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, specialising in the Tudor period.
[1]: 79 After only two years, Ehrenberg was working as a teacher at Rydal and achieved the position of assistant master in mathematics, history and German.
[1]: 79 After his discharge from the army, Elton studied early modern history at University College London, graduating with a PhD in 1949.
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.
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.
[1]: 80 Cromwell shone Tudor light into the darker corners of the Realm and radically altered the role of Parliament and the competence of Statute.
[5] Elton elaborated on his ideas in his 1955 work, the bestselling England under the Tudors, which went through three editions, and his Wiles Lectures, which he published in 1973 as Reform and Renewal: Thomas Cromwell and the Common Weal.
In particular, Elton was opposed to the idea that the English Civil War was caused by socioeconomic changes in the 16th and 17th centuries, arguing instead that it was largely due to the incompetence of the Stuart kings.
Elton was a strong defender of the traditional methods of history and was appalled by postmodernism, saying, for example, that "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.
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.