Penry Williams obituary

Historian and tutor at New College, Oxford, who wrote well-regarded books on the government of Tudor England

The Oxford historian Penry Williams, who has died aged 88, showed as much determination and high principle in crossing swords with officialdom over the plight of asylum seekers in his 80s as he had done half a century earlier in contesting the nature of Tudor government with GR Elton. His take on 16th-century government – not that there was a revolution in administration led by Thomas Cromwell, as Elton had claimed, but that it continued to be a tangle of local patronage and favouritism – was vindicated, though only after bruising academic controversy with the overbearing Cambridge historian.

Williams, a genial, approachable tutor to generations of history undergraduates at New College, Oxford (including myself), saw his primary duty for nearly 30 years as teaching – a somewhat downgraded and old-fashioned view these days. But that did not prevent him publishing several well-regarded books including a volume on the later Tudors for the New Oxford History of England series (1995) and pioneering volumes on life in Tudor England (1963) and the Tudor regime (1979), as well as co-writing the college's history for its 600th anniversary in 1979. His final publication, in 2011, was a biography of Sir Walter Raleigh.

Characteristically, his researches were focused not on the love lives of the Tudor monarchs – which might have brought him flashier fame – but on how the country was actually run and what it was like to live in. Elton did not much like to be challenged over his thesis that Cromwell's reforms presaged a governmental revolution and he responded bitterly, but the consensus was that Williams was right.

Williams might have become a highly popular warden (head) of the college in 1985 had he not fallen foul of his colleague Garry Bennett, the college's waspish chaplain and fellow history tutor who organised a campaign to prevent it. Bennett, who two years later killed himself after being exposed as the anonymous writer of a snide critical essay in the Church of England's annual Crockford's directory, ostensibly opposed Williams's candidature because he was married, but perhaps more likely through professional and personal jealousy: the two men had been fellow tutors for 20 years, their rooms next to each other. It was a bruising, petty, internecine Oxbridge spat and another candidate, one of the college's law lecturers, was eventually elected by the fellows instead.

Williams came from a long established Breconshire family, though he was born in Calcutta (now Kolkata) where his parents – late-married cousins – were living while his father was handicapper of the local Turf Club. The family soon moved back to Hertfordshire and then, following Penry's father's death in 1939, to mid-Wales.

Educated at Marlborough college, Williams joined the Royal Artillery in 1943, receiving a commission and serving at the end of the war in India and Java, before returning to take an accelerated two-year degree at New College in 1950. His tutor Alan Bullock, the first biographer of Hitler, introduced him to the historian Lewis Namier, at that time a professor at Manchester University, and he secured a junior lectureship there in 1951. At Manchester, he married his South African-born wife, June, in 1952 and completed his doctorate on the Tudor Council of the Welsh Marches, which gave him some insight into a rural administration at odds with Elton's grand picture. In 1964, he returned to New College, where he spent the remainder of his career before retiring in 1992 and becoming an honorary fellow in 1998.

Williams devoted much energy in retirement to helping asylum seekers. On the moderate left politically – first Labour, later SDP and finally Lib Dem – he was outraged at the injustice of the treatment of those waiting to be deported. He became a frequent visitor, adviser and helper of inmates at the Campsfield House immigration detention centre near Oxford. With his partner Sylvia, June having died in 1991, the elderly former don could be found into his 80s stoically turning up for appeal hearings at distant tribunals across the country to support those threatened with deportation. The couple befriended many and on occasion helped them to stay.

Williams is survived by Sylvia and a daughter and son from his marriage.

• Penry Herbert Williams, historian, born 25 February 1925; died 30 April 2013