Short answers, pulled from the story.
Geoffrey Elton officially anglicised his name during his military service in the British Army from 1944 to 1946. He served in the Intelligence Corps and the East Surrey Regiment with the Eighth Army in Italy before shedding his German heritage to become Geoffrey Elton.
Geoffrey Elton argued that Thomas Cromwell was the architect of modern government who created a bureaucratic state through a planned revolution in the 1530s. He claimed Cromwell delineated the King's household from the state and created powerful new organs of government to manage church lands and remove medieval features from central administration.
Geoffrey Elton engaged in a fierce public battle with E. H. Carr, who represented a more interpretive and sociological approach to history. The conflict culminated in the Carr-Elton debate where Elton defended nineteenth-century empirical history against Carr's views in his 1967 book The Practice of History.
Geoffrey Elton died of a heart attack at his home in Cambridge on the 4th of December 1994. He had previously served as the Regius Professor of Modern History at Clare College, Cambridge from 1983 to 1988.
Geoffrey Elton served as the president of the Royal Historical Society from 1972 to 1976. He also worked as publication secretary of the British Academy from 1981 to 1990 and was appointed a Knight Bachelor in the 1986 New Year Honours.