26 Facts About Geoffrey Elton

Geoffrey Elton taught at Clare College, Cambridge, and was the Regius Professor of Modern History there from 1983 to 1988.

Geoffrey Elton's parents were the Jewish scholars Victor Ehrenberg and Eva Dorothea Sommer.

Geoffrey Elton 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 and reaching the rank of sergeant.

Under the supervision of J E Neale, Elton was awarded a PhD for his thesis "Thomas Cromwell, Aspects of his Administrative Work", in which Elton first developed the ideas that he was to pursue for the rest of his life.

Geoffrey Elton taught at the University of Glasgow and from 1949 onwards at Clare College, Cambridge and was the Regius Professor of Modern History there from 1983 to 1988.

Geoffrey 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.

Geoffrey Elton was appointed a Knight Bachelor in the 1986 New Year Honours.

Elton focused primarily on the life of Henry VIII but made significant contributions to the study of Elizabeth I Elton 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-based government.

Geoffrey Elton made Cromwell the central figure in the Tudor revolution in government.

Geoffrey 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.

Geoffrey Elton wrote that Cromwell was responsible for translating royal supremacy into parliamentary terms by creating powerful new organs of government to take charge of church lands and thoroughly removing the medieval features of the central government.

In essence, Geoffrey 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.

Geoffrey Elton argued that by masterminding such reforms, Cromwell laid the foundations of England's future stability and success.

Geoffrey 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.

Geoffrey Elton's thesis has been widely challenged by younger Tudor historians and can no longer be regarded as an orthodoxy, but his contribution to the debate has profoundly influenced subsequent discussion of Tudor government, particularly on the role of Cromwell.

Geoffrey Elton was a staunch admirer of Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill.

Geoffrey Elton was a fierce critic of Marxist historians, who he argued were presenting seriously flawed interpretations of the past.

In particular, Geoffrey 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.

In 1990 Geoffrey Elton was one of the leading historians behind the setting up of the History Curriculum Association.

Geoffrey Elton saw the duty of historians as empirically gathering evidence and objectively analysing what the evidence has to say.

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.

Geoffrey Elton saw political history as the best and most important kind of history.

Geoffrey 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.

Geoffrey Elton married a fellow historian, Sheila Lambert, in 1952.

Geoffrey Elton died of a heart attack at his home in Cambridge on 4 December 1994.

Geoffrey Elton edited the second edition of the influential collection The Tudor Constitution.