Geoffrey Rudolph Elton Books

Englishmen greeted the accession to the throne of Henry VIII with more than the usual chorus of praise and anticipation, yet few offered any solution to the problems of the commonwealth or expected more than the maintenance of a precarious stability. Half a century later, however, his daughter Elizabeth inherited a realm which had experienced a revolution. Reform, not a dream but a rational prospect, had become the spirit of the age; it also provides the them for this remarkable history of the reigns of Henry, Edward and Mary.

G. R. Elton's Policy and Police, first published in 1972, has since acquired classic status in the literature on the government of sixteenth-century England. The book examines what actually happened during Henry VIII's break with Rome, the widespread resistance which necessitated constant vigilance on the part of the government, and the role of Thomas Cromwell, whose surviving correspondence permits a detailed insight both into the purposes of government and the manner in which it was experienced by the people.

A survey of the English experience through a thousand years and more, this book concentrates on the lasting characteristics of a people who early on discovered the fact of a national identity. The outstanding hallmarks of this experience were the existence of a strong central authority (in the monarchy), the provision of a system of law, and with these two the possibility of preserving individual rights and liberties in the face of a long sequence of historical vicissitudes.