England Under the Tudors
The best full-length introductory history of the Tudor period Written with great verve, it will delight both the scholar and the general reader.
The Spectator
Witty, muscular, clear, and above everything else, readable.
Times Educational Supplement
Anyone who writes about the Tudor century puts his head into a number of untamed lions mouths.
G.R. Elton, Preface
Geoffrey Elton (19211994) was one of the great historians of the Tudor period. England Under the Tudors is his major work and an outstanding history of a crucial and turbulent period in British and European history.
Revised several times since its first publication in 1955, England Under the Tudors charts a historical period that witnessed monumental changes in religion, monarchy, and government and one that continued to shape British history long after.
Spanning the commencement of Henry VII's reign to the death of Elizabeth I, Eltons magisterial account is populated by many colourful and influential characters, from Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas Cranmer, and Thomas Cromwell to Henry VIII and Mary Queen of Scots. Elton also examines aspects of the Tudor period that had previously been overlooked, such as empire and commonwealth, agriculture and industry, seapower, and the role of the arts and literature.
This Routledge Classics edition includes a new foreword by Diarmaid MacCulloch.
G.R. Elton (19211994) was Regius Professor Emeritus of Modern History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Clare College. Renowned as one of the leading historians of his era and the author of many influential books on the Tudor period, he was also a defender of a traditional, factual-based view of history. He was famous for his role in the influential CarrElton Debate in the 1960s, where he argued for a scientific approach to history against the historian E.H. Carrs more relativistic view.
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First published in Routledge Classics 2019
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2019 G.R. Elton
Foreword 2019 Diarmaid MacCulloch
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First published by Methuen & Co. Ltd 1955
Third edition published by Routledge 1991
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Elton, G. R. (Geoffrey Rudolph)
Title: England under the Tudors / G.R. Elton ; with a new foreword by Diarmaid MacCulloch.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; N.Y., NY : Routledge, [2019] | Series: Routledge classics | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018024442| ISBN 9781138602731 (hardback) | ISBN 9781138602748 (pbk.) | ISBN 9780429457333 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Great Britain--History--Tudors, 1485-1603. |England--Civilization--16th century. | Tudor, House of.
Classification: LCC DA315 .E6 2018 | DDC 942.05--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018024442
ISBN: 978-1-138-60273-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-60274-8 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-45733-3 (ebk)
England Under the Tudors, first published in 1955, was the product of a particularly rich moment in British culture when this country reaped the rewards of hospitality to refugees from tyranny in mainland Europe. Albeit not planned on such a grand scale, it should be bracketed with that contemporary work of survey scholarship, the Buildings of England series, the first volume of which had been published four years earlier. Geoffrey Elton (192194) and Nikolaus Pevsner (190283) spent their careers repaying a debt of gratitude to the country they made their own; their vigorous, no-nonsense prose style, larded with phrases that had not quite been said before, or sometimes even words that had not quite been English before, is part of the pleasure of reading their works. Geoffrey Eltons English was at best hesitant when in 1938 at age 17 he arrived in England from Prague, as Gottfried Ehrenberg, son of a distinguished professor of Classics. His first scholarly publication was a conscious tribute to his father, The Terminal Date of Caesars Gallic Proconsulate (Journal of Roman Studies 36, 1946), but that same year he began his research on the history of his adopted home country. That led not just to this book, but to a lifetime of groundbreaking study of Tudor England and warm encouragement of many generations of younger scholars, myself included.
Eltons doctoral supervisor at the University of London was J.E. (later Sir John) Neale, who had made his reputation with a superb, concise and unfootnoted biography, Queen Elizabeth I (1934). Neale was now in the middle of his publications on Elizabeth Is parliaments, ably assisted by a team of young women whom he permitted to undertake biographical studies of MPs in individual parliaments (at Masters level only; no doctorates for them). Biography was Neales forte, and it did not then (or indeed ever) appeal to Elton; nor did lack of footnotes. Instead, he set off for the Public Record Office in Chancery Lane to master a vast array of administrative documents produced by Tudor government, both letters and office filing systems, all of which needed to be rescued from well-meaning efforts by Victorian archivists and historians to rationalise them. Here was another similarity to Nikolaus Pevsner, who had an ambiguous relationship with Victorian restorers of ancient churches: irritated by their tidy-mindedness, appalled by some of their reconstructions, but in the end grateful for the rescue of much that would otherwise have perished.
Much of this Tudor archive was virtually rearranged from the already reorganised State Papers through a very Victorian heroic feat of intellectual engineering: Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII. In 37 volumes, it sets out day by Tudor day, thousands on thousands of papers, interspersed monthly with a digest of actions recorded on the patent rolls. The editors pointed out that their efforts to pin down the chronology of letters, usually without year-dates, were provisional; but few historians heeded them. Eltons rigour and temperamental scepticism compelled him to listen, though the task of re-dating remains enjoyably incomplete. The core of
