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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 July 2014
The recent publication by Cambridge University Press of the third volume of G.R. Elton's collected papers and reviews nearly coincided with two other events: the appearance of a florilegium entitled Tudor Rule and Revolution and presented to him on his sixtieth birthday, and the announcement of his appointment as Regius Professor of History at Cambridge where he has been a Fellow of Clare and a mainstay of the University Department of History for three decades. During that time his work has ranged over the whole territory of the historian. Witness the scores of papers in a set of three fat volumes that is a selection and also the seventeen other published volumes of original work mainly based on archives, large narrative histories, and also books on the study and teaching of history. His major contributions also include the annual bibliography he has edited since 1977 as well as various series of monographs and archival indices which in themselves have been a major source of encouragement to the work of other scholars.
But G.R. Elton has not gathered flowers and tributes and honors because he is an industry in himself—a veritable Krupp among historians. It is rather the quality of his achievement that has been celebrated since the publication of The Tudor Revolution in Government in 1953. Once the radical theses of that book had been incorporated into the text England Under the Tudors (1955), the importance of his work has never been in doubt. Subsequent debates in Past and Present and other journals, with Oxford medievalists and London Elizabethans, showed the impact of his main ideas.
A review of G.R. Elton, Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government: Vol. III, Papers and Reviews 1973-1981. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1981. Pp. x, 512. $49.50.
1 Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government, 3 vols. (1957-1983). [Cited hereafter as Studies.] Guth, DeLloyd J. & McKenna, John W., eds., Tudor Rule & Revolution: Essays for G.R. Elton from his American Friends (New York, 1983).Google Scholar
2 The chief contributors were Elton, G.L. Harriss, P.H. Williams, J.P. Cooper and Joel Hurstfield. See Past and Present 25 (1963), 26 (1963), 29 (1964),and 32 (1965)Google ScholarPubMed; also Hurstfieldin, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th Series, 17 (1967)83–108CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Elton, replied in Slavin, A.J., ed., Tudor Men and Institutions (Baton Rouge, 1972), pp. 265–294Google Scholar, “The Rule of Law in Sixteenth Century England.”
3 Slavin, A.J., The Tudor Revolution and the Devil's Art,” in Guth, and McKenna, , Tudor Rule and Revolution, pp. 3–5Google Scholar, and the full bibliographic notes in Loach, J. and Tittler, R., eds., The Mid-Tudor Polity (London, 1980), pp. 187–196.Google Scholar
4 Bradshaw, Brendan, “The Tudor Commonwealth: Reform and Revision,” The Historical Journal 22 (1979): 455–476CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for the dubbing see p. 455: “It looks as if Tawney's Century is yielding place to Elton's Era.”
5 See the discussion in Stoianovich, Traian, French Historical Method and the Annales Paradigm (Ithaca, N.Y., 1976).Google Scholar
6 Hegel's treatise The Philosophy of History in its Introduction contains his extended discussion of original, reflective and philosophical history. I have used the edition of the Introduction published separately by Hartman, Robert S., Reason in History (New Haven, 1953).Google Scholar
7 Studies, 3: 486–491.Google ScholarPubMed
8 Ibid., p. 490; Elton develops this idea also in ibid., pp. 491-495, an essay in review of Oreste Ranum, ed., National Consciousness and Political Culture in Early Modern Europe.
9 Hartman, , Reason in History, p. 4.Google Scholar
10 Ibid., p. 12; see the anlaysis in Wilkins, B.T., Hegel's Philosophy of History (Ithaca, 1974), pp. 19–78.Google Scholar
11 Hartman, , Reason in History, p. 11Google Scholar
12 My summary is drawn from The Practice of History (Sydney, 1967)Google ScholarPubMed, and Political History (New York, 1970)Google ScholarPubMed, in the main, but also from The Future of the Past (Cambridge, 1968)Google Scholar, and the presidential address to the Royal Society, “The Historian's Social Function,” reprinted in Studies, 3:413–428.Google ScholarPubMed
