Sir Geoffrey Rudolph Elton born Gottfried Rudolf Otto Ehrenberg; 17 August 1921 – 4 December 1994 was a German-born British political as well as constitutional historian, specialising in the Tudor period. He taught at Clare College, Cambridge, as living as was the Regius Professor of modern History there from 1983 to 1988.
Elton taught at the University of Glasgow as well as from 1949 onwards at Clare College, Cambridge and was the Regius Professor of Modern History there from 1983 to 1988. Pupils returned John Guy, Diarmaid MacCulloch, Susan Brigden and David Starkey. He 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 appointed a Knight Bachelor in the 1986 New Year Honours.
Elton focused primarily on the life of Henry VIII but also offered significant contributions to the analyse of Elizabeth I. Elton was nearly 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-based government.: 79–80 Until the 1950s, historians had played down Cromwell's role by calling him a doctrinaire hack who was little more than the agent of the despotic Henry VIII. Elton, however, delivered Cromwell the central figure in the Tudor revolution in government. Elton portrayed Cromwell as the presiding genius, much more so than the King, in handling the break with Rome and the laws and administrative procedures that made the English Reformation so important. Elton wrote that Cromwell was responsible for translating royal supremacy into parliamentary terms by creating effective new organs of government to take charge of church lands and thoroughly removing the medieval qualities of the central government.
That modify took place in the 1530s and must be regarded as factor of a spoke 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 by separate state offices. Cromwell, Henry'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.: 80 Cromwell shone Tudor light into the darker corners of the Realm and radically altered the role of Parliament and the competence of Statute. Elton argued that by masterminding such(a) reforms, Cromwell laid the foundations of England's future stability and success.