ABSTRACT
Geoffrey Elton and Dr David Starkey deliver shrewd blows, but neither finally
convinces.2 Although the debate is often very technical, it deals with issues
of fundamental importance and therefore deserves clarification and further
attention. Starkey is right to criticise Elton for exaggerating the difference
between administration and politics.3 For Elton the central administration
under Thomas Cromwell in the 1530s became ‘bureaucratic’, ‘national’,
‘modern’, and functioned quite apart from the ‘personal’, ‘informal’, ‘house-
hold’ politics of the day, a distinction he presents as fundamental. Creative
and hard-working administrators got on with things while courtiers were
frivolously wasting everyone’s time. Starkey has little difficulty in showing
that so rigid a distinction between administration and politics, between
administration and the court, cannot be sustained. But Starkey in turn fails to
convince when he claims that politics and administration ‘inescapably overlap
and interact’.4 The claim that all government is always ‘political’ is excessive.
In such a world no one is doing anything for its own sake or for the general good
but merely for personal advantage, which seems to be how Starkey defines
‘politics’. What Elton and Starkey are offering is a choice between two over-
simplified models: models which, it may be speculated, reflect the experience
of living through in the one case, Clement Attlee’s reforms (a revolution in
government), (although Elton thinks such a suggestion preposterous), and in
the other, Harold Wilson’s style of ruling (paranoid fear of factional intrigues).
Closer to the realities of early Tudor government would be an alternative that
allowed degrees of interaction between administration and politics but also
allowed some separation, while seeing neither interaction nor separation as
inevitable. Both Elton and Starkey can write allusively, even contradictorily at
times, and no doubt they could claim that they do not subscribe to the views
attributed to them here and that they have always made qualifications or recog-
nised exceptions to their principal lines of interpretation. But both do seem
to me to return continually to the contrasting positions that I have outlined,
especially in their efforts to clinch their respective cases. And the starkness
of those fundamental beliefs leads them into misleading interpretations and
bizarre deployments of the evidence as they try to squeeze every drop of
polemical advantage.
