G.R. Elton

Elton argued that the 1530s were not merely eventful but revolutionary: that Thomas Cromwell rebuilt English administration into something recognisably modern, bureaucratic and national rather than an extension of the royal household. He made the case in The Tudor Revolution in Government in 1953 and carried it into England Under the Tudors two years later, which became the standard survey for a generation of students and has stayed in print. The thesis has drawn fire ever since. R. B. Wernham, Penry Williams, Gerald Harriss, C. S. L. Davies, Jennifer Loach and Peter Gwyn all questioned whether the changes deserved the word revolution, and G. W. Bernard argues that Henry VIII drove policy far more than Cromwell did. Born Gottfried Ehrenberg in Germany, Elton came to England with his family in 1939 and ended as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. He also wrote The Practice of History, a defence of archival method aimed at E. H. Carr.