ABSTRACT
When Geoffrey Elton (born Gottfried Rudolph Otto Ehrenberg at Tübingen) arrived in England in February 1939 at the age of seventeen, he ‘knew scarcely a word of English’.1 Nine years later he submitted to the University of London the doctoral dissertation that in revised, published form became one of the most controversial monographs ever published in Tudor studies. There is no need here to rehearse the now-dead debate about the meaning of what the subtitle to that book advertised as ‘administrative changes in the reign of Henry VIII’. Suffice it to say that The Tudor Revolution in Government of 1953 utterly transformed received notions about the place of Thomas Cromwell in English history. The destroyer of monks and Machiavellian manipulator of legend became in Elton’s telling a great statesman and reformer, a tireless administrator who not only created at Westminster the first modern bureaucracy but also the sovereignty of the independent state, a monarchy grounded on the supremacy not of the king but parliamentary law.
