In 1531 he produced the _Boke named the Governour_, dedicated to King Henry VIII. The work advanced him in the king's favour, and in the close of the year he received instructions to proceed to the court of the emperor Charles V. to induce him to take a more favourable view of Henry's projected divorce from Catherine of Aragon. With this was combined another commission, on which one of the king's agents, Stephen Vaughan, was already engaged. He was, if possible, to apprehend William Tyndale. It is probable that Elyot was suspected, as Vaughan certainly was, of lukewarmness in carrying out the king's wishes, but this has not prevented his being much abused by Protestant writers. As ambassador Elyot had been involved in ruinous expense, and on his return he wrote to Thomas Cromwell, begging to be excused from serving as sheriff of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire, on the score of his poverty. The request was not granted. He was one of the commissioners in the inquiry instituted by Cromwell prior to the suppression of the monasteries, but he did not obtain any share of the spoils. There is little doubt that his known friendship for Thomas More militated against his chances of success, for in a letter addressed to Cromwell he admitted his friendship for More, but protested that he rated higher his duty to the king. William Roper, in his _Life_ of More, says that Elyot was on a second embassy to Charles V., in the winter of 1535-1536, when he received at Naples the news of More's execution. He had been kept in the dark by his own government, but heard the news from the emperor. The story of an earlier embassy to Rome (1532), mentioned by Burnet, rests on a late endorsement of instructions dated from that year, which cannot be regarded as authoritative. In 1542 he represented the borough of Cambridge in parliament. He had purchased from Cromwell the manor of Carleton in Cambridgeshire, where he died on the 26th of March 1546.