A Spanish diplomat who visited Scotland in 1551 formed the view that 'he is miserly and covetous, and loves discord better than peace'. This chapter argues that these views misunderstand the movement for Catholic reform in 1550s Scotland. One reform arguably the centrepiece of the entire reform programme was certainly put into effect, and crossed explicitly from disciplinary into doctrinal territory. This was the vernacular catechism whose commissioning was the main business of the 1552 council. Von Wied's Enchiridion Christianae Institutionis was one of the sources for the 1552 catechism and had an agenda strikingly similar to that of the Scottish Catholic reformers. When John Hamilton was finally supplanted by Mary of Guise in 1554, political support for the Catholic reform effort ceased altogether. Archbishop Hamilton's reformers had explicitly abandoned some of the old orthodoxies of Catholicism.

This introduction presents an overview of the keyconcepts discussed in the subsequent chapters ofthis book. The story of Joan of Arc has continued toelicit an extraordinary range of reactionsthroughout almost six centuries since her death.Joan of Arc was a visionary and a holy woman whoclaimed to be guided by God through the medium ofangels and saints. Joan's enemies also tried to useher military achievements against her, denying thatGod would really condone such bloodshed and warfare,or even encourage the people of France to abandontheir oaths to support the Treaty of Troyes. Thecapture and death of Joan of Arc had little directimpact on English fortunes during the war, which hadreached deadlock. The accomplishments of Joan of Arcare remarkable, given that she had to overcome thesignificant cultural and social prejudices of amedieval society that valued men more highly thanwomen.

This chapter proposes a reading of Byatt's œeuvre as a continuous series of reimaginings of the art of storytelling and its different (dis)contents. It focuses on Possession and Byatt's interest in the fairytale form. It studies the essentially hermeneutic concept of co-creative reading that Byatt's fictions participate in and also habitually promote. This chapter puts emphasis on a practice of reading that is basically grounded in the use of stories in a culture.

Steven Shapin described the interlocking spheres of intellectual enquiry in early modern England as theology, politics and natural philosophy. These overlapped because they were connected in legitimations, justifications and criticisms, especially in the use of conceptions of God and nature to comment upon political order. This chapter presents these relationships by reconstructing the intertwined erudite endeavours of John Toland, Anthony Collins, Matthew Tindal, Thomas Chubb and Thomas Morgan. At this point the perceived threat of deism is acknowledged to have declined in Britain. Furthermore, this chapter explores the generally held view of English deists. The deists were not modern. Nonetheless, generations of Enlightenment historians have positioned them as the founding fathers of the movement leading to the French Revolution and modernity. If the portrait of deism is accepted, then a reassessment of deism in England is necessary, especially in light of the characterizations of the English Enlightenment as clerical and strongly religious.

This chapter explores on the impact of machinery on traditional skills in the shipbuilding industry. It suggests that the evidence needs to be handled with some care for, by being over-influenced by the interpretation of some of the early histories of the unions involved and relying on selected pieces of first-hand testimony, it would be possible to conclude that the experience of craftsmen in modern British industry has indeed been one of traumatic loss of position. However, when this material is placed in its original context of ambiguity about the extent of industrial change and emphasis on the survival of real skills, it becomes clear that it does not provide an accurate picture of the role of craftsmen at work. Throughout the period of this study the craft sectors of British industry continued to rely on high levels of manual aptitude, technical intelligence, and self-organisation, particularly in the case of the assembly of complex items like large metal ships.

This chapter discusses the lack of close management control of labour in shipbuilding, which is attributed to the nature of the industry's product. Its scale and variety made the overall supervision of assembly virtually impossible, while its complexity made the close control of the pace of work on particular tasks very difficult. As a result, the shipbuilding labour force was still characterised in the middle of the twentieth century by a set of independent attitudes towards work normally thought of as ‘pre-industrial’. Although yard owners had the power that came from winning contracts and purchasing tools and raw materials, their lack of any real control over labour meant that they were dependent on a significant level of voluntary cooperation in the day-to-day business of production. This informal partnership may have become harder to maintain in the face of increasing foreign competition and the need for radical changes in production methods after the Second World War, but had it never existed it seems unlikely that any ships would have been built in Britain during the period of this study.

Queen Balthild appears in several trustworthy contemporary souces, but it is the Vita Domnae Balthildis which gives us the most information about her. The Vita Balthildis is about as contemporary a Merovingian source as has survived. The key to Merovingian high politics was co-operation between the Crown and some faction or factions of the powerful Frankish nobility. The 'slave' Balthild will play a key role in these politics. Balthild's hagiographer, of course, saw divine will as the reason for her rise to the status of queen, but providence may well have had some significant help from the contemporary politics of the British Isles. A seventh-century hagiographical work whose author is concerned about 'friends' and 'detractors' of a saintly queen, is a strong reminder of the period's intricate relationship between political power and Christian sanctity.

This chapter seeks to strip the craft of the image of diplomacy as a ‘glamorous’ profession. The principal source base for this study is the private correspondence of c.50 diplomats and their families drawn from all ethnic groups in the British Isles. Postmodern approaches to history that inform other branches of the discipline are often greeted with a defensive hostility in international history. This study seeks rather to foster it, not through the rigorous application of theory to the interpretation of the past, but by the selective and sympathetic use of its concepts to elucidate aspects of human life and experience. This leads to the methodology employed namely the selective elucidation of diplomatic practice over time. The chapter also discusses cultural diplomacy before nongovernmental international organizations as a branch of international relations that can be defined in several ways.

Diplomacy has always been a lifestyle requiring its disciples to abandon some of the customary distinctions between public and private life. Diplomacy, as a profession, had a much higher social and political standing in Europe than in Britain, a fact attributable to the often direct involvement of ‘absolute’ monarchs, be it in terms of appointment, instruction, negotiation or policy formation. Prospects for social and political advancement were also open to those of genteel extraction who belonged to the kinship, friendship or clientage networks of powerful English political clans. Diplomacy, as this suggests, relies a good deal on the exercise of discretion, the morality of which accords poorly with an emerging code of public ethics that prioritized transparency and merit over secrecy and privilege.

This chapter focuses on the changes in and administration of allowances during the course of the war, most notably the introduction of new levels of allowances in 1942 and 1944, focusing on the particular difficulties encountered by the families of those taken captive. Throughout the course of the Second World War, the question persisted of whether or not service pay and allowances were adequate. The chapter raises a discussion on how suggestion of wives turning to prostitution to supplement their allowances never appeared as an issue in political debates. Furthermore, it highlights that, in November 1940, both family and dependants' allowances were increased, at least partly in response to local and national campaigns.