Some Origins of a Tudor Revolution

WAS there a revolution in government during the 1530s? Such a thesis has been associated since 1953 with the name of the late Sir Geoffrey Elton (1921–94). In that year Elton brought out The Tudor Revolution in Government, resting his thesis, as his subtitle announced, on administrative change.1 ‘The Thesis’, as we shall call it, was plain. Its essence was that during the 1530s Thomas Cromwell conceived a remodelling of the administrative features of English central government, turning them from a medieval household form into a modern, national bureaucratic form. Cromwell ‘created’ a governmental machine ‘whose principle was bureaucratic organization in the place of the personal control of the king, and national management rather than management of the king’s estate’. The new, ‘purely national’, scheme was contrasted with ‘the direct action of king and household’, that is to say with ‘medieval administration’. And Cromwell manifestly belonged to ‘the modern age’.2 Almost immediately after The Tudor Revolution in Government appeared, Elton added the claim that Cromwell was the author of a revolution in the church as well as the state: the author of the English Reformation in its political aspects—not only the facilitator of Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon, but also the originator of the legislation that established the Church of England and, again, the man who by parliamentary action exalted the monarchy above the church.3 Indeed, eventually Elton would declare that all of England’s needs were satisfied by this revolutionary. His was ‘a revolution in the kingdom from which the nation emerged transformed and altered in every aspect of life.’4

Bureaucracy · Economic history · Estate · Government (linguistics · Legislation · Monarchy · Political science · Politics · State (computer science · Classics · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Historical Studies of British Isles · History · Law · Philosophy · Scottish History and National Identity

• Michael Turnbull, G. R. Elton, and the Making of the Practice of History

  Open Access•Doug Munro•The Historical Journal•2015

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