Policy & Police: The Enforcement of the Reformation in the Age of Thomas Cromwell

by G.R. Elton

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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

460 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1972

About the author

Sir Geoffrey Rudolph Elton FBA (born Gottfried Rudolf Otto Ehrenberg) was a German-born British political and constitutional historian, specialising in the Tudor period. He taught at Clare College, Cambridge, and was the Regius Professor of Modern History there from 1983 to 1988.

An strong advocate of the primacy of political and administrative history, Elton was the pre-eminent Tudor historian of his day. He also made very significant contributions to the then current debate on the philosophy of historical practice, as well as having a powerful effect on the profession through, among other things, his presidency of the Royal Historical Society.

Reviews

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

One gets the impression that Elton needed a vehicle to employ some of the more detailed and interesting personal stories that he'd dug up over the course of his incredibly prolific career as a scholar of the era of the English Reformation, stories such as William Neville's attempt to construct a 'cloak of invisibility' or a Fleet Street riot caused by mistaken identity and pot of wine upside the head. Elton does make an argument that the Reformation in England did have its outspoken critics and was not necessarily a done deal in 1536. However, suppression of anti-Reformers, though overseen by Thomas Cromwell, was almost entirely handled by local officials through proper legal channels and did not constitute a tyrannical crack-down from the center. Tudor England in the 1530s, Elton concludes, was not entirely going along with the winds of religious and political change as initiated by Henry VIII, but then neither was it a police state cowed into submission by a web-weaving genius with a truncheon. Certainly the work of one of the field's greatest, but then 'Policy and Police' will probably only appeal to that small group of scholars involved in similar research.