ABSTRACT
Until fairly recently, it would have seemed perverse to give finance and administration a leading place amongst these political problems. However important, such topics seemed securely to belong to the esoteric field of bureaucratic history, and thus in their details to be of interest only to the professional specialist. The general student of Restoration history needed only to know that the later Stuart monarchy was chronically short of cash, a shortage which occasionally provoked or deepened political crises and which, when resolved by increasing levels of trade in the 1680s, allowed Charles and James to rule with minimal reference to parliament. How Restoration government governed, how its revenues were collected and spent, belonged safely to that area which defines the grey edge rather than illuminates the centre of examination papers. However, it is now apparent that these topics have come into their own, as historians have recognized that, in Sir John Plumb's words, they were ‘fundamental in moulding both the nature of our constitution and our politics’. If in so many ways, and certainly in its constitutional aspects, the Restoration period looked backwards rather than forwards, there were definite stirrings of progressive change in the areas which, today, we might call public policy.