13 Ibid., pp. 431-436.
14 Ibid., pp. 467-474.
15 Ibid., pp. 474-479.
16 For Hegel the most elementary category for the historian is the fact, but responsiveness to the factual is not equated with passive reception. The factual remains limited until reasoned upon, opening the way toward a critical and reflective historiography, see Hartman, , Reason in History, p. 13.Google Scholar
17 Studies, 3: 416–420.Google ScholarPubMed
18 Steiner, George, Extraterritoriality: Papers on Literature and the Language Revolution (New York, 1976), pp. 58–70Google Scholar; Loewenberg, Peter, Decoding the Past (New York, 1983), chapters 1 and 2.Google Scholar
19 Studies, 3: 289–304.Google ScholarPubMed
20 Nichols, D.J., “The Nature of Popular Heresy in France, 1520-1542,” The Historical Journal 26 (1983): 261–275, especially 271 ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
21 Studies, 1:1–36Google ScholarPubMed; there Elton, then twenty-four years old, puts forward the idea that the virtue of his analysis is that it arrives at a theory “rationally explaining the activities of Caesar and his enemies,” in respect of facts and without attributing authority to historians who have none.
22 A.G. Dickens, in his Introduction to the Torchbook, Harper edition of Henry VIII (New York, 1966)Google Scholar, sharply criticized Pollard's interpretation of the king and also his neglect and misunderstanding of Cromwell's role in the years 1532-1540. Chapter XIV, “Rex et Imperator,” gives the clearest statement of Pollard's ideas, but see also Neale's obituary essay on Pollard in The English Historical Review 64 (1949): 198–205.Google ScholarPubMed
23 Pollard, A.F., The Evolution of Parliament (London, 1920), pp. 216–234.Google Scholar
24 Developed in Queen Elizabeth (London, 1934)Google ScholarPubMed, The Elizabethan House of Commons (London, 1949)Google Scholar, and Elizabeth and her Parliaments, 2 vols. (London, 1953–1957)Google Scholar. Neale's thesis about Elizabeth as a force for restraint of legislative despotism is in “The Via Media in Politics,” an essay in his Essays in Elizabethan History (London, 1958)Google Scholar. The shrewdest assessment of Neale's ideas and achievement is by Elton, : “Parliament in the Sixteenth Century: Functions and Fortunes,” reprinted in Studies, 3: 156–182.Google Scholar
25 Both Elton and Hurstfield deny this continuation of Pollard's thesis; see especially Hurstfield's, essay “The Paradox of Liberty in Shakespeare's England,” in the collection of his essays Freedom, Corruption and Government in Elizabethan England (London, 1973).Google Scholar
26 Heal, Felicity, “The Church of England and its Opponents from Reformation to Revolution,” The Historical Journal 24 (1981): 201–210.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
27 Ibid., 201 f.
28 Heal, Felicity, Of Prelates and Princes (Cambridge, 1980), chapters 2, 5, 7 and 8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
29 In addition to Star Chamber Stories (London, 1958), and Policy and Police (Cambridge, 1972)Google ScholarPubMed, see “Politics and the Pilgrimage of Grace” in Studies, 3: 183–215Google ScholarPubMed, where Elton has a judicious survey of other recent work; also Jones, W.D.H., The Mid-Tudor Crisis, 1539-15631 (London, 1973).Google Scholar
30 Reform and Reformation, p. 295, and Studies, 3: 390Google ScholarPubMed. The view of Cromwell as a Protestant reformer goes clear back to Foxe, of course. My own interpretation in the Introduction to Thomas Cromwell on Church and Commonwelath (New York, 1969)Google Scholar, which Elton generously credits as a correct analysis of Cromwell as a “universal reformer” while thinking it overdrawn in some ways (Reform and Renewal, p. 10, n. 7) developed lines present in Dickens, A.G., Thomas Cromwell and the English Reformation (London, 1959).Google Scholar
31 See England Under the Tudors, pp. 110-113-14.
32 Policy and Police, p. 424.
33 Reform and Renewal, p. 11.
34 This is a volume in the New History of England edited by A.G. Dickens and Norman Gash.
35 Bradshaw, , “The Tudor Commonwealth,” pp. 459–461Google Scholar. This shift and the narrative techniques employed by Elton is the subject of my paper “G.R. Elton and the Tudor Age: Telling the Story,” first delivered at the Chicago meeting of the North American Conference on British Studies, in October 1980 and being prepared for publication.
