ABSTRACT
Best known for his work on early Tudor government and especially the bureaucratic reforms of Thomas Cromwell, Geoffrey Elton has recently turned to the later Tudor period to replace the old view of conflict between the House of Commons and the queen with a drastically revised version. The following essay provides a preview of many of the themes more fully expanded in his latest book, The Parliament of England, 1559-1581. You will notice as you read it that for political, as for religious, revisionists the move has been away from an understanding of institutions as conflictridden and divided along partisan lines. Elton argues that in Parliament, as in the Church, the old thesis of partisan struggle simply will not bear the weight of the evidence. Instead, he finds relative co-operation and consensus within parliament, and between Parliament and the queen. He finds that disagreements are better traced to factions at Court than to parties in the House of Commons or to the Parliament’s attempts to expand its power and liberties vis-à-vis the royal prerogative.
