In view of the large number of financial complaints in Tudor diplomatic correspondence, it is entirely understandable why compensation might be considered a central problem of sixteenth-century foreign service. The feeling conveyed by the diplomats is that their pay was haphazard in its conception, irregular in its distribution, and utterly insufficient in its magnitude; that is, it was thoroughly unsatisfactory in every respect. So consistent and so forceful did these envoys make their case that today it is virtually axiomatic for historians to assume that compensation was chaotic, and that service abroad was always financially debilitating. “Upon none of the royal servants did the disorder of sixteenth century fiscal administration bear harder [than upon the ambassadors],” Professor Mattingly notes. Moreover, “for an ambassador, the chance of financial embarrassment was almost a certainty.” Sir John Neale, another of only a few who have addressed this issue directly, is persuaded that, “it was not exceptional for an Elizabethan ambassador to get into financial straits … generally ambassadors had to face making inroads into their private estates.” Or: “His [the ambassador's] was not a happy lot. His profit and loss account was a statement in two terms of which one was never operative …. Their pay was often irregular and never adequate, and they were lucky if their private estates were not hopelessly mortgaged at the end of an embassy.” Other historians, making only passing reference to diplomatic compensation, simply assume the worst.

Yet the diplomats of Elizabeth served, frequently for extended periods, and often repeatedly as well.

Dogberry: This is your charge: you shall comprehend all vagrom men; you are to bid any man stand, in the prince's name.

Watch: How if a' will not stand?

Dogberry: Why, then take no note of him, but let him go; and presently call the rest of the watch together, and thank God you are rid of a knave.

(Much Ado About Nothing, Act III, Scene iii)

Modern historians who have described the English village constable of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries have largely accepted Shakespeare's Dogberry as an accurate portrayal of this official. They are almost unanimous in regarding the constable as an incompetent agent of royal authority, and like many of his seventeenth-century critics they depict him as uneducated, unprofessional, lazy, and disobedient. A recent study has also revealed that some of the men chosen as constable had “criminal” records. In one Essex village a number of these officials had previously been “in trouble with the courts,” sometimes having broken laws that it would be their duty to enforce when they became constables. Both historians and seventeenth-century commentators frequently attribute such failings to the social unsuitability of the men selected for the office. They claim that the substantial inhabitants of the village sought to avoid such a lowly position, and that it was thus filled by the “meaner sort” of residents who were attracted by its perquisites or were too poor to hire substitutes. Such men, it is contended, were not only ignorant and unable to spare time for their duties but also so lacking in social status that they were easily intimidated and commanded little respect.

Several studies of county government do suggest alternative approaches to understanding the constable's alleged incompetence. T.G. Barnes and A. Hassell Smith, for example, attribute the constable's weaknesses not only to the personal and social defects of the men selected for the position; they also suggest that divided allegiances often rendered such officials incapable of action.

The debates of the Army Council held at Putney church during October and November 1647 have not suffered neglect at the hands of historians and political theorists. Such an explicit examination of the fundamental tenets of government as occurred in the discussion of the franchise is a pivotal event in the history of political thought and it has been treated as such ever since Sir Charles Firth uncovered William Clarke's notes of the meetings. Emphasis upon the content of the dispute over the franchise has served to elevate the Putney debates into a symbolic event, a milestone in the struggle between privilege and liberty which dominated English history for two and a half centuries and English historiography ever since. Rainsborough's dictum that “the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he” encapsulates this theme and has passed into the common stock of historical quotations. Indisputably, succeeding generations of scholars and students will grapple with the meaning of the debate on the franchise and of its place in English political thought.

The universal importance that the conflict over the franchise has assumed for political theorists and historians of the longue durée has created some difficulties for students of événement who need to understand the precise historical situation in which the meetings occurred. When abstracted the debates may have sharp contours and poetic proportions; but when viewed more narrowly they take on different, and occasionally changing, shapes.

For years those who have looked for the contribution of religion to the “spirit of capitalism” have concentrated on the English Puritans and their Calvinist counterparts elsewhere. Those scholars have relied on literary evidence to make their points, and to establish the relationship between Calvinist doctrines or assumptions and an ascetic and compulsive devotion to work. It came as a surprise, therefore, when a rigorously quantitative content analysis of the most popular religious books of Restoration England showed just the opposite—that the most self-consciously “Anglican” authors were those who placed the most emphasis upon work and worldly enterprise as a religious duty. They were also able to integrate this duty with the rest of their theology in a more straightforward, logical manner than the Puritans, for whom the connection is thought to have been psychological, mediated by religious anxiety. Work was, for the most popular Anglican authors, part of a moralistic religion of works. We can even say that such an emphasis was adopted at just the time when Anglicans were facing up to a change in the status of their church and adopting attitudes more characteristic of members of a movement or denomination, which helps to explain why work and effort were coming to seem more important to them.

There have been numerous lines of criticism of Max Weber's thesis connecting the doctrine of evangelical conversion and the spirit of economic enterprise. But since the following approach and alternative suggestions do not build on them, we must go back again to Weber's own classic formulation.

