"Geoffrey Elton was the first of the revisionists. In 1965 he was already warning against the belief that the origins of the Civil War were to be found in the Parliaments of Elizabeth's reign: "the system of parliamentary management perfected by Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell, and further refined in the more difficult days of Queen Elizabeth, would no doubt have required tactful and sensible adjustment as the seventeenth century developed," he concluded, "but there is nothing in the story of 1604 to suggest that it had already ceased to be practicable." Elton's message has been noted, and most historians would now accept that the century after 1530 was one of substantial harmony in the relationship between crown and Parliament, and that the institution itself served the needs of both ruler and ruled satisfactorily until at least the 1620s."
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Geoffrey Elton
Sir Geoffrey Rudolph Elton FBA (born Gottfried Rudolf Otto Ehrenberg; 17 August 1921 – 4 December 1994) was a German-born British political and constitutional historian who specialised in the Tudor period. He taught at Clare College, Cambridge, and was the Regius Professor of Modern History there from 1983 to 1988.
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