36 Scarisbrick, J.J., Henry VIII (London, 1968), chaper 4Google Scholar, and “Thomas More, The King's Good Servant,” Thought: Fordham University Quarterly 52 (1977): 259–265Google Scholar; see also his very important paper “Cardinal Wolsey and the Common Weal,” in Ives, E.W., Knecht, R.J. and Scarisbrick, J.J., eds., Wealth and Power in Tudor England: Essays Presented to S.T. Bindoff (London, 1978), pp 45–67.Google Scholar
37 Guy, J.A., The Cardinal's Court (London, 1977)Google Scholar, and The Public Career of Sir Thomas More (New Haven, 1980)Google Scholar; see also his important articles: “The Tudor Commonwealth: Revising Thomas Cromwell,” The Historical Journal 23 (1980): 681–687CrossRefGoogle Scholar, “Henry VIII and the praemunire manoeuvres of 1530-1531, The English Historical Review 17 (1982): 481–503Google Scholar. A central work in this argument is the unpublished Cambridge doctoral thesis by Nicholson, G.D., “The Nature and Function of Historical Argument in the Henrician Reformation” (1977).Google Scholar
38 “The Tudor Commonwealth,” pp. 461-469 and “More on Utopia,” The Historical Journal 24 (1981): 1–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and the work cited there by Dermot Fenlon, Quentin Skinner and J.H. Hexter.
39 For the role of statute law see Reform and Renewal, pp. 66-97, and also the many papers reprinted in Studies: 2, nos. 14, 15, 17 and 19; 2, nos. 21-26 and 31-32; 3, nos. 37, 40 and 46.
40 “Taxation for War and Peace in Early-Tudor England,” Studies, 3: 234–253.Google Scholar
41 Bradshaw, Brendan, The Irish Constitutional Revolution of the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 146–154 especially, but also pp. 58-66Google Scholar; also the important article by Ellis, S.G., “Thomas Cromwell and Ireland, 1532-1540,” The Historical Journal 23 (1980): 497–519CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Compare Ellis on Henry's ideas in Ireland with Slavin, , Politics and Profit (Cambridge, 1966), chapters 5 and 6Google Scholar, for Scotland.
42 Studies, 2, nos. 2, 9 and 14; 2, nos. 22, 31 and 32; 3, 35, 40, 46 and 47. See also the papers on the volumes edited by Tilly and Ranum discussed above as well as Elton's papers in the volume in the New Cambridge Modern History he edited: The Reformation, 1520-1559 (Cambridge, 1958), 2: 1-22 and 438–463.Google Scholar
43 Studies, 3: 37–49.Google ScholarPubMed
44 Ibid., p. 3.
45 Policy and Police, p. 46.
46 I refer to Tawney's work on the rise of the gentry and also the title of Hoskins' volume in the Social and Economic History of England edited by Briggs, Asa, The Age of Plunder: The England of Henry VIII (London, 1976).Google Scholar
47 Studies, 3, no. 36.
48 Ibid., p. 56.
49 Mauss, , The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange (New York, 1954)Google Scholar, and Barley, F., Stratagems and Spoils (New York, 1967)Google Scholar. I have also found useful Leach, E.R., Rethinking Anthropology (London, 1961).Google Scholar
50 Among Weber's works relevant here the most important is On Charisma and Institution Building (Chicago, 1968)Google Scholar, and Economy and Society (New York, 1968)Google Scholar. Many important papers are in the untranslated collections entitled Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, 3 vols. (Tübingen, 1920–1921)Google Scholar, and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Soziologie und Sozialpolitik (Tübingen, 1924)Google Scholar. Among Eisenstadt's many books the one most central for my position here is Revolution and the Transformation of Societies (New York, 1978)Google Scholar, with the thorough survey of recent studies and a fine critical bibliography for each chapter, especially chapters 1-5.
