Geoffrey Elton Quotes

[Replying to the criticism of J. P. Cooper] I hope to show that he has arrived at a mistaken view from partial, and partially misinterpreted, evidence. In a field in which things are far from clear or straightforward this is neither surprising nor shocking; it is more disconcerting to find that one who so readily chastises others for their supposed failings should himself be strangely inclined to inaccuracy in discussing other people's views and even in transcribing documents. A self-appointed hound of heaven ought to be more precise in his quest.

Prolonged involvement with Parliament has in the end convinced me that the customary concentration on it as the centre of public affairs, however traditional it may be, is entirely misleading. This is a message, it seems to me, that needs to be absorbed into the general history of England.

We historians are, in a way, fighting for our lives. Certainly, we are fighting for the lives of innocent young people beset by devilish tempters who claim to offer higher forms of thought and deeper truths and insights – the intellectual equivalent of crack, in fact. Any acceptance of these theories – even the most gentle or modest bow in their direction – can prove fatal.

There are those who would deny a distinction between England and the continent of Europe, alleging that the island is in every respect – politically, socially, culturally – a part of Europe. This is an opinion that could be held only by those whose knowledge of the continent is derived from books and from visits; anyone who has actually ever lived there knows how fundamental those differences are. Or perhaps one should say, how fundamental they were; possibly they have in the last thirty years been disappearing together with an England that was real, and apparently unchangeable, at any rate down to 1939.

English government has a special claim to be studied. It developed in comparative freedom from outside interference, producing a curious blend of decentralized and popular freedom with strong, efficient, and centralized administration.

Sir John Neale has shown how mistaken this view is: queen and Commons clashed frequently throughout the reign, but this did not prevent equally frequent co-operation. Secondly the conventional view supposes that serious conflict on the parliamentary stage is somehow normal: that "the Commons" misbehaved unless they opposed the Crown. This is nonsense. Parliament was part of the king's government, called to assist him by making grants and laws, but also designed to keep the Crown in touch with opinion and an accepted occasion for complaint and protest. It was, and is, a talking institution, a place for debate. The historian who supposed that debate must mean "inevitable conflict" had better investigate his subconscious.

One of the chief tests of the quality of historical work lies in its readability. History, even serious history, is interesting, and the historian who makes it dull deserves the pillory.

The political institutions of England were peculiar. In a manner quite unknown elsewhere, its monarchy combined high prerogative claims and exceptionally effective government with the absence of coercive power and an instinctive regard for the supremacy of the law. Its Parliament uniquely combined co-operation in government with the satisfaction of the subject's needs: no other representative institution in Europe was so firmly integrated into the monarchical system of government, so thoroughly organised for routine business, so flexibly able to accommodate all interests. In England taxes fell most heavily on the wealthier part of the nation, an oddity which provides perhaps the most striking contrast of all to European custom – which in this respect was to grant exemption to the powerful. English law, notoriously, was very different indeed... And these, and other, distinctions appear not only to the eye of the historian; they were very visible also to observers of the day. By the side of the often bemused and rarely commendatory reports of visitors from abroad there grew among Englishmen a strident selfconsciousness of separateness, from Richard Morison's "English hands and English hearts" peculiarly able to win against all odds, through John Aylmer's God who is English, to John Foxe's elect nation.

[O]nce...the early seventeenth century is treated as a sequence of events rather than the working out of a destiny – the parliamentary history of 1603–28 ceases to be the record of the "inevitable" accentuation of inherent strain and becomes comprehensible as a series of political crises, complicated by personality, in which the outcome may be identified but cannot be presumed from the start. In the context it is worth notice that James I's last Parliament was the only one in which Crown and Commons worked in a measure of harmony, and that even in 1628 the opposition leadership carefully avoided any proposals which could be read as an invasion of prerogative rights. The ineffectiveness of the Petition of Right, as futile a document as even constitutional struggles have ever thrown up, neatly demonstrates the absence of revolutionary strains in the difficulties encountered up to that point. Before Charles I's experiment in the 1630s, war was not so much inevitable as totally improbable; and the failure of Charles's government was not rendered "inevitable" by deep divisions in society or inherited stresses in the constitution, but was conditioned by the inability of the king and his ministers to operate any political system.

In history there are no authorities: history is a free study in which no man can claim rule, or credence for his mere ipse dixit, and in which the only true sin is to deny a hearing to views with which one happens to disagree.

One of the things that you have to grasp about the English of the sixteenth century is that they were a confident nation. It would be an error to suppose that they were uncertain of themselves. Of course, they had no reason to be overconfident in the face of God... Though quite sure that life was short and miserable and dangerous, by and large they faced those dangers and those miseries often with pessimism, but rarely with despair... [The] more universal reaction was to accept man's fate and to confront it firmly. This made for confidence. In fact, the reign of Elizabeth was notable for chauvinistic arrogance.

God was English, though – since God was not always kind – this did not mean that everything was always going well. But ill fortune did not affect the national conviction of the superiority of the English, a visible hallmark of the century. It is found, for instance, in Richard Morison's writings in the 1530s, perhaps the first sign of this kind of thing; it is fully ripe in John Foxe and in similar writers of the Elizabethan era. God has singled out the English for his own, as the true elect nation. Morison, for instance pointed out that the English ate beef while the French lived on broth and vegetables, a plain proof of English superiority. And this was the view of a man who, I ought to emphasise, had lived many years abroad. We are not taking about ignorant men; we are talking about men who, having seen both sides, were (and I do not know that they were necessarily wrong) content to believe that the country they had been born into was especially blessed. That conviction is very marked among the Elizabethans and Jacobeans... The convictions I speak of are found widely diffused in popular consciousness, among the aristocracy, the gentry and the people at large, whether travellers or stay-at-homes. They might dislike one another, trouble one another, and be discontented with one another, but relative to the foreigner, relative to the poor and depressed subjects of supposedly despotic powers, they knew themselves specially favoured... The English thought England was good and elsewhere was inferior.

If we are to get further, we need at this present no essays on the causes of the civil war, but studies of the political behaviour of all sorts of men in all sorts of institutions, unaffected by the historian's foreknowledge of the later event. In that way we may ultimately perhaps arrive at an explanation of the mid-seventeenth-century breakdown, but it will be less well tailored, less readily reduced to a list of preconditions, precipitants and triggers, less satisfactory to theorists of revolution. On the other hand, it might be real.

The absolute differentiation of England from the continent was achieved in the aftermath of the great transformation which we call the Henrician Reformation, and it was in the end achieved with conscious recognition and even deliberation.

The Act in Restraint of Appeals to Rome was a government measure, affected slightly by opposition from the church and not at all by parliament. A proposal to authorize the archbishops by act of parliament to dissolve the king's marriage was soon replaced by a comprehensive attack on papal jurisdiction in England. In Cromwell's hands, the preamble turned into an unhesitating statement of the theory which underlay the whole practice of Henry VIII and his government: the theory of the imperial crown of England sovereign within its own realm over both laity and church.