Among the individuals who populated rural England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, few were more unloved than the gamekeeper. That he was regularly damned at the village alehouse is not, perhaps, all that surprising. The gamekeeper was, after all, responsible for enforcing the highly unpopular laws “for the preservation of the game.” It was he who searched laborers' cottages for snares, nets and illicit game; it was he too who hauled poachers before the local justice of the peace for summary trial and punishment. But if the gamekeeper was hated by the poor, his standing in other quarters was not notably higher. Stewards questioned his honesty, foxhunters denounced him as a vulpicide, and the press was always eager to brand him as a rank hypocrite. Defenders were rare and cautious. Even Richard Jefferies, author of a very sympathetic portrait of a keeper he had known in his youth, nevertheless felt compelled to acknowledge “the abuse lavished upon [gamekeepers] as a class—often, it is to be feared, too well deserved.” Historians, for their part, have made little effort to discover whether that abuse was in fact deserved. Those who have not ignored the question altogether have usually been content to repeat the charges hurled at gamekeepers by their contemporaries. In the view of one of the more recent historians of the game laws, for example, the gamekeeper “was usually some bold pugnacious labourer, often a former poacher chosen on the maxim ‘set a thief to catch a thief.’… He could not often resist the constant temptation to sell game on the sly ….And the combination of igonorance and authority all too often made him into a brutal and arrogant man.”

During the last decade, there has been a steady growth in scholarship concerning the moral and philosophical dimensions of Adam Smith's economic theory. The reasons are various: a determination to take Smith out of the dark shadow cast on him by Karl Marx, the perceived intellectual impoverishment of socialism, and an historical concern for tracing the peculiarly Scottish dimensions of the Wealth of Nations (1776). This renewed interest in Smith appears to be more than a sudden intellectual fashion. The now completed publication of the “Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith” provides the basis for the work of systematically reconstructing Smith's intellectual career. Most students of Smith would agree that at the moment this work of reconstruction has just begun.

One of the curious features of recent Adam Smith scholarship has been its perfunctory treatment of “das Adam Smith Problem,” a problem that once seemed at the very center of understanding the moral and philosophical dimensions of Smith's work. In the last decades of the nineteenth century a group of German scholars coined that phrase to describe what they saw as a possibly fundamental break between the assumptions that guided Smith's first work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), and those that supported the economic theory of his later work, the Wealth of Nations. On the one hand, Smith's explanation of moral judgment was based upon the psychological principle of “sympathy,” a capacity inherent in every individual which allows a person to “enter into” the situation of another and thereby bring his own “sentiments” into accord with those of his fellow.

In 1832, a royal commission was appointed to investigate the operation of the poor laws in England and Wales, and two years later legislation was adopted on the basis of the commission's recommendations. For most contemporaries the passage of this measure, the so-called New Poor Law, seemed to promise significant, perhaps even radical, change in the administration of poor relief. An ancient system of parochial government was to be supplanted in the localities by a series of larger poor law unions and boards of guardians, whose discretion was to be limited by responsibility to a national bureaucratic authority in London. No less dramatic was the relief policy that the new law envisioned. It was generally understood that the poor law commissioners appointed under the act were to direct their main efforts to the establishment of a system of workhouses, wherein relief could be accorded under conditions that rendered the pauper's lot “less eligible,” that is, less attractive, than that of the poorest independent laborer. Through such means, it was hoped, an end might be made to what was seen as a long-established and widespread practice of supplementing the inadequate wages of the laboring poor out of the poor rates.

While the tendency of recent work has been to question the practical effect of this legislation on the actual distribution of aid, the problem remains of explaining the motivations and intentions of the men who promoted a measure of such seemingly abundant and far-reaching implications.

Assessments of the famous “Peace Ballot,” officially “A National Declaration on the League of Nations and Armaments,” have undergone little change since its results were announced in June 1935. Like contemporary observers, historians are unclear on the origins of the ballot, are impressed by the public response, and are uncertain of the meaning of “the most remarkable popular referendum ever initiated and carried through by private enterprise.” Historians will probably never reach a consensus on the exact meaning of the ballot and are likely to go on echoing the diverse judgments of contemporaries. But the origins of the referendum are not obscure, and in The Impact of Hitler: British Politics and British Policy 1933-1940 Maurice Cowling has offered a stimulating thesis that could embrace the ballot and suggest a new evaluation of the political controversy that surrounded the preparation and conduct of that much-heralded “National Declaration.”

Cowling has persuasively argued that foreign policy was the form party conflict took in Great Britain in the late 1930s. Politicians conducted it in the light of party considerations. Cowling selected 1935 as the year foreign policy first became “central,” when Abyssinia became the focus of all political discussions. And it was the issue through which Stanley Baldwin reestablished Conservative “centrality” in domestic politics after strong “swings” against the government in by-elections during 1933 and 1934.

According to the Cowling thesis, in the class-polarized politics of the 1930s, party leaders had to be especially sensitive to the opinion of the center, which, in 1935, meant presenting policy in terms that the League of Nations Union and its largely Liberal constituency would approve.