51 See the analysis by Giddens, Anthony, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory (Cambridge, 1971), pp. 119–184.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
52 For this description of political action see Parsons, Talcott and Shils, Edward, Towards a General Theory of Action (New York, 1968).Google Scholar
53 In the truly vast literature on revolution and modernization in political systems I have found the following especially useful: Eisenstadt, S.N., Tradition, Change, and Modernity (New York 1973)Google Scholar; Jessop, B., Social Order, Reform and Revolution (New York, 1972)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kramnick, Issac, “Reflections on Revolution: Definition and Explanation in Recent Scholarship,” History and Theory 11 (1972), 26–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Trimberger, E.K., “A Theory of Elite Revolutions,” Studies in Comparative International Development, 7 (1972): 191–207CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Huntington, S.P., Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, 1968)Google Scholar; Smelser, Neil J., Theory of Collective Behavior (New York, 1963)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gattung, J., “Feudal Systems, Sturctural Violence, and Sturctural Theory of Revolutions,” Studies in Peace Research 1 (1970): 110–188Google Scholar, and two books by Douglas, Mary, Natural Symbols (Baltimore, 1973)Google Scholar, and Rules and Meanings (Baltimore, 1973).Google ScholarPubMed
54 For Eisenstadt's development of Weber's ideas see Turk, H. and Simpson, R.R., eds., Institu¬tion and Exchange (Indianapolic, 1971), pp. 35–56Google Scholar, an article entitled “Societal Goals, Systemic Needs, Social Interaction and Individual Behavior; also fundamental is Eisenstadt, Traditional Patrimonialism and Modern Neo-Patrimonialism (Los Angeles, 1973).Google Scholar
55 Tudor Chamber Administration 1485-1558 (Baton Rouge, 1952).Google Scholar
56 See Starkey's, David unpublished Cambridge doctoral thesis, “The King's Privy Chamber, 1485-1547,” (1973).Google Scholar
57 Studies, 3: 56.Google ScholarPubMed
58 Commentaries on the Laws of England (Chicago, 1979), p. 75.Google Scholar
59 The Spirit of the Laws, Bk. XII, ch. vii.; and Rossiter, C., ed., The Federalist Papers (New York, 1956), p. 273.Google Scholar
60 Pollock, F. and Maitland, F., The History of the English Law, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1968), 2: 503.Google Scholar
61 Van Patten, J.K., “Magic, Prophecy, and the Law of Treason in Reformation England,” American Journal of Legal History 27 (1983): 1–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
62 Bellamy, J., The Law of Treason in England in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 69–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
63 Reform and Reformation, p. 196; Elton calls this the “most interesting particular order” in the whole anti-papal campaign.
64 Policy and Police, pp. 254-259.
65 Cohn, Norman, The Pursuit of the Millenium (New York, 1961), pp. 53-74 and 99–124Google Scholar, but especially Bettelheim, Bruno, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York, 1976), pp. 66–73.Google Scholar
66 The classic work is Taylor, R., Political Prophecy in England (London, 1911)Google Scholar, where there is a full study of the Galfridian texts; but the most important analysis of mentality is in Thomas, Keith, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London, 1971)Google Scholar. In Thomas see especially the comment on p. 390.
67 Van Patten, , “Magic, Prophecy and the Law of Treason,” p. 19.Google Scholar
68 Ibid., pp. 22ff.
69 Thomas, , Religion and the Decline of Magic, pp. 511 fGoogle Scholar. It is important to consider ritual decapitation, even of statues, in the context of its place in rituals of warfare: see Bohannan, Peter, Law and Warfare: STudies in the Anthropology of Conflict (New York, 1967).Google Scholar
70 Voegelin, Eric, “Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme,” The Southern Review, New Series 17 (1981), pp. 235ff.Google Scholar
