenyon, The History Men: The Historical Profession in England since the Renaissance (1983; rev. edn. 1993), pp. 219-220


 * Elton's power and authority rest on his unflinching self-confidence and his terrifying industry. He writes whole articles while others are labouring over paragraphs, books while they are completing articles... Personally a very kind man, of some charm, in public he is impatient with naivety or error, which unfortunately surround him everywhere.
 * John Kenyon, The History Men: The Historical Profession in England since the Renaissance (1983; rev. edn. 1993), pp. 220-221


 * Elton is very much a historian's historian, writing within the profession, and though his influence on the teaching of early modern history at schools and universities has been more profound than that of any other man of his generation, he is not well known to the general public as some of his colleagues, like Hugh Trevor-Roper and J. H. Plumb.
 * John Kenyon, The History Men: The Historical Profession in England since the Renaissance (1983; rev. edn. 1993), p. 223


 * Geoffrey Elton was the first of the revisionists. In 1965 he was already warning against the belief that the origins of the Civil War were to be found in the Parliaments of Elizabeth's reign: "the system of parliamentary management perfected by Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell, and further refined in the more difficult days of Queen Elizabeth, would no doubt have required tactful and sensible adjustment as the seventeenth century developed," he concluded, "but there is nothing in the story of 1604 to suggest that it had already ceased to be practicable." Elton's message has been noted, and most historians would now accept that the century after 1530 was one of substantial harmony in the relationship between crown and Parliament, and that the institution itself served the needs of both ruler and ruled satisfactorily until at least the 1620s.
 * Jennifer Loach, 'Parliament: A ‘New Air’?', in Christopher Coleman and David Starkey (eds.), Revolution Reassessed: Revisions in the History of Tudor Government and Administration (1986), p. 117


 * If we begin with Elton’s first and fullest consideration of the methods and purposes of historical study, his book entitled The Practice of History, we find a revealing metaphor running through the argument. The aspiring historian is pictured as an apprentice – at one point specifically as an apprentice carpenter – who is aiming to produce a first piece of work to be inspected and judged by a master craftsman.
 * Quentin Skinner, "The practice of history and the cult of the fact", Visions of Politics (2002)


 * Elton may well be right to stress the pragmatic element in the notion of explanation, an element perhaps best captured by saying that good explanations are those which succeed in removing puzzles about the occurrence of facts or events. But it hardly follows that good historical explanations will consist of anything that practising historians may care to offer us in the way of attempting to resolve such puzzles. Historical explanations cannot be immune from assessment as explanations, and the question of what properly counts as an explanation is inescapably a philosophical one. The question cannot be what historians say; the question must be whether what they say makes any sense.
 * Quentin Skinner, "The practice of history and the cult of the fact", Visions of Politics (2002)


 * A surprising feature of The Practice of History is that Elton makes no attempt to respond to these arguments by seeking to vindicate the social value or cultural significance of his own very different kind of research. He could surely have attempted – as several of his admiring obituarists did – to convey some sense of why the study of administrative and constitutional history might still be thought to matter even in a postimperial culture dominated by the social sciences. It is true that, a couple of years later, he made some gestures in this direction in his first inaugural lecture. But it is striking that he almost instantly stopped short, apologising for starting to speak in such a ‘very vague and rather vapoury’ way. Faced with the question of how a knowledge of history might help the world, he preferred to advise historians to ‘abandon and resign’ such aspirations altogether.
 * Quentin Skinner, "The practice of history and the cult of the fact", Visions of Politics (2002)


 * Elton’s fundamental reason for wishing to emphasise technique over content appears to have been a deeply ironic one: a fear that historical study might have the power to transform us, to help us think more effectively about our society and its possible need for reform and reformation. Although it strikes me as strange in the case of someone who spent his life as a professional educator, Elton clearly felt that this was a consummation devoutly to be stopped. Much safer to keep on insisting that facts alone are wanted.
 * Quentin Skinner, "The practice of history and the cult of the fact", Visions of Politics (2002)


 * And then, as he got older, his health began to go. He started to get very tetchy...arrogant, and I suppose I did the unforgivable, which was to criticise him humorously.
 * Elton didn't like that at all. Geoffrey got very cross with me. He wrote an absolutely shocking review of a collection of essays I edited in which he obviously went for me, but he went for very much younger people as well, which I think for somebody who is a knight and a Regius professor is scandalous bullying, and I said so.
 * Unfortunately...it was his eyesight that was at fault, not my footnotes. So one was able to skewer him by his own methods. It was horrible, and in retrospect I deeply regret it... Well, I regret that the thing happened at all.
 * Interview with David Starkey, as cited in Giles Whittell, "Exclusive interview with David Starkey" The Times (9 October 2008, published in the edition of 11 October 2008, p. 7)


 * More perhaps than any Briton this century, he exemplified the virtues of the empiricist school of history. Not for Elton the fashionable theory of his continental contemporaries or the anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist posturing of left-wing historians in this country. In his 1967 primer The Practice of History, he argued that laborious work with documents must remain the bedrock of all research into the past. Without this foundation, no analysis or theorising could be taken seriously. National history, he warned, was too important to sacrifice on the altar of intellectual vogue. The survival of traditionalist history in British schools and universities owes much to his reason.
 * 'Past Master', The Times (7 December 1994), p. 19


 * It is certainly true that Elton overestimated the administrative genius of Thomas Cromwell, Henry's principal policymaker. But his arguments cannot be dismissed wholesale. He was right to emphasise the peculiarity of the royal supremacy in the Church, the growing importance of Parliament, and the success of Tudor bureaucratic reforms... Elton's work will survive as a useful example of patriotic writing based on meticulous scholarship. Britain has lost one of the greatest champions of its past genius.
 * 'Past Master', The Times (7 December 1994), p. 19